User Reviews

I like James Franco as an actor, and he seems like he'd be a cool person to hang out with (though maybe not if you're an aspiring actress, allegedly). It's James Franco the writer/director/artist/poet/musician/provocateur that's a problem for me. Part of it is envy, I'll admit (I wish I had freedom and funding to indulge all MY creative whims), but a larger part of it is I suspect that James Franco the Multifaceted Artist is a total poser.

"Interior. Leather Bar." doesn't dispel my belief that Franco is a poser, but it also re-enforces my belief that he'd be a cool friend. Val Lauren, the actor playing Al Pacino's character from the movie "Cruising," thinks Franco is a cool friend, Franco's involvement the primary reason he's agreed to participate in this project, even as his agent strongly advises him not to (his wife just wants him home in time for dinner). He seems more intrigued by playing a role originated by Pacino than Franco's and co-director Travis Mathews' stated thesis that the leather bars of "Cruising" represent a subculture that's fading away as homosexuals gain greater acceptance in mainstream society. (AIDS might also have had something to do with it but I guess that's too sad. Also: "Cruising" as a gay culture touchstone? Not sure about that.) When Lauren questions James Franco directly about why he thinks the missing 40 minutes from William Friedkin's "Cruising" needs to be explored, Franco says something about needing to confront the world of gay leather bars to challenge fears he has only because he was raised to have them. This seems like something that could be challenged by getting a trial subscription to any one of a number of gay porn sites, or while making all the gay-themed movies he's been a part of ("Milk," "Howl," "The Broken Tower"), but maybe he just wants to be sure he's been thoroughly challenged.

But "Interior. Leather Bar." does more meandering than challenging. Actors, both gay and straight, spend most of their time wondering what's expected of them. Some of wonder if James Franco will be in the movie and if he will get naked (not really and no, respectively). Others wonder just how far they are expected to go. Pretty far, as it turns out: real, non-simulated sex takes place, though it barely makes up five minutes of screen time in the total ten minutes of leather bar footage. Consequently, the movie is labeled porn by some, though I don't think it is. In fact, one sex scene seems realer than most, and you actually sense an emotional connection between the couple involved. Pretty impressive when you consider they've got an audience -- including an Oscar-nominated actor -- circling them as they get busy on a sofa. It's not a surprise to learn immediately after that the actors are a couple off-screen. Though Lauren seems pretty shell-shocked by the action on set, he compliments the two men, telling them they appear to have a great relationship. For his part, Franco isn't a co-director so much as the project's instigator. Mathews does the bulk of the directing, with Franco shown leaving early, right after watching two dudes have sex. Make of that what you will.

"Interior. Leather Bar." is presented as being the re-creation of the missing 40 minutes from "Cruising," but it's more like a glorified DVD extra accompanying a movie that was never finished. It's strangely fascinating but also frustratingly pointless.

This film is the behind the scenes of re-imagining and reproducing the unseen footage of a film called "Crusing".

I am disappointed and I feel cheated after watching "Interior. Leather Bar.". The description says that it is the re-imagination of the lost 40 minutes of footage, too explicit to be shown in the cinema. However, it really is just a behind the scenes documentary of why James Franco wanted to make this film, then getting the actors to play it, then briefing the actors, the actors mingling, actors telling what they feel about making the film. That takes 50 minutes of the screen time already, and there is only 7 minutes of re-imagined scene in a leather bar. "Interior. Leather Bar." is marketed in such a misleading way, it's actually all sauce and no beef.

I saw this film at the Berlinale film festival 2013, where I felt myself severely misled by the synopsis on the festival website. I saw a lot of meta-talk about cruising, about straight actors playing a gay role, about an actor being advised against getting involved in the project for the sake of his future career, and so on, with emphasis on "meta" and "about". And the bit of sex that was shown, was in a dancing atmosphere and not the traditional dark room. Maybe offensive for straight people but not very explicit, yet the festival website devoted a lot of attention to the revival of scenes deleted for fear for censors. Finally, I completely missed the insight in the film making process that was promised too. In short, an unnecessary film, not even a bit informative about this different universe we know nothing about.

This film promotes itself suggesting it re-imagines the 40 minutes excised from the movie "Crusing". It is actually a contrived and boring "behind the scenes" making of 10 re-imagined minutes from the original movie and, as shown, I highly doubt they are what Friedkin would have actually filmed.

