David Searching (1997)

David Searching (1997)


Director: Leslie L. Smith
Writer: Leslie L. Smith
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 101 min



Stars: Anthony Rapp, Camryn Manheim, Julie Halston

Movie about a young homosexual man's search to find himself by surviving heartbreak and relationship fears. He explores what it means to live for himself and others. His video camera and his roommate and best friend, a heterosexual female. David searches for love, creativity, and meaning with his video camera, though living life is much harder when not hiding behind the lens.

Scrooge & Marley (2012)

Scrooge & Marley (2012)


Directors: Richard Knight Jr., Peter Neville
Writers: Timothy Imse, Richard Knight Jr., Ellen Stoneking
Genres: Drama, Family, Music
Country: USA
Language: English 
Duration: 91 min
Year: 2012


Stars: David Pevsner, Tim Kazurinsky, Rusty Schwimmer







Dennis Harvey
Film Critic

Billed as “a holiday movie for all of us,” “Scrooge & Marley” is in fact very niche, being of and for that segment of the gay community that enjoys watered-down camp and syrupy empowerment messages, which are not to be confused with the good kinds of either. This spin on “A Christmas Carol” delivers a heavy-handed morality play that Dickens himself might have found gauche, sugar-coated with weak songs and broad performances. Playing scattered theatrical runs between now and Christmas, the pic figures to do modest but better biz from its home-format release next month.

Raining on his employees’ seasonal cheer (even firing one of them), Ebenezer, aka Ben, Scrooge (David Pevsner) shutters the gay nightclub he ripped off long ago from a former benefactor (the inevitable Bruce Vilanch) and settles in for a grumpy solo Christmas Eve. But he’s visited first by Marley (Tim Kazurinsky), his former partner in ruthless gay-community bilking, now a salvation-seeking denizen of purgatory.

As in the Dickens story, three more ghosts follow: Christmas Past (Ronnie Kroell), who helps Ben revisit his homophobic father and other contributors to his greedy, mean adult personality; Present (Megan Cavanagh), who shows how forgiving the people around him are; and Future (JoJo Baby), who promises Scrooge’s customarily bleak reward. Scrooge redeems himself, natch, though the maudlin final scenes are cringe-inducing.

Of course, it’s impossible to do a “Carol” without sentimentality — Scrooge’s whole journey is about thawing his heart. But “S&M” (get it?) is so crude and literal-minded in its gay reinterpretation that no genuine emotion can get past the script’s compilation of cliches. Execution isn’t much better, with a low budget that might’ve been turned to a more imaginative pic’s advantage, but here is charmlessly obvious, with tacky f/x and stagy interiors; indeed, the material could translate to a proscenium with little alteration.

Shot in Chicago, the pic clumsily uses frequent blackouts to transition between scenes in a mediocre tech/design package.
Source: Variety.com

Film:

Crutch (2004)

Crutch (2004)


Director: Rob Moretti
Writers: Paul Jacks, Rob Moretti
Genre: Drama,  Biography
Country: USA
Language: English 
Duration: 88 min
Year: 2004




Stars: Eben Gordon, Rob Moretti, Juanita Walsh






By Don Willmott on Tuesday 1st November 2005

Two facts to ponder: Crutch is "based on a true story," and Rob Moretti is not only one of the lead actors but also the writer, director, editor, and producer. The result: Crutch comes across as an extremely personal exorcism of Moretti's suburban gothic adolescence, for better and for worse. Like the scribblings in a teenager's diary, the film vacillates between insight and exaggeration.

Moretti has quite a story to tell. Sixteen-year-old David (Eben Gordon), the surrogate for Moretti, lives in a broken home with his rapidly deteriorating alcoholic mother (Juanita Walsh) and two sullen siblings. Dad (James Earley) lives across town with another woman, and the family's method for coping with all this drama is to maintain a chilly silence. When not scribbling frantically in his well-worn diary, David finds distractions with his pretty girlfriend Julia (Jennifer Laine Williams). Together, they sign up for an acting class led by new-in-town thirtysomething Kenny (Moretti) and his sidekick Maryann (Jennifer J. Katz). Within minutes, Kenny starts a not-so-subtle dance of seduction with David, who is too distracted by his family problems to pick up on the signals... at first.

