Tag: Film Review
All the latest film reviews for LGBT themed films and others.
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FILM REVIEW | I Am Chris Farley
American Comedian Chris Farley was only 33 when he died of a cocaine and morphine overdose a few days before Christmas in Chicago in 1997.
The new documentary I am Chris Farley tells his rapid ascent to stardom and his even quicker descent to a life of alcohol and drugs, and eventually to an early death.
‘I am Chris Farley’s’ was made in conjunction with the estate of Chris Farley, so the producers had access to all of the relevant people in Chris’s life, including his family, friends, and fellow comedians and television co-stars. From his days as an unknown comic at Chicago’s Second City Theatre (where lots of famous comics got their start), from where he was plucked to be on the popular NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL) for five seasons, to eventually following the path of former SNL’ers to star in movies.
Chris’s brother Kevin Farley (who is also a producer of the film, and is also a comedian) reminisces about his brother Chris during his stand up comedy act. Kevin then talks about their lives growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, where they had a normal life, with a father who gave his boys a lot of freedom. Kevin talks about Chris’s life in high school and college and laughs about the way in which Chris would throw himself to the ground and do pushups to impress women. While Chris did graduate from college and worked for a time for his father at the Scotch Oil Company in Madison, he didn’t get his professional start in comedy until he joined Ark Improv Theatre in Madison. It was clear then that Chris was the stand out star, footage from his shows display a comedic style that surpassed his costars. Even when he went on to be part of Chicago’s Second City Theatre, his on stage presence was larger than life. But it wasn’t until he got to SNL that he was able to display his true comedic talent, with the aid of professional comedy writers in an intense weekly live television show setting.
Farley was a member during one of SNL’s peak times, and his fellow cast members included Adam Sandler, Mike Myers and David Spade. Not only did Chris outshine and outperform his fellow cast members, he was the one who provided the huge laughs on the show, whether in his role as ‘motivational speaker,’ to a skit where he auditions for Chippendales alongside host Patrick Swayze (in which Farley takes off his top to reveal a huge belly), to any role that he was given, Chris was truly the funny man. But according to the people who knew him, he was also a softee, a very sincere guy who would take a liking to everyone, and everyone would take a liking to him. SNL creator and Executive Producer Lorne Michaels talks, at length, about how he mentored Chris in his early days of being on the show. Myers talks about the times they spent together on the set and how Chris was the nicest and most sincere guy there. But it’s David Spade who brings the best of the memories of Chris in the film – they both started at SNL at the same time, so they shared the incredible feeling of being first-timers on the historic television show. Spade mentions many funny moments he and Farley shared together on the set, including the many times when Chris would walk into his shower at work, stark naked (with his penis tucked in) and proceed to give Spade a huge hug – Spade says this was just the kind of man Chris was. Spade and Farley would eventually break out of television and into films. And after they were released from their SNL contracts in 1995, they made the films Tommy Boy and Black Sheep, both critically panned but made lots of money. But in between these films, Farley’s personal life was not as shiny as his professional life.
Drug and alcohol problems led him to rehab an astonishing 17 times. Michaels was instrumental in trying to help Farley overcome his habit, but it was a demon that Farley was unable to kick, which led to his premature death where he was found on a linoleum floor in his apartment in Chicago. Eerily enough, John Belushi, another overweight comedian who got his start at SNL and became a huge movie star (Ghostbusters, The Blues Brothers), also died at the age of 33, of a cocaine and heroin overdose, in 1982.
I am Chris Farley is a best of Chris Farley documentary that shows the best of his professional work. We are also treated to his spot on the David Letterman Show where he bounds onto the stage, making sure you knew he was in the room, his hair all over his face, clenching his fists, and then in true Chris Farley fashion, falling over backwards in his chair.
While the documentary doesn’t really explain why Farley got involved in alcohol and drugs in the first place (perhaps no one knew), it’s a very good tribute to a celebrity who died way before his expiry date.
“There’s a category of people who I’ve worked with who are infuriatingly talented’ – Michaels says – “and Farley was one of them.”
I Am Chris Farley is now available to buy on Blu-Ray and DVD.
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FILM REVIEW | Iris
“I don’t like pretty!” 93-year-old idiosyncratic fashion maven Iris Apfel remarks, in an enchanting new documentary by Albert Maysles.
