Change Your Image
yngblkbeau
Reviews
Latter Days (2003)
Hmmm...
I have several issues with this movie. The biggest one is its insincere attempt to resonate with viewers who may either have been victims or perpetrators of homophobia, for whatever reason. How does a gay screenwriter/producer like C.J. Cox, who is supposedly the real-life Elder Davis, expect to convince anyone of the pain he experienced as a closeted gay man in the Mormon church when he didn't even bother to use gay actors to play the roles? While watching the extras on the DVD, I was very surprised by the attitudes of the hetero lead actors, who ridiculed the actions of the very characters they expect us to take seriously in the movie. How does this fit in with Cox's attempt to sell a story about love between two men, homophobia, and life in the closet? And why did Cox load up the story with so many gay stereotypes--- the handsome and shallow circuit boy, the cute and long-suffering boyfriend-in-waiting, the fag hag close friend, the token sissy boy black friend, the gay man with AIDS, the friend who's trying to make it big in the entertainment business, the tight skimpy tank tops and shorts that not even a desperate street hustler in West Hollywood would wear... In fact, the only thing thats missing is a group of drag queens harmonizing to a Dusty Springfield number. It seems to me that nearly all gay themed movies made since the 90s are flowing in this same old vein. Are they trying to tell us that most gay people's lives are like this? Latter Days was extremely unoriginal for a true-to-life story.
Some may disagree that a movie could be made about gay characters without the overuse of sexual innuendo, stereotypes, and clichés. But Ang Lee did it quite well with Brokeback Mountain, and that movie was such a trailblazer that it will be a very difficult precedent for future producers of low rent cookie-cutter gay movies to top. Even 1960's Victim told a better story about homophobia than Latter Days did. Contemporary queer cinema seriously needs to drag itself out of the doldrums. These tired characters and story lines are the same ones we keep seeing over and over again, and this is a shame because there are talented gay actors and screenwriters out there who could do so much better than this.
Still, Latter Days is worth watching because it brings up an important issue regarding people who are conflicted about being forced to make life-changing choices between their faith and family and their homosexuality.
Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998)
So-so movie at best
This flick has its funny moments and it had a lot of promise but it fell down flat somewhere midway the movie, and none of the characters were interesting enough to carry the story the rest of the way through its 92 minutes. There seems to be no point to the plot because the story is just as thin and shallow as the lead characters. At the end of the movie I found myself wondering what the heck it was all about anyway. Was this a story about friendship, lust, and falling in love? Was it about Gabriel's confusion about his sexual identity? Was it all about Billy's life as a long-suffering and hopeless romantic in search of the elusive Mr. Right? Or was it a tale about a never-to-be romance between two unbelievably hollow people? I suspect the screenwriter attempted to do a combination of all of the above and simply failed to come up with a smoother and more logical ending.
Brad Rowe plays the role of the handsome hunk Gabriel, a painfully stereotypical butch-boy character that most gay men can only fantasize about. At First Gabriel seems to be a really cool, down-to-earth, nice, charming, sensitive, and sweet guy. But he, quite predictably, turns out to be an insensitive, flake who toys with the emotions of his rather average-looking admirer, Billy, a gay victim-of-unrequited-love stereotype played quite well by Sean Hayes.
All through the movie, Gabriel keeps us guessing about his sexuality, from his troubled relationship with his girlfriend (whom we never see), to his homoerotic lead-ons with Billy (especially in the bedroom scene), and to his hanging out with a really goodlooking guy and girl at the Catalina sioree. Billy eventually convinces himself that Gabriel is probably questioning his own sexuality and extends a hand of friendship to help him come to terms those feelings. But the cold and unfeeling Gabriel then tells Billy that he was never unsure about what he wanted at all, and he walks away hugging his gorgeous model boyfriend whom he had apparently been seeing all along, leaving Billy standing on the beach. Now, that was cold! At the end of the movie we want to feel sorry for Billy, his having been dumped by Gabriel for a super goodlooking guy. But it is unfair to say that Gabriel dumped Billy because they were never really 'together' in the first place. It just doesn't make any sense that Gabriel made such an effort to befriend Billy and to lead him on the way he did, unless he was interested in being more than just platonic friends, or, at least, in platonic friendship, albeit with an undertone of homoeroticism. But, the way Gabriel discarded Billy during that beach scene made it clear that he wasn't really interested in Billy's friendship at all. Something is missing here, and it is the key that would explain Gabriel's transition from being a nice guy to the son-of-a b*tch that he turned out to be. Did he ever really have a girlfriend, or was that just a lie he made up to keep Billy at bay? Was Gabriel's 'girlfriend' really the dark-haired guy that he eventually ended up with? Did Gabriel ever even like Billy as a friend, or did he just use Billy as a means to get the modeling contract and the Catalina shoot? Unfortunately, the movie ends without even attempting to explain it.
