This is How Movies Should Be Made

just watch it!

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

This really could have been a great movie in my opinion.Especially loved the acting of Thea Gill and Derek Baynham and the plot was (except for all the cheesy details) realistic and well devised.Having said that, here is what really sucks about this movie: Chase (main character, they "gay guy") behaved like the greatest A-hole on the planet during the movie!! I mean, I was really starting to hate him when he treated that girl Christy in the most condescending way ever! It's one thing not to be attracted to girls, but that doesn't give you the right to treat them like trash. First, he meets her at a party where she tries to make small-talk, but he totally ignores her and then he tells her he will grab a beer just to leave her stuck on the couch (all right, it's a party, whatever). But then, he does it again at the barbecue, only this time he tells her to grab a bear FOR HIM, then goes to play football. They never show it, but I wonder how she must have felt when she came back with the beer and saw him being gone.I mean I get what it's like to hear someone say "I wouldn't want my son to grow up being a f**(F-word)" but that doesn't mean he can do it to someone else. He should have no right to complain after treating someone like that! But it gets worse: First he betrays his best friend Tyler (who so far had shown considerable support after his coming out and behaved pretty much as perfectly as you could expect from your best friend) by having sex with his dad (Nathan). But even when he gets caught by Tyler's mother, that doesn't keep him from making out with Nathan some more, not even 20 seconds after Nathan told him that his wife had seen them in the woods. Motto:"Oh, I just might have destroyed your family, f*ck it, let's make out some more." Really!?! So then they make out some more in broad daylight and (surprise!) Tyler walks in. He storms off, being chased by Chase who yells:"It's not what it looks like!" WTF!? In my head I'm thinking: U stupid piece of sh*t! Maybe now is the time to pack your bags instead of running after your best friend who just found out that his dad is gay and you two are having an affair!!! I mean the dad is not innocent either, of course. But Chase just takes the cake by behaving totally selfish and with no regard for the lives of other people.The fact that Tyler in the end says:"It wasn't your fault" is totally beside the point. Of course it wasn't Chase's "fault" that Tyler's dad was gay, but the way in which it was revealed was well set up in order to maximize trauma to the whole family, whose lives as they knew it were destroyed.

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.

"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!

I have a feeling this story is played out in real life far more often than most people think. The psycho-sexual sublimations of real married men in middle age are if anything more intense than those lying at the heart of the character played with understated anxiety by the actor Dan Payne. The fact that the subject of his desire is a younger man rather than a younger woman sets this film apart from the trashy stuff of soap opera and carries it into the realm of social commentary as well as legitimate drama.Does it succeed on its own as a gripping and well-produced story? Yes and no. There are problems with continuity from scene to scene and timing in general that interfere with the viewer's ability to stay on course by way of identifying with the main characters, in spite of generally excellent acting in the separate episodes comprising a more or less believable plot.I liked the casting with the single exception of the writer's inclusion of himself as Chase Rousseau -- somewhat long in the tooth for a college kid. He was also quite wooden (no pun) in scenes with both the buddy and the dad. How does it all end? How do stories of this kind usually end? To the extent that this one prepares the viewer for a unique catharsis the answer to that question will be revealed and the viewer will be satisfied. A solid seven of ten in my book.