Movie Marathon 4

i have a fascination for foreign pink movies. the treatment, the settings, the social acceptance, may all be different, but the love is universal. thanks to the wonders of the internet (aka, torrents) i have a new one almost every other day. i will be putting up these movies. good or bad overall, for me they serve as a window. there's a whole wide world out there. we just need to open our eyes to the possibilities.

Author: Spleen


Another writer put his(?) finger on what had been bugging me: Steven and John really have nothing in common, apart from the fact that they're both gay; and it's not as if two people of opposite sexes both being heterosexual is enough to create a spark. (Ah, if only.) -Sure, they're both typically randy seventeen-year-olds; but we're told that THIS relationship, unlike Steven's furtive sexual encounters and John's mechanical fling with an underwear model, is special. Really? I would have liked to have SEEN the relationship - the actual, first-order relationship, not just John and Steven's second-order talk about it.

This brings me to the main reason I found "Get Real" hard to enjoy: it seems to consist entirely of painfully protracted, hesitant, fumbling, conversations in which neither side has any idea what he or she wants to talk about. When Steven first meets John - when he first meets ANYONE - it seems that all he can do is um and ah and look at the ground. -Realistic? Perhaps, but it just goes to show how little realism is worth, if it means we have to sit through one slow, awkward scene after another for 110 minutes. For this reason I wasn't so bothered by the speech at the end. That was awkward, too; but at least it showed that Steven had managed to string words together into coherent and reasonably fluent paragraphs. About time.

I'm reminded of the (few) films I've seen about the social ostracising of gays, like "The Sum of Us" and "Boys Don't Cry"; they, too, have colourless, under-defined central characters and relationships. If the central romance is heterosexual, writers feel the need to create some kind of special something to make it interesting to outsiders; if it's homosexual, that fact alone is felt to be enough. -This is less true of the romance in "Boys Don't Cry". But then, that relationship isn't really gay.

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for me, the movie has its moments. i probably would have appreciated it more if i'd seen it 10 years ago, back when i was still a teenager struggling for an identity. but seeing it now, it's more fluff than substance. nonetheless, there are still golden moments. 


i would have given it an 8 out of 10 ten years ago but factoring in the onset of age (and hopefully, wisdom) i'm giving it a 6 out of 10.  hehe