The re-shot "Crusing" minutes are provocative and very sexually explicit, but they don't make up for the other 50 minutes where we watch the straight actor in the Al Pachino role trying to come to terms with taking on a gay-themed role.

I thought the 60 minutes of this movie would never end.

"Interior. Leather Bar" shouldn't have been made. It didn't need to be made. Only the reigning poseur king of "art" filmaking James Franco and his idiot director friend Travis Mathews would have thrown this sixty minute hairball up on any screen.

Yes, William Friedkin's "Cruising" was controversial. The bad press it received before and after being made and released effectively killed it. It was pretty much forgotten by everyone, even those gay men who arrived in the life long after it was made and rejected. The stories that sprang up around "Cruising" are more interesting than the film itself, i.e. the crowds of LGBT activists picketing and disrupting the actual filming, the disclaimer Friedkin was forced to add to the credit sequences which stated the film was not a blanket condemnation of the entire gay community, and the "lost" sex scenes filmed at actual NYC leather bars. As it is now known, there never were explicit sex scenes filmed. It's an urban legend.

"Interior.Leather Bar" is a sham from beginning to end. Nothing looks correct, the music is wrong, and let's not get started on the eyeshadow being applied to the men in their borrowed leather gear. Franco and Mathews simply wanted to make an "important statement" buried under gay porn so they hitched their exploitation horse to an antique cart full of actors (both gay and straight) who were never actually there during the leather heydays of the late 70s. Everyone is acting and discussing their motivations in the spaces between filming. You know there's going to be trouble when the camera searches actor Val Lauren (who's pretending to be Al Pacino) driving to the shoot and listening to his phone messages. The first call from his wife or girlfriend establishes his heterosexuality and the second is from an unknown man who dismisses Lauren's decision to appear in "Franco's f*ggot movie". Lauren agonizes for an hour about the sex that may or not happen and tries to find his inner Pacino. He can't find it and comes across as both whiny and pretentious, as if his involvement in this project is beneath him.

Leather bars are a dying institution. Their function was derailed by the AIDS crisis and more recently by the tsunami of "normalization" for LGBT people over the past decades. The raw acting out of men who played games without rules has been traded for SUVs, parenting, and PTA meetings once a month. Franco's soggy pretend leathermen can all be found waiting tables at any West Hollywood restaurants. The exposure and decline of the leather and backroom world began with "Cruising" and deserves a better, more fitting eulogy than this stupid mess. Two stars for the exposed dicks and at least one actor who actually looks like he stepped out of the 70s onto the floor of the Mineshaft NYC.

This ridiculous twaddle was made only to pad the resumes of Franco and Mathews, who think they're really saying something about sexual freedom. It's disingenuous in the extreme and not worth losing an hour of your life to view it.

I, too, was expecting something else, but although this is weird, choppy, and appears to have no point on the surface; I like how Franco (please just come out already) casts the point-of-view from the perspective of the straight guy who is new to all this and just got dragged into it and so on. Franco's point (to him, and to the viewer) is just because something (in this case, gay sex) is not only outside your experience, but something you have been programmed to hate, does not necessarily make it so for the people involved, hence the loving gay couple. Basically I got to see it for free on Netflix, an hour of time I could have spent watching the violence he is railing about. I don't mind the hour, would recommend it to somebody who's seen a million movies and willing to try something different. And if you're a little pervy there isn't much, but there is some nice flesh on display here. (check that one butt shot) lol

How this 60 minute piece of drivel ever got made, or was released, is beyond comprehension. It is nothing more than an extremely tedious version of what used to be known as "vanity press". Franco should be ashamed of himself. Why he, his collaborator, and the "actors" in this piece of garbage thought they had anything constructive to say about "rumored" cuts made to a 50-year old film, borders on the incredulous. Anyone can "imagine" what those phantom 40 minutes of sex in a leather bar might actually have shown. I imagine it would be a whole lot less boring and painful to watch than this waste of film (or tape). Anyone who had anything to do with this dreadful enterprise should be forever banned from film-making!

In 1980, Exorcist director William Friedkin made yet another movie that found another great way to stir up controversy and etch itself onto the front page of newspapers. His directorial effort Cruising was a film about Al Pacino's cop character going undercover in seedy gay bars in order to catch a series of murders in the specific area. The film divided critics, enraged the homosexual community, who even held boycotts and sent Friedkin death-threats over the film, and the film forever lived with a looming cloud of infamy over its head, with more comments being made about its impact over its quality.

