Caravaggio (1986)

This film is a fictionalized biography of Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Nigel Terry), the 16th-century artist. It explores the love triangle of Caravaggio, Lena (Tilda Swinton), and Ranuccio (Sean Bean) and dwells upon Caravaggio's use of street people, drunks, and prostitutes as models for his dark and dimly lit paintings. The movie begins with Caravaggio as a youth (Dexter Fletcher) who charges for everything he sells, whether it's his paintings or his body. All gay and bisexual characters live life to the hilt. There are many anachronisms, such as Caravaggio's use of contemporary dress for his Biblical figures, a bar lit with electric lights, and a character using an electronic calculator. Caravaggio is presented as one of the founders of the chiaroscuro technique, which uses selective light to illuminate form in contrast to the deep shadows around it. His genius made him a legend, and the film suggests that the legend ultimately eclipsed his enormous talent. After Ranuccio has stabbed him in a fight, Caravaggio tells his mute servant Jerusaleme (Spencer Leigh): "All art is against lived experience. How can you compare flesh and blood with oil, ground pigment?" Lying on his deathbed, delirious with fever, Caravaggio recalls his life, loves, and obsessions. A monk tries to force a crucifix into Caravaggio's hands, but he uses his last strength to hurl it away.

"Caravaggio" was shot entirely at Limehouse Studios, in the central London dockyards on the Thames River. It is director Derek Jarman's most ambitious, popular, and acclaimed film, typical of his style, one of his greatest works, and features an engrossing plot. It took eight long frustrating years before he could finally bring it to the screen. The dialogue is in unrhymed verse, and Jarman did not create a Hollywood reproduction of Caravaggio's world, only "an Italy of the mind." Simon Fisher-Turner composed the original music, and Derek Jarman wrote the script from a story by Nicholas Ward Jackson.

L.I.E. (2001)

15 year-old Howie Blitzer's (Paul Dano) mother has just died in a car accident. His father Marty (Bruce Altman), an unscrupulous workaholic building contractor who's constantly having sex with his girlfriend, has no time for his own son. Therefore, the teen must navigate his adolescence virtually unsupervised. Howie joins a gang of boys who break into houses for kicks and they rob houses in the middle-class neighborhoods off the Long Island Expressway. Together, he and his best friend Gary (Billy Kay) break into a place belonging to an old guy named Big John (Brian Cox), a local man who is a respected pillar of the community. When Big John fingers Gary for the crime, Howie learns that his pal has been keeping a secret: he is in a sex-for-pay relationship with Gary. Big John is a former Marine with a taste for young boys. He not only desires young teenagers, but young adult men and women as well. Except for a short glimpse inside his bedroom, we don't find out what makes Gary tick. A relationship develops between Howie and Big John that surprises them both. Big John becomes Howie's caretaker when Howie's father is sent to prison in a tedious subplot. Unlike Howie's father or friends, Big John answers his questions about his worth and place in the world, and also about sex. For a while their lives intersect, and neither of them knows quite what to do. Howie walks away with the knowledge of his own value as a human being. He's able to assert himself in a confrontation with his father later in the film, and proclaim himself to the world. Big John walks away knowing that he's made a permanent and vital difference in the life of another person, and that he's finally loved someone.

There are references to homosexuality and pedophilia in the movie, but this is not a movie about homosexuality or pedophilia. It is a story about a boy who finds that important something in his life that is missing. It's controversial because one of the main characters is a pedophile. However, there are no inappropriate sex scenes, excessive violence, or vulgar language. But Howie does masturbate in bed, and Gary takes his shirt off at every opportunity in a clearly erotic manner. "L.I.E." (a double-meaning acronym for the Long Island Expressway) captures male adolescence more genuinely than most films, with realistic relationships, great performances, and an interesting plot. Pierre Földes composed the original music, Stephen M. Ryder wrote the screenplay, and Michael Cuesta directed.