User Reviews

I guess my first question about this film is -- couldn't they afford any air conditioning? Why was everyone sweating all the time?

About the only good news here is the acting of one of the principal gay characters -- the one played by Charlie Barnett. Barnett, who is gay in real life, has an uncanny knack for seeming very real in his characterizations. I've watched him in several things lately, and have been impressed. Although here, that ability to act "real" began to falter midway through the film. He has...but back then he should have worked on his acne and dental issues. Didn't they have makeup men for this film?

His partner in the film is played by Leroy McClain. I'm a little undecided here. Let's say he shows promise.

I can't say the same for any of the others in the film, but I want to single out for a grade of F the actor Cameron Scoggins. The acting was "okay", but to give this person a singing role? Let's put it this way, it made me glad I sometimes have to wear hearing aids because I could take them out when he started singing.

As far as the plot...well, it's okay. Sort of. One straight couple (at least they thought they were straight) get into the whole sexual fluidity thing, and the gay couple try an open relationship. Meh. You'll get bored. But I guess we can say that this is one of the few (if any) films where a never-seen character has to have both arms amputated. I guess that says a lot about this picture.

I read the comments from the director about this movie and how he wanted to show the new generation's sexual fluidity and how much more open sexually they are. While the movie certainly shows that, I think the director fell in his own trap and tried to convince his audience that said fluidity is good and turns out okay. Different things work for different people but personally I could not relate to someone who is willing to forget that last week his lover of six years was telling him he loved someone else and this week he's telling him he doesn't love that someone else, only him. While the director painted an almost fairy tale ending - just watch the final scene while the credits roll, the question that popped in my head and stuck there was "would Marcus have done the same thing if Stan had responded positively to his declaration of love" or "and what would have happened if Stan had showed up the day after the birthday and had told Marcus that he overreacted, that he was sorry, and that he was in love with him too"? Unfortunately, the movie took the easy way out and chose to portray these very serious consequences and just brushed them under the carpet

This sincere, quiet, and apparently low-budget indie _tries_ to explore experiences outside of the strictly monogamous and outside of the strictly heterosexual, and it deserves some props for not taking the easy way out of these issues--but neither is it all that well-made, well-acted, or 100% sure of itself and what it wants to be as an alternative, counter-culture film. It's probably worth watching, but don't prepare yourself to be amazed or blown away.

We meet Marcus and Aaron, an NYC gay-male couple who may or may not be interracial (it's honestly hard to tell and the plot never derives anything out of Marcus's darker, and Aaron's lighter, complexions). After six years together, they're deciding to move toward opening up their relationship without sacrificing their love for one another. We also meet Annie, a rather ditsy twenty-something elementary-school teacher, whose boyfriend, Stan, hooks up with Marcus in what is apparently Stan's first same-sex experience. Stan hasn't admitted to Annie that he's interested in seeing guys sexually. Annie hasn't admitted to Stan that she's also having her own same-sex fling with a fellow teacher named Mandy. And in turn, Marcus isn't admitting it to Aaron that he's falling in love with Stan, despite Marcus's sincere intentions to stay living with and passionately loving Aaron. Further complications, improbably but still rather predictably, ensue.

Everybody reads everybody else's private emails to their paramours. Every scene that should be light and sexy and poignant seems heavy-handed and forced. New Yorkers who could log onto Grindr or Craig's List and have multiple partners within minutes instead encounter the same knot of confused people in what ends up feeling like a very limited, almost claustrophobic version of New York City. One honestly just gives up trying to find believability in repeated, "miraculous" meetings between the same people within a city of millions, in people who _say_ they want an open relationship and then cannot handle the consequences, and in blurred lines between gay and straight that leave one character, Stan, just calling himself "curious." Maybe so, but all of these half-hearted complexities leave viewers less and less curious in this film as it goes on.

The later scenes between Marcus and Aaron seem especially poorly acted, just when we need to understand them and their motivations the most. Mandi's character is subjected to such bizarre hardships as finding out her dying father's arms are getting amputated, just because the writer doesn't seem to know what else to do with her character. Characters keep suggesting they share partners and try threesomes, and if threesomes had actually happened, they probably would have been more interesting, and less strained, than what this movie presents instead.

It deserves props, finally, for not insisting that the heterosexual couples are any happier than the homosexual ones, for not demanding its characters ultimately settle down from their experimental bisexuality, and for not preaching that one can only reach "happily ever after" via conventional monogamy. Its deviations from conventional morality make it an interesting experiment in indie film-making. Better acting, characters whom we know better and care about more, and more of a commitment to actually realizing the non-monogamy these characters think they long for, _would_ have made the experiment more of a success.