Jaie Laplante Movies

Adapted from a series of short stories by Canadian cult favorite Bruce La Bruce, this seriocomic coming-of-age story stars Andre Noble as Cliff, a teenager growing up in Toronto in the 1980s. While Cliff is aware of the fact he's gay and has a ravenous curiosity about sex, he hasn't been able to do much about it. However, on his 18h birthday, Cliff's free-thinking mother, Madge (Marnie McPhail), pours him a stiff drink, offers him a reefer, and politely but firmly tells him to go downtown and have some fun. Eager to lose his virginity, Cliff instead encounters Butch (Brendan Fehr), a good-looking guy in his early twenties who makes his living as a male prostitute. Cliff is infatuated with Butch from the first moment he sees him; however, while Butch appears fond of Cliff and strikes up a friendship with him, his career has forced him to develop a sense of emotional distance from others, and he isn't interested in sex with other men unless he's being paid for it. Cliff becomes a regular visitor to Butch's apartment and gets a crash course in the underbelly of the Toronto gay community, but one day Butch drafts Cliff into performing a sex act with him for a customer, leaving Cliff humiliated and heartbroken. Sugar also stars Sarah Polley and Maury Chaykin. Only the second feature film from respected theatrical director John Palmer, it was screened as part of the 2004 San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A man pursues his sexual obsessions to their darkest and most dangerous extremes in this gay-themed drama based on a novel by Dennis Cooper. Dennis (Michael Gunther) is a gay man, who as a teenager developed a perverse attraction to violent pornography and simulated snuff photographs, which he describes in great detail in a series of letters to his former lover Julian (Jaie Laplante). As Dennis grows older, his fascination with the darker side of the sexual underground grows more intense, and in time he meets Henry (Craig Chester), a masochist who posed for some of the pictures that sparked his interest in S&M. When Dennis learns that Henry was murdered, he weaves the incident into an elaborate fantasy, in which Dennis suffers a painful death in a dungeon of erotic torture. In time, Dennis graduates from violent fantasies to sadistic interludes with a male prostitute (Michael Stock) and eventually plans a series of sexually-oriented murders, concluding with an episode in which Dennis and two collaborators (Parker Posey and James Lyons) drug a young punk (Alexis Arquette) into unconsciousness. After having group sex, Dennis and his cohorts murder the punk. As one might expect, Frisk proved to be highly controversial and received a sharply divided reaction in its screening as the closing night attraction at the 1996 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; some hailed it as a disturbing and iconoclastic masterpiece, while roughly half the audience angrily stormed out of the theater before the film's conclusion. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide