'Best Day Ever' entertains you without ever really moving you, explores gay men's feelings without ever actually feeling real, and slows to the routine pace of midlife, more so than a 90-minute movie ever should. The pacing is in fact leaden, the scenes much too long, and the brooding about the main character's fiftieth birthday so prolonged as to be maudlin. Worse, the film is so centered on him, so unrelenting in its focus, it just starts to feel like the writer-director's vanity project, where none of the supporting characters have anything better to do than join him wallowing in his personal misery. The eventual love-interest seems forced, and though they have some cute moments of accidentally bumping one another their first time going to bed, the new bf is so obviously there to cure the protagonist's loneliness, it's hard to see this relationship naturally, quirkily taking its own course.
Gay indie projects of the 2010s manage things the major studios with their superhero manias aren't yet willing to try, and this one has much better acting, and more individually golden moments, than a lot of these smaller-scale, less ambitious projects can manage. It bothers me to write this, but Best Day Ever could have used some big-studio pacing, some expensive effects, enabling it to achieve as close as 2010s gay indies can come to a Hollywood ending.
Gay indie projects of the 2010s manage things the major studios with their superhero manias aren't yet willing to try, and this one has much better acting, and more individually golden moments, than a lot of these smaller-scale, less ambitious projects can manage. It bothers me to write this, but Best Day Ever could have used some big-studio pacing, some expensive effects, enabling it to achieve as close as 2010s gay indies can come to a Hollywood ending.