FromDecatur
I liked this movie--the relationship between the son and his friend is a really nice one at the beginning. The mother is a little quirky and amusing, as is the little sister. The father does a good job of showing that odd place in life where one realizes one left things behind due to choices that need to be revisited, i.e., him being gay.I would have rated higher if the ending had felt a little more satisfying. Clearly the son, sister and mother are all making peace with the dad being gay and getting on with life. Our two gay characters seem to be left with a very uncertain future ahead of them and they don't seem to have any reason for optimism. I don't think it had to be a happily-ever-after ending, but I didn't have a sense of closure with the two characters with whom I identified the most. Still, I did enjoy this movie and would recommend it.
crispin_13
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this movie. First off, there aren't enough gay movies around (I live in Toronto and if I can't get them here...) and I'm always excited about seeing them and promoting them; however, this is a terrible movie with a couple of highlights. Dan Payne is one of them. He is very good and while there are parts of the script that he gets mired down in, he manages to out act anybody else in this fiasco.The script is awful. The ideas are sound but the dialogue is choppy and laughable. Thea Gill might be the worst actress I've seen in a long time. Her melodramatics are only emphasised by the bad script and the soap opera music score. Every time someone says or does anything that might be slightly hinting at homosexuality we are bombarded by a heavy-handed strum of the guitar and don't forget the obligatory music video/montage sequence. Sheesh.The ideas are thoughtful and well intended but I don't want to like this movie in a desperate grasp for movies that identify our culture. I think that we need more than this. This movie is trying to be high culture but its coming off as an ABC Sunday Night Movie. Maybe we've hit a point where we are getting good and bad movies. Straight people get shitty movies; I guess we do too.
sandover
"Maybe one of them lost his ball, dear." says mom to her little girl, after having witnessed her husband kissing in the woods her son's best gay friend. This comes unfortunately as a lame joke, bad wordplay. For if the film remains deliberately strained - and I mean that as a point the film makes - between what is said and what is meant, namely in the last lines of it, where the two, er, friends, bid their adieus, the straight guy says in a straight way a "straight phrase" as he says and prefers instead of 'I love you'. I don't remember the phrase, and I don't remember most of the names in the film; my attention span fails miserably when the events depicted are guilt-smitten with an hey, man understanding dressing. Only the last line portrays succinctly the fear, the love, the limits of one's own, the end of a friendship, the incapability of saying I love you face to face, instead of giving a repressed, condescending fetish. For this is what happens in the end; and I wouldn't want it otherwise, because the fact that the gay guy who waits at the bench, is well, waiting, and goes nowhere, instead of the father, who drives and drives and leaves it all behind for better tomorrows, is well deserved, and we can draw a lesson from it, as he evidently could not (except for the family portrait he leaves at their home, which comes in really bad, and I mean ethically, taste); the lesson being how character development can turn good in a sour way - or is it the other way around? Is not that, in that kind of film, we begin by sympathizing the victim in the closet, who as soon as he comes out of it, the effect unleashed, like a gush of wind, mixes the scenario towards schematic character development. And I say this because there are some good elements in this film that - well, don't live up to the moment. I mean look how the son begins like a cardboard college jerk and ends up, if not a sympathetic character, someone a bit more likable than in the first place.Enough for analysis. I hope the film was a bit better. The soundtrack is not in the least for an effort; the first, three times in a row "music" intervenes, it is exactly the same bunch of menopause chords in our ears, and the rest of it is one more instance of growling voice-and-guitar sympathy, and the lessons of life.Please, writers, directors, musicians and actors, do not indulge in guilt!
