Ja Zuster, Nee Zuster (2002)

Based on a 1960s Dutch television series, this delightful musical comedy chronicles the lives of a group of tenants in a guesthouse filled with eccentrics. The movie's plot involves at least three romances, a threatened eviction, a series of robberies, and a pill that change personalities from bad to good. One romantic interlude includes a muscular thief in his underwear singing on the rooftop to his pet pigeons. All the inhabitants of the guesthouse are very cheerful and good-hearted people whose open communal lifestyle is contrasted with the life of the nasty and complaining neighbour Mr. Boordevool (Paul Kooij). He has spent ages looking for a way to close the guesthouse. One day a girl from the the guesthouse meets young hunky Gerrit (Waldemar Torenstra), a bleached-blond burglar with a heart of gold. Sister Klivia (Loes Luca) lets Gerrit stay even though he is a thief. Mr. Boordevool thinks this is his chance to have his neighbours evicted. When a flamboyantly gay hairdresser opens up a shop across the street, the plot takes a number of queer twists as both Boordevool and the neighborhood begin to change. The gay plot may be small, but the gay sensibility is overwhelming in this campy motion picture.

"Ja Zuster, Nee Zuster" is a colorful 1960s movie world where the streets are filled with singing and dancing, carnivals come to town, and everyone's problem is the mean old nasty neighbor. It's hilarious camp fun and unusual in that it doesn't take itself seriously. Raymund van Santen composed the original music. Harry Bannink, Frank Houtappels, and Pieter Kramer wrote the screenplay from the story by Annie M. G. Schmidt. Pieter Kramer directed. The English title is "Yes Nurse, No Nurse". In Dutch, with English subtitles.

Jerker (1991)

In 1985 young gay Bert (Tom Wagner) in San Francisco receives a call from a complete stranger in the middle of the night who engages in explicit sex talk. The men have phone sex over the next few months with Bert never knowing who the caller is. He calls himself J. R. (Joseph Stachura) and is a partially paralyzed Vietnam veteran who saw Bert at a party and was attracted to him, then found his phone number. “Jerker” unfolds in a series of 20 phone calls. At first the men only engage in sex game playing, but after several months Bert becomes serious when he discovers that a lover and frequent sexual partner is dying of AIDS. The phone relationship suddenly becomes deeper and more intense, developing into a profound if isolated intimacy. It soon becomes apparent that Bert also has the disease. Before going on a business trip to New York, J. R. talks with Bert and becomes concerned with how he sounds. After returning from the trip J. R. calls for several weeks, then he realizes that Bert has died.

This hard to find film of a play by Robert Chesley uses strong graphic sexual language at first, then shifts to intensely emotional dialogue when the specter of AIDS suddenly comes into their lives. Tom Wagner as the attractive, sexually promiscuous Bert, and Joseph Stachura as the calm, assured J. R. give very fine performances in this filmed play. It is intelligently staged and produced, but it's very low budget and home videoish. Mark Thompson, senior editor of the Advocate wrote, "Robert Chesley was one of the most significant gay playwrights of his time. ‘Jerker’ remains to this day one of the most important pieces of gay theater ever created." Film critic Dan Sullivan wrote: "I’ve never seen a play that went from the near-pornographic to the tragic, but ‘Jerker’ achieves it." What does "Jerker" mean? It has the sexual connotation of masturbation, but it is also quite deliberately a tear-jerker. Music was composed by Michael Angelo. The screenplay was written by Hugh Harrison, and he also directed