Daniel Craig on the poignant yearning of "Queer"

'Queer': How Daniel Craig & Drew Starkey Handled AWKWARDNESS of Sex Scenes

Drew Starkey is so cute.

I love his sweater at R1.

Nope give it to Coleman Domingo, an actual gay man. THAT would be true progress.

Celebrating a straight actor for "being brave" and tackling a gay role is exactly the type of thing Hollywood actually liked to do.

Real progress would have been making Queer with actual gay actors and not two straight male leads.

Mo Rocca is a good interviewer.

He really seems a lot more gay than his early days on The Daily Show with John Stewart.

R4, I don't know that Craig is all that straight?

I saw this movie today and I didn't care for it all, though Daniel Craig did deliver a solid performance.

I saw it today as well and I had high expectations, it was kind of disturbing and weird actually

I saw this last night. Most interesting aspects to me were the cinematography (a large part of the movie is set in a coming darkness, twilight world) and the music- Trent Reznor is becoming a fine film composer. I was a little leery of Luca Guadagnino's preciousness when I saw that the movie's production design was featured in this month's World of Interiors magazine, but the Latin deco/midcentury settings weren't too overpowering (something that ruined Tom Ford's movie version of "A Single Man" for me- ugh).

Daniel Craig is a very good actor but I think he is miscast here. They should have chosen someone less physically handsome and commanding (I think they were aware of this by giving him in some scenes a faux combover). I kept thinking that the movie would have been much more interesting if Drew Droege had been in the William Lee role, or someone whose connection to "masculinity" is blurrier. The parts where he starts ladling out his verbal pontifications a la Burroughs don't really ring true.

The last third of the movie after they start traveling is much better than the first part. I think the reason is the script and direction are not really getting or describing completely in a nuanced way the psyche of all gay people living at that time. The wound that both William Lee and Eugene Allerton carry means never being allowed to fully love or be loved with another man because to do so would mean one or both of them are "queer" or less than men. The Eugene Allerton character does a lot of game playing because of this. Maybe this is why Lee's "telepathy" drug is so appealing to him.

I've never read the novel, so I am interested how the movie is the same or different- the ending seems to relate directly to Burroughs himself outside of the book. Does the movie also put in a connection to the murder of Burroughs' wife in the last dream sequence?