Once David's mom is tossed into rehab, David, feeling adrift, starts clinging to Kenny, and before long, the two are happily intertwined in a drug-fueled affair. "I was impressionable," David says in his retrospective narration. Meanwhile, Maryann tells Kenny, "All I'm saying is that you should be careful."

Indeed. Kenny, who we learn was a successful actor who lost it all in a shameful spiral of drugs and self-hatred, is an utterly unsympathetic (but good-looking) lout, a sexual predator who spends half the film committing various felonies and misdemeanors, albeit with the consent of young David. Looking for advice as the relationship sours, David turns to Zack (Tim Loftus), a local bookshop clerk whose over-the-top swishiness, the likes of which hasn't been seen on screen since The Boys in the Band, stops the film dead in its tracks not once but twice. It's an egregious directorial mistake in a film that otherwise does a great job of capturing the gritty textures of a typical middle-class New Jersey suburb.

How strange it must have been for Moretti to write and then play the role of the man who seduced him as a teenager. Unlike the other characters in the film, the Kenny he's created is one-dimensional, a troublemaker who keeps making trouble and who doesn't earn a bit of understanding or forgiveness from the audience. You have to wonder if the man who inspired the character of Kenny will see this film and what he'll think of it. (For a much more nuanced portrayal of a suburban pedophile on the loose, see the fascinating L.I.E.)

Crutch does succeed in creating an intimacy with the audience. The story is so personal that you can't help but feel like a voyeur trapped in the small houses and apartments where most of the action takes place. When Mom splits open her chin in a drunken stupor and blood spreads everywhere as David helps her down the stairs, you almost want to wipe the blood off your own hands.

It's hard to believe that Moretti's real-life experience was quite as dramatic as the melodrama he's written, but Crutch has its moments, and at least you know that Moretti made it through his troubles and became a productive moviemaker. There could have been far unhappier endings.

Crutch in the clutch.

The Art of Being Straight (2008)

The Art of Being Straight (2008)


Director: Jesse Rosen
Writer: Jesse Rosen
Genre: Comedy
Country: USA
Language: English
Duration: 70 min
Year: 2008


Stars: Johnny Ray Rodriguez, Rachel Castillo, Jim Dineen

Variety Review by Dennis Harvey
Posted by JesseRosen on Mar 11, 2014 in A.O.B.S. Reviews, Reviews

“A low-key comedy high on charm and credible twentysomething observation, Jesse Rosen’s debut feature, “The Art of Being Straight,” stars the writer-director as a possibly-coming-out newbie in Los Angeles whose puzzling over his sexual identification isn’t helped by his jokily insensitive straight buds. Appealingly played, nicely executed pic has a shot at arthouse distribution in addition to select DVD/cable sales and further fest travel.

Twenty-three-year-old John (Rosen) has just moved to L.A. from New York, ostensibly “taking a break” from his longtime girlfriend. He moves in with college bro Andy (Jared Grey), whose pals incessantly do that kind of “That is so gay” banter that’s essentially harmless — unless you’re the only gay guy in the room. (Acknowledging there actually is a distinction, one eventually queries “Is it ‘gay’ like it’s lame or ‘gay’ like it’s homosexual?”)

A quiet, genial guy among these more boisterous types, John is hardly comfortable discussing his shifting Kinsey scale placement with them, and his new job as bottom-rung gofer at a major ad agency is fraught with sexual tension as a studly boss (Johnny Ray Rodriguez) barrages him with thinly veiled come-ons.

Meanwhile, lesbian friend Maddy (Rachel Castillo) suffers her own travails, questioning her relationship commitment with g.f. Anna (Emilia Richeson) while developing a crush on nice-guy neighbor Aaron (Peter Scherer). Her own low-rung job at an art gallery is made torturous by bitchy, pretentious co-workers and customers.

Maddy isn’t undergoing a major life change, just a wee bi-curious phase. John isn’t so much closeted as simply figuring himself out. His peers aren’t real homophobes, just guys talking typical guy-trash. Narrative developments feel true to an increasingly frequent real-world dynamic too seldom seen in drama: When gay guy (or girl) is just “one of the guys,” not the token “gay friend” or the straight woman’s non-threatening pal. Pic’s slice of post-collegiate L.A. life likewise feels casually on-target in portraying an aspirational milieu that’s more Silverlake than Beverly Hills or West Hollywood.”