| johns | 6 Rated R, language, sexual subject |
 This
first movie from a team of film school friends acting as
director-writer and co-producers chooses a volatile topic—street hustling—that
has been treated in three all-time great movies—Midnight Cowboy, American
Gigolo, and My Own Private Idaho—and, sad to say, fails to deliver
the impact needed to qualify as a new contribution to the
genre. Like Midnight Cowboy and My Own
Private Idaho it is using its topic as a device to
develop its real theme, which is friendship and
self-sacrifice in the midst of personal turmoil and
social degradation. But all that's new here is that the setting is Christmas in the subtropic climate of Hollywood, and these boys, who are portrayed well by David Arquette and Lucas Haas, unlike any of the characters in the three preceding movies are open about their livelihood being gained as sex objects for homosexual men. American Gigolo was about a hustler who had struck the big time and crossed over from male to rich female customers; My Own Private Idaho was about a character whose sexual preference was ambivalent and for whom hustling was just an easy way to make some money, and Midnight Cowboy was about a southern boy in the big city with dreams of being a women's gigolo but whose hopes were dashed on the hard pavement of reality. And, it being the '90's, the dialogue is more explicit about what homosexual acts consist of than the earlier movies, though there are no references here that weren't in Saturday Night Fever 20 years ago. The performances by Arquette and Haas (the innocent boy of Witness grown up and still looking but not acting innocent) will make this worth seeing for their fans, so I give it a slight endorsement. And for a first-time film it deserves a good grade, but another first-film recently reviewed here, Love and Other Catastrophes, would skew the grading curve for this one toward a "C," I'm afraid. |
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Photo © by the film's distributor |
© 1997, Jon Kennedy-Silicon Valley Today |