Iris acknowledges that she was never a conventional beauty but that has hardly stopped her pursuing her passion for style and becoming one of the most original and daringly dressed women in New York. As Maysles films her on and off for the past four years he captures not just her remarkable talent for putting the most unexpected and stunning outfits together for her daily ensembles, but he also reveals a captivating quick-witted charmer with an insatiable appetite for living life to the full.
Iris, married to her centenarian husband Carl for the past 66 years, lives in her mother’s Park Avenue apartment crammed with racks and racks of clothes. These, she explains were bought to be worn and not simply to be collected. She mixes chic with cheap and the results are always fabulous.
She and Carl ran a very successful interior design business for years and their clients include many of the occupants of The White House over the years, in one charming scene she quickly stops Carl spilling the beans about (how difficult) Jacqueline Kennedy was.
She was already well-known by New York’s fashion insiders but then in 2005 the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted what they thought was a small exhibition of Iris’s clothing and jewellery which turned out to be an unexpected phenomenal success. Doors were suddenly opened to her including commissions to do collections for the Home Shopping Network and becoming a Visiting Professor of Fashion for the University of Texas.
She was now, in her own words an octogenarian starlet and she put some of this down to the fact the Exhibition had provided the world with much-needed fantasy and glamour. Iris never does anything petite: everything must be big and bold. “Colour is so important: it can raise the dead,” just one of the statements that just trip off her tongue as she spouts forth about her beliefs. What Maysles is quick to spot though is that despite the seemingly incessant flow of opinion, Iris refuses to take any of it seriously.
Towards the closing scenes of this delightful docu-portrait of the woman Bergdorf Goodman called, “the rare bird of fashion”, Iris claims that her two best traits are curiosity and having a good sense of humour. “I could never be a friend of anyone who wasn’t either”, she added.
Frankly it’s hard not to like someone as engaging as Iris who comes out with such plums as “my mother worshipped at the altar of the accessory.” By the end of the movie you may not want to actually worship at the altar of Apfel, but you will be very sorely tempted.
P.S. This sadly was the last work of the great documentarian Albert Maysles who died just days before the movie was screened at the Miami International Film Festival.
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FILM REVIEW | Tab Hunter Confidential
★★★★★ | Tab Hunter Confidential
Tab Hunter was and still is at the age of 83-years old a stunningly handsome man.
When he was a teen idol in the 1950s he was the ultimate clean-cut, all-American boy and seemingly butter would not melt in his mouth. He was Warner Brothers Studio’s biggest box office movie star for at least three years of his tenure there. Surprisingly, we learn from this documentary, that Tab’s sexuality didn’t play a part in the ending of his Hollywood career. It was the actor’s own desire to buy himself out of his studio contract. Even though he was a major star, Hunter was extremely unhappy with the lightweight fluffy movies that he was always having to make.
Tab Hunter Confidential is based on the memoir that Hunter penned with film historian Eddie Muller in 2005. It is a lively account of how this handsome matinee idol, with a rigid set of principles, coped with his dramatic professional and personal life. His sexuality, although hidden from the public in the early days, was no deterrent for studio mogul Jack Warner who never raised the subject. He was simply happy that Hunter was such a moneymaker for him. When on one occasion Hunter’s privacy was sacrificed to save Rock Hudson from being exposed, Warner defended him with a blunt, “Today’s headlines are tomorrow’s toilet paper.”
With his career fading, Hunter resorted to dinner theatre and whatever work he could get to scrape by until his career got a second wind in the 1980s when he co-starred in Polyester with Divine.
The most interesting part of the story is Hunter’s romances ranging from ice skater Ronnie Robertson to actor Tony Perkins, the latter who managed to break his heart and steal a role that he had coveted. In an era when homosexuality was not only illegal but could also destroy lives, Hunter resisted taking the well-worn path of other closeted gay men in the public eye who had marriages of convenience. True, he very publicly ‘dated’ many starlets and took part in many photo spreads in fanzines with them, but he resisted the pressure to opt for the easy way out by getting wed.
Hunter a very devout Catholic explains his dilemma at the time: “If you were with a man you would be sinning, and if you were with a woman you would be lying.”
He did, as Debbie Reynolds confirmed, make the right choice and he eventually was able to come to terms with his sexuality by accepting the Church’s teaching on love and self-acceptance.
Some 30 years ago, Hunter aged 53 met a 23-year-old man called Allan Glazer who became his partner, and now after three decades together Glazer is a producer of this documentary which may be a reason why there is little of him in this movie. Since Hunter’s second movie with Divine in 1985 Lust In The Dust, he has settled down to a life away from the spotlight on his ranch with Glazer raising horses.
