Monday, December 20, 2010

2:05 AM | It's All About Sex

What do we ultimately get after watching Eric Amadio’s After Sex [2007]? Nothing, except the creeping feeling that we just lost a huge chunk of our time. This pretentious film about twosomes of all kinds having assorted intimate conversations after coupling is really just a string of vignettes that have no organic whole except that they try to explore issues of sex and sexuality and their permutations — a gay couple talk about roles and role-playing, a straight couple talk about the vagaries of loving, a Latino lady killer frets about having bedded a call girl, et cetera — but not much is new here. The insights are not insights but cliches, and almost all of the vignettes are delivered in such hokey ways by actors (save for the wonderful Zoe Saldana as a lesbian in love with her feelings-phobic roommate) who are straining way beyond their depths here. This is a cheesy and ineffectual film for people who think they can gain wisdom from reading the text on a milk carton.



Tom Donaghy’s The Story of a Bad Boy [1999] is a quirky — idiosyncratic? — story of a 17-year old high school boy in the closet who goes through the tumultuous cycles of life in senior year while juggling all sorts of extra-curricular activities, well-meaning but hopelessly clueless parents, and a developing crush on a student teacher. Played mostly in comic broad strokes, it nevertheless manages to convey the seriously funny and seriously mind-boggling roller coaster ride that is being 17. Every single scene here is done in hyperbole, but by God, I recognized the undercurrents. It certainly brought me back. This is a strange way of doing a film with the issues it tries to flesh out, but it works in some strange way. Even the puzzling end seems appropriate — although I don’t know what it is all about. But why fuss about that making absolutely no sense? I’ve been 17. It didn’t make sense either.

Labels: film, queer

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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