Has anyone else been suckered into watching this movie? UGH
It was on one of the Starz channels this weekend. Starz rated it 4 out of 4 stars (or maybe it was 5/5…whatever it had a top rating) I gave IMDb a quick look to see what ratings it had there. 8/10! The first 8 user reviews were 10/10!! So I recorded it to watch later.
BORING, disturbing in a pedophile way, looooong, creepy and BORING. Oh, and did I say BORING? Luckily I had it recorded - I FF through a lot of the last third of the movie. I was hoping something would catch my eye, but nope. I should have given up much earlier.
A 17-year-old boy falls in love with his father’s research assistant (adult male). The gay relationship isn’t what bothered me, but it was an adult having sex with a kid - CREEPY! The kid’s parents seem to condone it all. Neither of the actors is gay in real life, so there was no chemistry at all. I later read that Armie Hammer (adult lover) made many stipulations about nudity and the sex scenes. So that made for very robotic, forced acting.
The peach scene will turn your stomach. :eek:
Awards:
Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay plus hundreds of award nominees. Why?
After it was over, I went a little deeper in the IMDb user reviews. There the 1, 2, 3-star reviews showed up…all with the same thoughts I had.
I thought it was over rated for sure. I didn’t like any of the characters and something about Timothee Chalamet makes me want to slap his face.
I wasn’t bothered by the younger male being 17; I don’t consider Army Hammer’s character a paedo in any way. I just didn’t like the look or the pace.
I remember back when Brokeback Mountain (ha! I initially typed “Bareback”! Freudian slip, anyone?) was being raved about and many detractors felt it was just getting good reviews because the director dared to make a “gay” movie, etc. I didn’t feel that way about that movie but I kind of do about this one. It just didn’t feel like it had any . . . heart, or something
Yea, it sure was lacking. The parents didn’t even seem to have any chemistry. It was just kind of blah. Lots of smoking, lots of bike rides, lots of scenes that really didn’t have anything to do with anything.
I watched it and thought it was OK. Overrated, yeah, but not bad. It was a pretty formulaic coming of age story with the added twist of someone going through an issue of coming to terms with his sexuality. I thought it succeeded best in capturing the timeframe it was set in: Not the repressive 50s or 60s, but not the liberated 2000s either. It was the 80s when being gay could still be a career killer, even if many of us knew people who were gay and more folks were coming out. It was also just before the time of the AIDS panic.
I wasn’t at all “creeped out” by the ages of the two main characters. It’s pretty common for the age of consent to be 16, so it’s not like the Armie Hammer guy was going after a 10-year-old.
But I didn’t get a sense of why the two were attracted to each other. I think that’s a common failure of such movies: Two people are passionately in love, but as someone watching the action, I just don’t see it. It seems contrived. If you want to see a convincing love story, watch the movie (fittingly titled) Falling in Love with De Niro and Streep. Now that one I consider highly underrated.
The added bit where the dad turns out to have had his own sexuality issues growing up was a little too pat. And with the mixture of languages it was all so… Continental!
I thought it was super-overrated. I think that people who were fans of the book back in an era where it was a rare example of gay stories, got overexcited about the movie when the actual movie doesn’t support that level of excitement.
In this day and era, I was put off by how damn priviledged Timotheeee’s character is. Also, that their “love story” had nothing backing it up – love at first sight, not much apparent in common other than lust. And the last scene, emoting into the fireplace, was entirely too pretentious.
It’s unbelievable to me that this mediocre film gets so much praise when the same year had God’s Own Country, which was absolutely fantastic. Nuanced, character-driven, great cinematography, and a story-arc where the characters actually grow from what they’ve been through.