Emmy Award winner Jeffrey Schwarz directs the movie, and this is his fourth documentary of a gay icon (Vito, Jack Wrangler and Divine). Schwarz shows a genuine affection for his subjects and the portraits he paints are very insightful and totally riveting. He reintroduces this disarmingly charming man to those of us who have memories of Hunter growing up, and present him to a new generation, who will see him as a role model that they can look up too.
The Tab Hunter DVD is available to buy
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FILM REVIEW | Elephant Song
★★★★ | Elephant Song
At only 26 years old, French-Canadian Xavier Dolan already has five films under his directorial belt, all of which have been well received and critically acclaimed. In addition, he’s acted in 12 films, including the just released Elephant Song.
In 2009, Dolan directed, produced, starred and wrote J’ai Tué Ma Mére (I Killed My Mother), a semi-autobiographical story about him as a young gay man at odds with his mother, and wrote the script when he was at the tender age of 17. It won 3 awards at the Cannes Film Festival. The next year he wrote, directed, produced and starred (again) in Les Amours Imaginaires (Heartbeats), a story about three close friends who are involved in a love triangle. In 2012 Dolan continued his string of emotional and heartfelt films by writing and directing Laurence Anyways. At 168 minutes, it was an ambitious project for the young director to do, it was about the struggle of a straight man who, over the course of ten years, transitions from male to female, and how it affects the relationship with his lover (with amazing performances by Melvil Poupajd and Suzanne Clément). Laurence Anyways won many awards, including two Cannes Film Festival Awards (the Queer Palm Award and Best Actress for Clément). Lawrence Anyways was also nominated for ten Canadian Screen Awards (winning two), and more importantly, at the Toronto International Film Festival, it won Best Canadian Feature film. Not bad for a local boy.
2013 is when Dolan wore multiple hats in a film. In Tom á la Ferme (Tom at the Farm), Dolan, who wrote, produced, directed and starred, plays Tom, a young man who works in an advertising agency and travels to the Canadian countryside for the funeral of his 25-year-old boyfriend. The problem is that the grieving mother did not know that her son was gay, so she accepts Tom as his friend in the hopes that he can tell her all about her dead son’s life. Meanwhile, the deceased’s brother, 30-year-old Francis (an amazing Pierre-Yves Cardinal), knew that his brother gay but could never really accept it. Conflict, anguish, thought provoking moments, anger, love, and acceptance follow. More acclaim followed Dolan when Mommy was released in 2015. It stars French Canadian actress Anne Dorval who is a widowed mother overwhelmed by her teenage son (Antoine Olivier Pilon – a relevation) and his attention deficit disorder. Dolan wrote, produced and directed Mommy, and it won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and won nine Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Motion Picture.
In the newly released Elephant Song, Dolan, who co-stars along with Bruce Greenwood and Catherine Keneer, plays Michael, a psychologically unwell young man in a mental institution who may or may not have had something to do with the disappearance of his psychiatrist. So it’s up to Greenwood’s Dr. Greene to interview Michael to try to get to the bottom of his colleague’s disappearance. During the interrogation, Michael plays mind games with Dr. Greene, alluding to the fact that he knows where his psychiatrist is but is not quite yet ready to tell. Michael is clearly a very disturbed young man, his very famous opera singer mother all but ignored him, and the one time he spent with his father was when he took him elephant hunting, with the boy Michael crying over his father’s killing of an elephant. And Michael alludes to a sexual relationship that he is having with his psychiatrist, so it’s up to Dr. Greene to take what Michael is saying with a grain of salt. Even the head nurse, Susan Peterson (Keneer), warns Dr. Greene to keep his distance from Michael. It’s a film that at its centrepiece is Dolan, who is perfect as Michael, very good looking yet very mischevious, you don’t know whether you want to hug him or to run away from him. And the film revisits the themes of homosexuality and the lack of acceptance so common in Dolan’s films.
What’s next for Dolan besides conquering the world? He just finished shooting ‘It’s Only the End of the World,’ about a young man who returns home after 12 years to announce his impending death to his family. It stars Marion Cotillard and Vincent Cassel. Dolan will also be shooting his first film in the United States, to be titled The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, in 2016. It’s a fictional story about an actor who is famous for playing a Marvel-style superhero whose life and career are turned upside-down when his private correspondence with an 11-year-old fan is exposed and made to look indecent by a villainous gossip columnist. This one stars Hollywood heavyweights Kit Harrington, Jessica Chastain, and Susan Sarandon. If his previous films are anything to go by, these new films (and his future films) will be eagerly anticipated and will be must sees.