Notwithstanding, as much as we like Billy, its difficult to muster any empathy for him because he's really a victim of his own superficial fixation on having a prettyboy stereotype for a boyfriend. This begs the question: is it really so that lonely gay men like Billy are doomed to a life of singleness because they can't find Mr. Right. Or, is the singleness self-imposed because they're holding out for fantasy stereotypes like Gabriel? Unfortunately for the producers of this film, they've successfully made a statement in support the latter argument.
I give this movie 3 stars out of ten. It could have been a lot better.
Mambo Italiano (2003)
A good movie!
The thing I like most about this movie is that its atypical. The characters are not all young, middle-class, white American men with the usual cookie-cutter workout bodies and pretty faces, who hang out in bars and gyms. I loved the ethnic twist, and the fact that the actors all looked like people who could be your next door neighbors. The script is funny and the actors play the characters well. The only reason I didn't give it a higher rating is because of the way the story transitioned into Nino and Angelo becoming lovers. Sure they were old friends, but Nino had ditched Angelo's friendship since they were young boys, and even then there was nothing even remotely more than platonic between them. The part of the plot where they suddenly hook up together as lovers and decide to move in together is not very believable, especially considering how much of a closet case Nino is.
Some people were dissatisfied with the ending, but I thought the ending was great. Angelo not only becomes a big success, he also hooks up with a much better guy than Nino in the end. Although the movie is about Angelo's life, it seems to me to be more of a character study of Nino---a man who's seriously repressed and in denial about himself. Perhaps its even a study of repression and denial in Italian culture on the whole, as Anna mentioned several times during the movie.
I didn't like Nino's character because I think he's a selfish jerk. He was only using Angelo for sex, and he was never really in love with Pina either. His only reason for pretending to fall in love with her and getting married was his fear of being publicly branded as a gay man. But, Pina is a selfish jerk, too. She wasn't in love with Nino either. as she boasted to her friend, her real reason for marrying him was because she prided herself for "converting" him. I'd say these two deserve each other. In Anna's flashback during her session with the psychiatrist she saw towards the end of the movie, Nino was seen half naked in the woods on a 'camping trip' walking with and hugging another half naked man. So even though his relationship with Angelo is over, his life as a man who secretly sleeps with other men isn't. There's also another deleted scene on the DVD that shows that Pina didn't really "convert" Nino at all, but I guess they edited that scene out of the movie because they felt that Nino's story had already been told---the not-so-happy bisexual husband who will forever be cheating on his wife with other men. I can't imagine why some of you feel that it would have been better for Nino and Angelo to end up back together. Nino doesn't deserve to have a cool guy like Angelo.
My favorite characters in the movie were Angelo's family---very, very funny. Nino's mom was wonderfully bitchy, too.
Skin and Bone (1996)
Interesting start, but loses steam by the minute.
The plot is far from original and doesn't really make much sense. These hustlers are not teenage boys, they're grown men who in any real life scenario would know better than to let themselves be taken advantage of by a sleazy, soul-less female pimp. Still, there's a certain darkness about this film that makes it bit more watchable than the myriad of others about the gay hustler scene. The director could have taken this story in a thousand different directions, and any of other 999 would have been better than the way this movie ended, if one should even call that an ending. The editing is clumsy, and the acting fails to realistically convey either the desperation or the naiveté of the young hustlers. The main problem I find with this movie is that its denouement is an anticlimax.