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TLA ReleasingI have to admit I’d never heard of TLA Releasing until I stumbled across them on the web by accident. But from the moment I saw their home page tlareleasing.com. I was intrigued. I was checking out their press page where some of their movies were mentioned. This should give you an idea of how diverse they are: Schoolboy Crush is a movie featuring some great looking Oriental guys. It’s set in a boy’s boarding school and describes itself as ‘Gossip Girl collides with Fatal Attraction’. Gutterballs, due out in 2009, is a gross-out movie that starts with a sadistic rape and works its way through a series of grisly murders. Another Gay Movie combines eroticism with comedy and promises to give a new twist on high school, teen flicks that the more mainstream distributors put out. Of course, you can’t miss the sequel, Another Gay Sequel! Just looking at the press information for those three titles suggested to me that this is company that likes to play around on the edge and push envelopes, as they say. Sexy, fun and sometimes downright nasty their titles are fresh and original and should appeal to everyone who likes a bit of naughtiness with their action, and some filth with their adventure. Stopping off to find out a little more about this company that I did and yet didn’t know, I read the co.uk website and found that TLA Releasing is ‘the new leading voice in gay and international cinema.’ It was launched in 2001 in Philadelphia, and was established due to the overwhelming popularity of tlavideo.com, an online retail site catering to film lovers of all tastes. So, it acquires independent and good gay theme and international movies and distributes them; that’s what it’s all about. Great, now I know that, I can get back to viewing some of the free trailers on the site. I checked through some other titles to see if there was anything there I’d heard of, or even seen… and realised that there was. Adam and Steve leapt from the page and made me realise that I’d actually heard of some TLA released movies without realising who’d released them. Craig Chester takes the lead as Adam and also directs the script that he wrote himself. It’s a gay romantic comedy and there is a trailer on the website to view. Actually there were trailers for all of their 121 listed movies and I checked out: Bangkok Love story, a tale of romance and adventure; Boy Culture, a story of the confessions of an ex-escort based on the novel by Mathew Rettenmund and The Trip a title from 2002 that blends farce and tragedy. Although I only viewed a few of these movies it soon became clear that several things were at work here. There is more than your average gay content, more than your average erotica and steamy sex (though the trailers were G rated) and yet these movies are of a higher than average standard of many ‘mainstream’ movies I’ve seen. The quality of writing, direction, filming and acting is equal to any Hollywood flick you might catch at the cinema so why aren’t these titles and their stars, directors and studios better known? Is it because of their content? Is it too close to the edge and have they pushed the envelopes too far? I guess it has something to do with all of that. But we should remember that this is a releasing company, a distributor, and not an actual studio. Though the quality of the productions they take on board is consistently high and it’s great that they are pushing the gay genre. You can find more clips on the tube sites and all the titles I saw were available to buy on DVD from their TLA Releasing web site. |
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