The Other Side of Brokeback
Review of 'Adam & Steve'
Volume 5, Number 14
| April 6 - 12,
2006FILMAdam
& SteveWritten and
directed by Craig
ChesterTLA Releasing and
Funny Boy FilmsOpens Mar.
31TLA
RELEASINGSteve is
horrified that he is the person who got his new lover Adam hooked on coke 15
years before—he’s now in a 12-step group—but that’s not
his biggest
worry.The Other
Side of
Brokeback“Adam
& Steve” reclaims film gays as the butt of the
jokeBY SETH J.
BOOKEYYou know how
sometimes you see a fun, gay movie where the young couple is in love and they
have kooky friends, and it ends with hope and promise? The script bubbles with
wit and an actor or two you like from a successful TV show makes a delightful
surprise appearance in a small, independent
film?“Adam
& Steve” is not that movie. If you would like to see that movie, you
can. It’s called “Trick” and you can rent
it.“Adam &
Steve” is the brainchild of Craig Chester, who wrote and directed this
over-the-top sitcom of a film, and stars in it as well, as Adam. Steve is played
by Malcolm Gets, who played a Nile Crane-like, should-be-gay character on
“Caroline in the
City.”The film
has in interesting premise—two lovers, a year into their relationship,
realize that 15 years earlier, they had a disastrous one-night stand that
changed their lives. On that earlier night, Adam, done up in full goth regalia,
takes Steve back to his place. Steve, wearing not much more than shiny go-go
pants and a Dee Snyder wig, winds up having diarrhea while standing
spread-eagled in a doorway, followed by Adam projectile
vomiting.Fast-forwarding
15 years later, Adam is panic-stricken when he accidentally stabs his hound and
runs all the way to a hospital ER in his underwear, where he meets psychologist
Steve. They wind up having a lovely courtship; parallel to this, Steve’s
permanent houseguest Michael (Chris Kattan) hooks up with Rhonda (Parker Posey),
Adam’s best gal pal. Rhonda was once obese but lost all the weight, but as
a stand-up comic still tells the fat-girl jokes to a dead audience. Sadly, this
is pretty much the only amusing part of the
movie.The problem
with “Adam & Steve” is that everything is given over-the-top
treatment. When the couple faces homophobia, it’s overdone. An outraged
neighbor spies them through a window and yells, Oh my God, they’re
cornholers!” Repeatedly. Does that ever happen in the West Village? Even
an attempt to recognize 9/11 and the loss of the World Trade Center is miserably
handled when a kook with a gun disrupts a nature walk in Central Park conducted
by Adam.When we meet
Adam’s parents and sister, of course, everything about them is
hyperbolic—they think they are living under a curse. We are treated to
Adam’s mother (Julie Haggerty) spilling coffee on people while she totters
around the dining room with her head upheld in a traction halo. Oddly, the only
people who seem to act true to life here are Steve’s fundamentalist
Christian parents.The
film’s biggest failure, though, besides using Marie’s Crisis for a
finale that justifies the film’s bad-joke title, is the revelation that
the two lovers once met before. While Steve is horrified that he is the person
who got Adam hooked on coke—he’s now in a 12-step group—after
about five minutes, he seems much more pre-occupied by the thought that he lost
control of his bowels in front of Adam more than a decade
ago.There is one
silver lining in this poop-laden mess, though, and that’s the presentation
of a loving couple who are constantly affectionate, which we don’t see
enough of in general on the big screen. It’s nice to see a gay love story
in which neither of the lovers die. Unfortunately, “Adam &
Steve” offers very little else. The real question here is, with all the
wonderful gay movies that never make it out of the film-festival circuit, how
did this three-ring-circus of a movie get
distributed?Gay City News
is published
byCommunity Media
LLC.Gay
City News | 487 Greenwich St., Suite 6A | New
York, NY 10013Written permission of the
publisher must be obtained before any of the contents of this newspaper, in
whole or in part, can be reproduced or
redistributed.
Posted: Thu - April 6, 2006 at 07:03 PM
|
Quick Links
Calendar
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat
|
Categories
Archives
XML/RSS Feed
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jun 20, 2009 07:04 PM
|