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Review: The Good American

Your average pro-business Republican might take exception
By PETER KEOUGH  |  May 6, 2009
3.0 3.0 Stars

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By most accounts, Tom Weise is a good American: he arrived in New York from Berlin 15 years ago and started a company that is now the biggest of its type in the world. But your average pro-business Republican might take exception upon learning that Weise is an illegal immigrant and HIV-positive and his company is "rentboy.com," a gay-escort service. Jochen Hick's engrossing, fascinating documentary follows Weise as he's forced to return to Germany and tries to expand his business by organizing a "HustlaBall" — an annual celebration of gay hustlers he had established 10 years earlier in the United States — in Berlin. The film interweaves the personal (Weise's relationship with his long time-companion, his second thoughts about his career, his struggle with illness) with such broader issues as gay rights here and abroad, and it doesn't stint on the sex (which includes a novel way of "housewarming" a new apartment).

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  Topics: Reviews , lgbt film festival 2009, LGBTfilm
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ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH
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    John Hillcoat doesn't stray from Cormac McCarthy's Road For those who found the Coen Brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men too lighthearted, John Hillcoat's relentlessly faithful version of the author's post-apocalyptic Pulitzer-winning novel might hit the spot.
  •   INTERVIEW: NICOLAS CAGE  |  November 24, 2009
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    Only Hunter S. Thompson could come up with a line like that; no one else had his knack for the near-Biblical proverb. Few writers outside of Madison Avenue or the New Testament can sum up a zeitgeist so cannily in a phrase.

 See all articles by: PETER KEOUGH

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