Black Sheep Boy (1995) User Reviews

Lots of pretty boys

[fubared1 · 5/10 · 14 July 2000]

But not much else to this pseudo-artistic claptrap. As if someone reading bad poetry on the soundtrack and lots of flashy cutting would make up for the fact this is simply a lot of pictures of pretty boys naked, in various states of dress, and sometimes masturbating, but always alone. The boys are very pretty to look at, but that does not make up for the fact that this is nothing more than an attempt to make artsy-fartsy soft-core gay porn flick. Perhaps if the director had used real people instead of gay models this would have been something different. Still, the pseudo-poetry and the actor reading it are pretty awful. The acting and dancing in the non-modeling scenes are equally pathetic.

Decodings, with which it is paired on video, is a similar bit of nonsense without the pretty boys, just a lot of senseless, non-connected stock footage.

Non-linear narration and filmic experimentation

[atlantis2006 · 10 August 2010]

I had read much criticisms about Wallin's film. It is certainly a non-conventional, non-linear narration with much of experimentation going on; perhaps even excessively experimental at times.

Nonetheless that does not deny the film's value. Black Sheep Boy is a series of thoughts carefully ordained through a sequence of images focused exclusively on young men. Nakedness and full frontal nudity becomes a metaphor that elicits basic philosophical questions. The nature of Beauty, for example, as Plato's understands it, is the never-ending search of an ideal, thus the narrator of the film never ends his search for that one boy, who can only be grasped or intuited in his multiple encounters with countless nameless boys. The essence is unobtainable. And what is one's relationship to beauty? Beauty is nothing but a veil that we use to cover up the horror of mortality; according to Nietzsche beauty can be found in true art, according to Kant beauty exists because death exists, and beauty is that which reminds us of death while at the same time reaffirms our vital urges. Ultimately, death veils the real, covers and masks the certainty of death. All of this is present in the narrator's observation about life.

Black Sheep Boy however lacks the clarity that most people would look for, it can be very academic at times and this is made obvious through the constant quoting of Baba's book about "The Problem of Sex", a book that owes much of its genesis to Foucault's "Histoire de la sexualité".