Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay

A couple of weeks ago I watched a softcore gay porn video gay-themed film called The Journey of Jared Price, which Netflix recommended to me. It turned out to be badly written and acted, as well as very low-budget and grainy. I could forgive the production qualities, but not the writing.

I wrote a review of the movie for Amazon.com. Days went by — no review. It was finally posted a few days ago, after about two weeks.

Apparently, one of the reasons it took so long was because someone found my use of the word “gay” too controversial.

Here is my original review; the parts that Amazon deleted are in boldface. Some of the cuts I can understand, but others I don’t get.

Lots of heart, but that’s it

(2 stars out of 5)

I’m sure all the folks involved in making this movie are good people. The DVD contains an interview with the cast and the writer/director, and they all seem pretty likeable. I bet they’d be nice to hang out with. But the movie just wasn’t very good.

First, the good points. The story was ultimately sweet — it had heart. I found myself liking Jared and Robert and I rooted for them to get together. (Corey Spears is so damn cute that I was often distracted from his mostly not-so-great acting; Josh Jacobson was better. On a side note, I looked him up and learned that he was in the Buffy episode “The Gift” — he was the teenager who told Buffy “You’re just a girl!” after she rescued him from a vampire at the beginning of the ep.)

The film quality: I could forgive the fact that it was filmed on digital video — after all, they were given only a $30,000 budget.

And now the bad points.

The characters: they’re mainly unoriginal archetypes straight out of 60 years of gay pulp fiction. The cute, innocent small-town boy in the big city; the rich, 30something guy who turns out to be a lecher (because all gay men over 30 are jerks, right?); the elderly woman who dispenses wisdom and turns out to be open-minded towards gay people [something like that — I can’t remember the exact phrase I used there]. If you’re gay, you’ve seen them a million times before.

The plot: I recall writer/director Dustin Lance Black saying that 10 Percent Productions wanted a gay morality play, and that’s what he gave them. It’s all black and white and obvious. Men with money won’t bring you happiness; follow your heart instead! Duh. Okay, okay — there are lots of people out there who still don’t know that, so maybe they’d benefit from watching this. But you can advocate a point of view while still writing an entertaining movie with three-dimensional characters.

The plot has little narrative flow. Things are left unestablished. For instance, what does Jared see in Robert in the first place? And there’s little dramatic buildup and payoff. Things happen abruptly. There’s a scene where Robert calls Jared but Matthew doesn’t give him the message, and then it’s dropped. In a better movie, this scene would lead to misunderstandings and a little bit of tension. But nothing happens here.

The movie’s dialogue is pretty bad. It consists mostly of cliches, as well as things like “cool” and “oh, okay” and “my bad.” Sure, those expressions are true to life. And many of the scenes between Jared and Robert seemed very real, as if I were watching them on a surveillance camera. But there’s “interesting” real and there’s “boring” real. Watching paint dry is also real, but it’s not entertaining.

Although much of the acting is decent, two of the actors were pretty mediocre.

Basically, the movie had the production quality of a porn video with little of the payoff.

Here are Amazon.com’s General Review Writing Guidelines. I’m trying to figure out where the word “gay” fits in. Maybe someone thought it counted as “profanity, obscenities, or spiteful remarks.”

I love you, Amazon.com, but this is for you:

Gay gay gay gay gay.

So there.

(And Google, eat your heart out.)

[update: see this entry]