Latter Days - Hollywood meets West Hollywood

my rating:

Latter Days is about a meeting between two cultures. Not just the Southern California party boi culture and the Idaho Mormon missionary culture (as in the plot of the movie, in which a relationship develops between two cute young men from opposite sides of the tracts). But also the formulaic button-pushing mainstream sensibility Hollywood culture and the taboo-pushing porn-friendly West Hollywood culture.

It's professionally executed, but obviously on a small budget. Most of the scenes are in a handful of ready-made locations, and a few briefly-used sets look like the quick mock-ups you might find in a "scene" porn video: just good enough to allow you to suspend disbelief and tell yourself "this is taking place at an airport".

It features few "name" actors in supporting roles (Erik Palladino - Dr. Malucci of "ER" - plays a shut-in with AIDS, Joseph Gordon-Levitt - the kid on "Third Rock" - plays one of the Mormons, and Jacqueline Bisset - look her up - is one of the hotties' boss), but the main characters (Christian the slut and Davis the saint) are played by a nearly-unknown and a complete-unknown, respectively. Similarly, it's an "auteur" movie (i.e. both written and directed) by C. Jay Cox, who has had just a few screen credits in Hollywood.

The acting itself is good, but not great. I'm not sure if it's the main actors' inexperience in front of a camera, the director's inexperience behind it, or the script, but it has a kind of "stage" feel to it... overacting a bit so that the people in the cheap seats can "read" it, without worrying too much if it isn't naturalistic. (Part of why hardly anybody does Shakespeare straight when putting it on film.) It'd probably play better on TV (or video, which is how most people will end up seeing it, since it's not exactly getting lots of cinema time).

The movie is simultaneously Hollywood and West-Hollywood with its treatment of sex. A Hollywood movie rated R for sexual content might contain scenes about as graphic as this, with shots of bodies intertwined with no naughty bits poking out, or extreme close-ups that crop anything unmentionable out of the frame. But these scenes would be conventional het-sex, not boy-on-boy action. Here we have similarly-staged scenes of Christian giving a reluctant straight guy a blow-job, or a shot focusing on Christian while a trick is rimming him, or the inevitable sequence of two nekkid boys rolling around in the sheets... and that content is directly out of West Hollywood.

There are glimpses of cocks here and there, but mostly the shots are carefully choreographed so that a leg ends up in just the right place to hide the goods. The movie is unrated, but deserves an R; I bet the MPAA would give it an NC17. I admit it: I enjoyed the sex scenes... they gave me an idea of how straight audiences probably feel during those tedious extended boy-on-girl scenes in so many R-rated movies.

The story itself features more than a few clichés and elements of formula, ranging from the stock supporting character types to the highly unlikely coincidences upon which the plot turns. Which is to say nothing of the Bet That Character A Can Seduce Character B But Falls In Love In The Process.

So, yeah, it's pretty Hollywood. But it's unapologetically gay, it has fun with the sex, and both stars are adorable, making it quite West Hollywood as well. That's not my thumb, but it's pointing up. {wicked grin}