The film was extremely disappointing...Cameron Mitchell seemed to be going through the motions here, I can't believe that the same person who wrote and directed the amazing "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" made the ridiculously bad "Shortbus," essentially a pseudo-porn film selling itself as a character study. In fact, from the first sequence onwards, JMC's movie delivers sexually graphic scenarios erections, money shots and all illuminated by awfully contrived dialogue, horrid performances and a plot that is as preposterous/pretentious as it is tedious.
As the characters struggle to express "profundity" through dialogue, they instead slip into triteness and cliché, and the emotional catharsis that seems to be JMC's goal feels absolutely staged and as cold and dettached as some of the acting.
JMC is apparently trying something serious. He seems to want to show how certain New Yorkers are coping with the numbed-out sense of disconnection they've been feeling since Sept. 11. Mitchell takes us into a world in which sexual behavior is abundant but not always satisfying, and in which it may be easier to find willing bodies than genuine intimacy, but it would have helped had the characters in Shortbus been a little more interesting and appealing than the sexual positions in which they find themselves.
"It's just like the Sixties, only with less hope," a character tartly declares at one point. Actually, it's just like the Sixties, only more clichéd. In a sense it's commendable that JMC wants to promote the joy of sex, but the movie is a big, pretentious, drawn-out drag, and not even very original; aspects of its plot can be found both in Oh in Ohio and Michael Winterbottom's equally hardcore (and more efficient) 9 Songs. JMC really needed to spend a lot more time developing these characters and their story, because a soap opera with sex is still only a soap opera. And a sex film without a heart or a brain or compelling characters is basically, a porn film.
As the characters struggle to express "profundity" through dialogue, they instead slip into triteness and cliché, and the emotional catharsis that seems to be JMC's goal feels absolutely staged and as cold and dettached as some of the acting.
JMC is apparently trying something serious. He seems to want to show how certain New Yorkers are coping with the numbed-out sense of disconnection they've been feeling since Sept. 11. Mitchell takes us into a world in which sexual behavior is abundant but not always satisfying, and in which it may be easier to find willing bodies than genuine intimacy, but it would have helped had the characters in Shortbus been a little more interesting and appealing than the sexual positions in which they find themselves.
"It's just like the Sixties, only with less hope," a character tartly declares at one point. Actually, it's just like the Sixties, only more clichéd. In a sense it's commendable that JMC wants to promote the joy of sex, but the movie is a big, pretentious, drawn-out drag, and not even very original; aspects of its plot can be found both in Oh in Ohio and Michael Winterbottom's equally hardcore (and more efficient) 9 Songs. JMC really needed to spend a lot more time developing these characters and their story, because a soap opera with sex is still only a soap opera. And a sex film without a heart or a brain or compelling characters is basically, a porn film.