As someone who has recently sat through Cruising, I fully understand why. It's an only adequate little thriller that is levied by the fact that it is such a curious piece of film history. There's not too much special about it other than a decently ambiguous Pacino performance and some well-photographed atmosphere, specifically inside the gay bars. Adding to the curiosity of the film, legend has it that forty minutes of the film had to be cut for it to achieve an R-rating rather than the ominous X-rating films were being stamped with during this time. The forty minutes are rumored to contain graphic gay sex as well as intimate scenes in the gay bars between its patrons.

This brings me to Interior. Leather Bar., a sixty-minute film by the likes of James Franco and Travis Mathews. The film is a mockumentary, following the Franco and Mathews as they attempt to assemble, cast, and reimagine the lost forty minutes of Cruising themselves. From the way Franco acts and interviews, one can easily see he's intrigued on how actors create an image once they begin and how they go about enforcing or affirming the image throughout careers.

Evidently, Franco has used his fascination for public personas and celebrity images as the basis for Interior. Leather Bar., a thoroughly intriguing and deeply-contemplative film that possesses lengthy dialogs on the public's perception of sex as well as mumblecore-esque aesthetics and structure. I walked in assuming I was going to see the full forty minutes from Cruising recreated to fit Franco and Mathews' idea of how the scenes were actually conducted. Instead, both men recreate the experience of working on the set of a film with graphic scenes of gay sex when a majority of the actors - at least the main ones - are straight males, many with wives and kids. We get the opinions of all the actors working on recreating this lost footage to Franco and Mathews' liking. This provides for a feeling of seeing unseen parts of a film without seeing the specific parts, if that makes even an inkling of sex.

A masterful scene comes about halfway through the film, with Franco talking to the project's main star Val Lauren, assuming the role of Al Pacino's character from Cruising. Lauren is a longtime friend of Franco, willing to help him out even on the most uncertain and unpredictable project thus far, but is having a hard time going through with a lot of the heavily gay scenes. He also has a difficult time understand the project's significance and Franco has a hard time explaining it. When Lauren and Franco (who, I believe, is playing himself here) sit down to talk about the scene, Franco goes into a discussion similar to the one I've had many times about how in many pieces of media, even something as minute and as trite as a commercial for toothpaste or toilet paper, we see a man and a woman. When we do see two men or two women together, presumably in a relationship, it isn't uncommon for there to be some uncomfortable vibes oozing through, to which Franco (and myself) blame on our exposure to one particular lifestyle for much of our life.

Franco then dives into a discussion about how censorship boards shiver at the thought of graphic sexual content but barely flinch when they see explicit violence on screen. 'So violence is natural but sex, something everyone does, thinks about, and even views, isn't?' is a question he asks Lauren. Franco basically settles on the idea that he is making this film to try and steer us away from the thought of one particular lifestyle, as well as breaking down his own personal apprehension and uncomfortableness around this kind of material.

Interior. Leather Bar. also seems to be acceptable to view as a time capsule for how gays are portrayed in cinema. Cruising wasn't blatantly homophobic in my eyes, but did possess somewhat understanding apprehension and caution to the lifestyle it greatly involved itself with. Interior. Leather Bar. presents its club scenes (when we do get a chance to see them, though they make up less than ten percent of the film) and even one major gay sex scene with a beautiful tenderness that would be given to an explicit sex scene between two women. Franco and Mathews' depiction of gay sex is a harmonious and wonderfully raw approach and an experience that could very well emphasize the theme of equality in the regard of how gay sex and straight sex are depicted.

What a beautiful film Interior. Leather Bar. is, centering its sights on conversation and emotion rather than basic shock and awe. I'm still not one-hundred percent show I know what to make of it, but to speak fairly, I don't believe Franco really is either. However, I believe he has made something that he will likely look back on as one of his most audacious and daring films ever, which says a lot for an actor in his thirties who, judging by some risky choices recently, is just getting started.

