Sunday, March 13, 2011

Worst of the Worst: #87, Testosterone

How's this for a story? A comic book artist meets and falls in love with a man, who leaves him abruptly and with HIV. The artist goes on a search through the gay community of Southern California as the book exposes some of the seedier aspects. Maybe it's not my cup of tea, but it sounds like an interesting enough story.

This movie, based on the book of the same name that had that story, changes that slightly. Okay, more than slightly. The artist does not have HIV -- just a broken heart -- and goes on a search through Buenos Aires to find his lover. The lover's family is hiding him so the artist fights against them and meets a mysterious woman and her brother who may or may not be able to help him.

The odds are a lot lower, of course, in the movie version and the obsession with finding the lover is also not quite as clear. Therein lies the biggest fault with this movie that nobody has ever heard of and made just less than $30,000 in its one weekend in theaters. There never seems to be a good reason for anything the main character does, so he just sort of moves aimlessly around Buenos Aires until the ultimate twist that left me going to Google because I didn't understand how it ended. Confusing plot and bad dialogue punctuated by multiple meaningless-to-the-plot sex scenes? Sounds like porn to me. Thankfully (for me), it was not graphic and mostly just guys running around with their shirts off. The direction is poor and the editing is especially bad, with scenes starting and stopping what seems like a second too early or too late. I've found in a lot of these movies that bad editing can make the difference between something being boring and incompetent.

The acting is actually mostly okay. David Sutcliffe, the "star," was a regular on Gilmore Girls and Private Practice and he's not bad. The main female actress, an Argentinian named Celina Font, is very good. The acting is enough to ensure that the movie is not so much awful as just meandering, incomprehensible, and ultimately forgettable.

(Tourney breakdown to come tomorrow.)

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