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FILM REVIEW | Boys In Brazil
★ | Boys In Brazil
This painfully unfunny dramedy starts and ends with a group of four closeted gay friends at São Paulo’s Gay Parade, one of the largest in the world. As the Parade ends one of them is gay-bashed and after they beat the thugs off, the four make a pact that by the time of next year’s Parade they will all finally come out of the closet.
Outrageously camp teenager Mauro has aspirations to be a Drag queen, something his devout evangelical parents are quick to put a stop too once they catch him midstream trying out his lip-synching routine. Their reaction is to drag around their local priest to exorcise the devil out of their son. Mauro’s rather shy best friend Rodrigo just needs a push to hook up with another handsome classmate, and telling his parents that he now has a boyfriend is rather a non-event.
Mauro’s gay uncle Vicente who was also part of the group is a high-flying businessman who panics when his boss is in town from Paris and insists on having dinner with Vicente and his wife. Vicente’s best girlfriend is dragged into be his beard, but he needn’t have bothered as the boss turns out to be gay too. Who Vicente would have preferred to be dining with is Roger the rather hunky man he helped rescue from the gay bashing incident. Roger, however, is married and about to be a father a second time, and just cannot find the time to reach his part of the pact and come out to his wife. It’s not helped by the fact that his mother-in-law (played by a real-life drag queen!) practically lives with them.
Then there is the angry and rather annoying self-righteous lesbian blogger who sits in judgement of them all and wants to publicly ‘out’ both Roger and Mauro against their wishes.
The cliché driven very lame plot is packed full of old-fashioned stereotypes that seem so out of place in contemporary gay cinema. Even the coming-out aspect of the stories are handled so clumsily, that they are difficult to empathise with.
I saw this one so you wouldn’t have too!
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FILM REVIEW | The Loft
The storyline is fairly straightforward, five seemingly respectable professional men conspire to share a secret apartment. A safe space in which to conduct their illicit affairs and indulge in their deepest, darkest fantasies, safe from the prying eyes of their wives.
That is until one of them, Luke, arrives to find a dead body, an unknown woman, a blonde, hand-cuffed to the bed they have all used at some point.
Then their fantasy turns into a nightmare, as they realise there are only 5 keys to the apartment and it isn’t possible to duplicate the keys… so one of the 5 must be the murderer?
Or so you think…
The film is quite inventive in terms of use of flashbacks, the way the five are questioned by the detectives investigating the crime, the possibility of the wives being involved? The list of potential suspects grows, as the victim is revealed. It has a feel of classic Hitchcock about it as we appear to suspect everyone, no-one is safe.
With a stellar cast, including James Marsden (Hairspray, amongst many others), Keith Urban (Bones in the Star Trek reboot), Wentworth Miller (Prison Break) and Matthias Schoenaerts (from the original version of Loft, and also Rust & Bone, A Little Chaos and Far from the Madding Crowd) who all give performances that waver between making you feel revulsion for them and their predicament and pity for the game they are all involved in.
Erik Van Looy remakes his 2008 Belgian classic and succeeds with playing with you – you think you know where it’s going, but you’re wrong!
One for a DVD and pizza night…
A massive 4 stars
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FILM REVIEW | Magic Mike XXL
The Kings of Tampa are back! The men, strippers from the 2012 film Magic Mike, return with a sequel – Magic Mike XXL – and they are back with a bang!
Magic Mike XXL reunites Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer and the rest of the cast from the hit film about male strippers and picks up the story three years later after Mike has left the world of stripping. He’s got his own furniture business but it’s not doing too well. So when the former Kings of Tampa look him up on the way to a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach, North Carolina, Mike (Tatum) can’t resist the pull to go back to stripping, and to reunite with his buddies. So what takes place is a male stripper road movie with scenes that allow all of the men to display their fine physical goods.
And these scenes are hot. In one, reminiscent of Jennifer Beal’s dance scene in the film Flashdance, with sparks flying all around, Mike does the same in his garage, a freestyle solo that proves he’s still got it. Once on the road, we are treated to the men’s misadventures, to be voyeurs in their exhibitionism, with a front row seat. First stop, a gay bar in Jacksonville where the drag queen emcee asks members of the audience if they want to participate in an amateur strip contest. Of course our men enter and wow the crowd. After, they find themselves at a beach party, where Mike has an encounter with Zoe (Amber Heard), who takes his picture while he is urinating.
