| good, not great |
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| written by alexjb |
January 7, 2006 - 7:48 AM PST |
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0 out of 1 members found this review helpful
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so i guess that this was the first gay men AIDS movie. as such, it's definitely significant, and bears watching if only to understand how scary a time that must have been to experience.
the characters are pretty good examples of gay men, some closeted, some carefree, a couple of them a bit older than the rest. there's even a token 'fag hag' for balance. and the filmmakers attempt to show each reacting a bit differently to the 'gay plague' that's ravaging their community. they succeed, if not brilliantly.
unfortunately, seven is kind of a lot of folks to keep track of, so there's a certain lack of character development, especially for the first young man to die, which is a shame because he's one of the more likable ones. also, one of the main characters is played by campbell scott (from the spanish prisoner, roger dodger) and he really has trouble emoting, amking hinm hard to sympathize with. finally, the film sometimes jumps a year or two at a time with poor transitions (usually marked by campbell scott's hair going through every bad 80s hairstyle). it's trying to straddle the line between looking at the impact on the small and large-scales simultaneously.
overall, i found silverlake life to be more compelling in terms of personalizing the disease (small-scale view), but Longtime Companion is a better reflection of how it hit the NY gay community at the time. |
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