Product Details

• Actors: Michael Wallin
• Directors: Michael Wallin
• Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Water Bearer Films, Inc
• DVD Release Date: April 20, 2004
• Run Time: 85 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0001O3YT4
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #97,301 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Black Sheep Boy" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Three Short Art Films, May 17, 2004

By 

interested_observer "interested_observer" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Sheep Boy (DVD)

"Black Sheep Boy" is the first of three short films by Michael Wallin on this Water Bearer Films DVD. All three films present images with voiceovers. There are no extras.

"Black Sheep Boy" (37 minutes, color) presents a number of attractive young men briefly (some more than once) in various states of dress both outdoors and indoors and also presents scenes of two or three modern dancers acting out relationship issues. The voiceover moves generally from observations on boys toward a director's perspective of wanting to limit the behavior of actors and models to keep them mysterious and undemanding. There are lots of jump cuts, nudity, posturings, bare feet, and interesting observations. This was the most visually engaging of the three films; one has to have the discipline to pay attention to the sound track, which is where the real story is told. Low 4 Stars.

The second film, "Decodings" (15 minutes; black & white) assembles historical footage (1940s and 1950s) with a voiceover that encourages one to consider how to be an individual in a mass society. Low 3 Stars.

The third film, "Place between Our Bodies" (33 minutes; color), shows the emergence of a man from an urban porn-centered milieu to idyllic scenes with them man in a positive relationship with a nice guy. There is some nudity and some hand-held shots of vintage pornography. 3 Stars.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very impressive, November 9, 2000

By 

"reteip" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Sheep Boy [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Considered one of the best gay shorts of 1995, Black Sheep Boy presents a narrative from a man who finds himself attracted to male youths. As he describes and contemplates the nature of his passion, boys in their late teens and early twenties pose and perform skits to visually display the commentary. Also included on the tape is Decoding, a short surreal film which addresses the issue of identity by utilizing clips and stills from the 40's and 50's. If you want my opinion on it, Michael Wallin, who directed both, is without a doubt talented, appears to be a modern day mixture of Ingmar Bergman and Luis Bunuel; although highly erotic, these are very poetic and artistic films which manage to honestly cut into the human psyche. I haven't been so impressed by a collection of shorts for a long time.

3.0 out of 5 stars Non-linear narration and filmic experimentation, November 6, 2011

By 

Arcadio Bolaños (Lima, Peru) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Sheep Boy (DVD)

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 (Meher Baba on the problem of sex & the sanctity of married life: With a warning on the means of birth control) "The Problem of Sex", a book that owes much of its genesis to Foucault's "Histoire de la sexualité" (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self).