I am not sure if the road was paved with good intentions or not, but travel on this road led only to a cul-de-sac of inanity. I believe the intent at its origin was bold. Comment on the censorship of "Cruising" at the time in which it was made accompanied by faithful reproduction of censored scenes could have resulted in a powerful film. Well made, this film could have planted seeds (pun or not) for further assessment. Particularly useful would have been elaboration upon male nudity and sexuality and how it is ... and isn't ... portrayed in the West. However, the result here is simply a self-congratulatory hedonistic indulgence. There is no enlightenment here, just as there is no skill. This work is not even titillating, it is only pathetic.

This is the first time I rate something with 1 star, there's nothing remarkable about this, it feels unfinished.

Having seen the original film and having read about the controversy sorrounding it I was excited to see this, even more so knowing James Franco made it.

But there's absolutely nothing, not even some information about that lost footage, how it got lost, what sort of things it contained, studio decisions that led to that, William Friedkin's opinion, no nothing, just people talking and talking about gayness I guess.

James Franco also talks about how he wants to do this to sort of fight ''straight-normativity'' because in every commercial, every love story is always a man and a woman. Well, the reality is the world will always be ''straight-normative'' because the vast majority of the world is heterosexual and will always be. I am tired of hearing this hetenormative BS as if it was the greatest evil in the world. Besides, showing this hyper sexualized and promiscous side of gay culture is not the best way to ''fight'' that.

It is no recreation of the lost footage, it's just backstage stuff that feels like a youtube vlog, wasted opportunity to make an informative and interesting documentary.

As many reviewers have noted, this movie does not aim to capture the 40 suppressed minutes of "Cruising," even though it was billed as such. It's not clear what's behind that mismatch. Did the movie's intent shift while it was being made? Whatever the reason, it's hard to understand who benefited from the misleading marketing of the movie.

We learn what the movie's about as we watch. James Franco explains his desire to overturn cultural conventions against explicit sex, which he finds odd because sex is constantly in the forefront of our consciousness. Porn, however socially unacceptable, is popular.

Val Lauren plays a straight man in two senses: he's a straight guy in a gay movie, plus his questions give James Franco an opening to explain the purpose behind the film. As Val notes toward the end, the explicitness was there all right, but it wasn't nearly as big a deal as our minds had conjured it up to be.

Whether or not this is someone's cup of tea, Franco reveals a refreshing degree of honesty and understanding. After all, most of the characters in the movie, in comments by them or by their family about the goings- on, are dubious to negative about the merits. That's what most of us probably think as well. The film is supposed to challenge that thinking.

I love reconstructions, forensic investigations and film mysteries, so I was really looking forward to this. Alas this film lost me about five minutes in, when Mathews casually declares they haven't got the money or the time (nor, I imagine, the discipline or the ability) to reconstruct the missing footage, so they are going to do a bit what they want. Ah, great -- not. It goes downhill from there, pretty much. In reality it isn't even a re-imagination: it's more like a making-of of itself. A big theme is the squeamishness of the straight actors, which is so very 2005. Perhaps at the time it was still a big deal for a straight guy to play gay, I am not sure. In any case, this is pretentious, meaningless rubbish.

Went into this expecting to be let down after some of the reviews. I found it far more interesting than expected.

It felt to me a lot more about motivations, fears, attitudes and trust than about sex. Yes there's some glimpses of sex play - that is necessary though, as it forces the other reactions.

It makes you think about your own reactions as well, whether you as the viewer are gay or straight. Do we judge the actors who are involved directly in the sex different to those who aren't? Do we view the gay actors in the project as lesser than the straight actors? Do we still respect those involved in the project or are they in some way artistically devalued. And why is a bit of pleasure between 2 (or more) people seen as worse than all the violence seen on screen in film and TV. Can it still have artistic merit as part of telling a story.

The longest scene featuring sex is outside of the bar, a frankly lovely scene between a real couple. Framed against the discomfort of the lead character (played by Val Lauren), and his fears of how it would affect him, his friendships and relationships, and his own standing as an actor.

One thing to remember is the era when Cruising itself was made. Also the fact the film was received very much as an anti-gay statement as it depicted Pacino as entering some kind of dark underworld of dirty sex (and murder). From the reactions from one of the leads friends in a series of phone calls, you can see that attitude to sex, in particular full-on gay sex, has not totally gone away. Also the fears of the affect on an actor's career.

The only thing that stopped me giving this a 9 is it needed an extra maybe 20 minutes after filming and editing, to explore how people felt after taking part, how James Franco felt, was the project a success and did it achieve what he wanted. However I definitely recommend.