Big Dick (Manganiello) get his big showy number when he performs, on the spot, for a shocked but very lucky female gas station attendant. You’ll never look at a bag of Cheetos the same way again.
A stop at private club Domina, Mike’s pre-Tampa stomping ground, transforms the movie into a breathtaking and intensely sexual film. You see, Domina’s female customers are treated to in-your-face male strip shows, and these strip shows are like ones you’ve never ever seen before on film. It’s here that Mike re-encounters Rome (Jada Pinkett Smith) the proprietress, and a woman from his past.It you’re out of breath at this point (trust me, you will be) there’s lots more. The men wind up at the home of Nancy (Andie MacDowell), a recently divorced sexy and flirtatious woman in her early 50s, and the rapport between Nancy and her female friends and the men is very palpable, very real, you can cut the sexual tension between the men and the women with a knife.It’s at the Myrtle Beach stripper convention where the film comes to a climax. Each man gets to perform his own unique dance, for a room full of ladies, and perform they do. Tatum strips all the way down to a shiny jockstrap, while the other men do their own special routines, one which includes chocolate sauce and whipped cream, and another one involves a sling. Various ladies from the audience are lucky enough to be chosen as part of the act. And Tatum chooses Zoe to be in his act, performing on her on stage in every position imaginable.Directed by the same man who directed the campy Liberace film “Behind the Candelabra,” Gregory Jacobs brings a stylised nuance to Magic Mike XXL, where the long dance scenes take a life of their own. And the male stars of this film really put themselves out there, hell, they’ve all got the bodies, so why not? And for the female actresses who were chosen to be performed on in various scenes of this film, we can assume they were not just acting, but were also extremely enjoying themselves. So will you. -
FILM REVIEW | The Last Knights
In the current climate of sword and sorcery fever, stirred up by the wonderful Game of Thrones, we are seeing a surge of books and films set in Machiavellian worlds, with plot twists and turns to keep you on your toes.
This film is one of those – probably more by happenstance than by planning. This film seems to seek to ride that wave – however, it falls short, far short.
A fallen warrior, one of the last knights of the title, seeks to avenge his former and now dishon-oured master against a cruel and corrupt ruler in a pseudo-medieval land.
Beautiful backdrops, amazing scenery, weather fit for Winterfell and its frozen North, there just seems to be something missing.
The cast work hard, the plot, in theory at least, should entertain but it fails somewhere.
Have you ever settled down to watch a good movie, only to be left a little, well, a little flat and dis-appointed?
With a cast that includes Clive Owen and Morgan Freeman, we could expect more but they can only work with what they have. The scenery is wonderful, spectacular even. The castles and courtyards appropriately epic, the costumes perfection.But, and its a big but, it doesn’t succeed – and I can’t put my finger on why?
I read a few reviews on this film from Amazon and my favourite one read: “utter ball bag”. Not sure why this tickled me, but it did! It was also too harsh as it only gave the film 2 stars – I’d give it 3 and maybe a second watch at some point to check if my review was right.A mild-mannered 3 stars -
FILM REVIEW | Boy Meets Girl
★★★★★ | Boy Meets Girl
Eric Schaeffer’s refreshing and enchanting drama about three 20 year-olds looking for love in a small backwater town in Kentucky gently challenges us to suspend our preconceived views on gender labels and be as open to what happens as these lovelorn kids are. Ricky is a confident and determined transgendered young woman who is marking her time working in the local coffee until she is accepted at Fashion School in NY and can get on with the life she dreams of. She’s been best friends with Robby since they were 6 years and he now works as a mechanic at her father’s garage and the two of them are totally inseparable.
Then one day their world gets shaken up more than a little when Francesca breezes into the coffee shop and within minutes it’s clear that there is a mutual attraction between her and Ricky. Francesca is the spoiled rich kid of a local Politician and is engaged to be married to a Marine presently serving in Afghanistan. When she and Ricky hang out with each other and start to really bond, Ricky breaks the news about her identity to her new friend by text even though they are sitting next to each other at the moment. It sets a tone on how all the intimate moments are so superbly handled in this touching tale of romance.
Francesca has been ‘saving herself’ for marriage … well, that’s the line she has feeding David her fiance… but soon finds herself in bed with Ricky. She asks after making love if this now makes her gay, to which Ricky simply replies ‘it makes you human.’ The situation soon intensifies when David comes home on leave unexpected and is horrified to discover that his fiance’s new best friend is the transgendered Ricky. It turns out that his homophobia is, however, to do with his own secret past which he shared with Ricky.
The one person who is even more upset with the two girl’s relationship, which ends before it even gets a chance to really take off, is Robby. Turns out that he now realises that he must come to terms with his own feelings for his best friend, and once he can let go of his preconceived ideas of her gender, he can love her for who she really is.
Schaeffer’s script handles this all with such refreshing candour which empowers these young people to find it within themselves to accept and value who they are without being hung up on the labels that society insists on doling out. Ricky’s own journey of discovery up to that point was certainly not easy as she had to deal not only with bullying and taunting during her school days but also with the demons of misremembering her late mother’s opinions. She is, however, fortunate to have the unconditional support of her blue-collared father and her younger brother.
Superb casting also contributed a great deal to the undisputed success of the movie, and the presence of the incredibly talented transgendered actress Michelle Hendley making her film debut as Ricky lifted the whole piece to a different plane. She gave a riveting performance of Ricky as a sassy strong-willed young woman, not immune to the world’s negativity and ignorance about her sexuality, but one who was determined that it wouldn’t stop her being her own true self.
It’s warm and often very funny and an entertaining, intelligent, sensitive treatment of an oft-misunderstood subject and probably the most enlightening and best movie that I have seen on it so far. It truly deserves the widest audience possible way.
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FILM REVIEW | A Funny Kind Of Love
★★★ | A Funny Kind Of Love
You could be forgiven for thinking from the opening scenes of this new comedy from Australian actor turned director Josh Lawson that you are about to watch a movie that is like a Wikipedia of sexual practices, or even some soft-core pornography.
Thankfully it is neither of those although Mr Lawson does want us to laugh at the absurdity of fulfilling sexual fantasies, which never ever turn out like you had dreamed and wished for.
These then are the totally separate stories of five couples and the tenuous link to them is the fact that they all live in the same suburb neighbourhood, and they are all white and middle-class. The first concerns Maeve who confides to Paul her live-in boyfriend that she has a rape fantasy, which he is as reluctant to comply with as he is with proposing marriage. Evie and Dan’s marriage has hit a rocky patchy so the counsellor they consult suggest role-playing to spice things up a bit. The trouble is that Dan gets so into it he quickly forgets why the started doing this as he is now completely obsessed with becoming an actor so he can play dress-up every day.
Richard and Rowena have been trying to have a baby for so long that sex has become a monotonous chore, for Rowena anyway. That is until her husband gets really bad news and bursts into tears and she suddenly discovers she has dacryphilia (that thankfully is explained on screen). It means that she gets sexually aroused at the sight of tears, which is harmless enough until she finds has to plot to constantly keep Richard sad enough to weep whenever she fancies getting laid. It is an odd condition, but not quite as potentially objectionable as the somnophilia that Paul has when he drugs his nagging wife Maureen so that when she is passed out, he can finally have sex with her.
The fifth and final … and by far the best scenario, is of a couple of strangers who have not met in person. Monica works as a signing translator for deaf people wanting to make phone calls, and one night Sam calls into use the service. He wants to be connected to a sex line and poor Monica has to be the conduit for the funny and bawdy language that passes between the ‘working girl’ and Sam a cute young graphic novelist. Despite its set up it has the most tenderness of all of the scenarios because of the very real chemistry between both the caller and the operator, and it is such a genuine connection.
There is one other tenuous link between this group of vignettes in the shape of a new neighbour who is going around introducing himself. Whilst handing over welcoming gifts he slips into the conversation that fact that he is a registered sex offender, but every household he calls on is so wrapped up in their own problems that the last part simply doesn’t sink in. Just when you think he may get back to his old ways, Lawson finishes him off. We had expected something fatal to happen because of the original title of the movie had been The Little Death and he is one of the ‘little deaths’.
The movie ends up being more bizarre than bawdy although it does heavily on the basic assumption that many people who find sex funny will find this movie comical too. The troubles are that the laughs are rather intermittent and some regarding the whole concept of non-consensual intercourse are bordering on being offensive and in extremely bad taste.
As well as giving himself a plum part (Paul) Lawson does pepper the piece with an extremely talented cast of well-known Australian actors. Particular mention to the pitch performances from TJ Power and newcomer Erin James as Sam and Monica. By placing their story last in the proceedings it did at least mean the movie ends on a much higher note than the one it started on.