Poster Boy

So, the hand cam got on my nerves rather quickly.

Spent the first part of the movie trying to figure out what kind of film I was watching. The film is obviously set up to be a "worlds collide" situation. Perhaps I was expecting that those 2 worlds, or their separateness, would have been better defined from the beginning.

The whole project comes off like an amateur attempt judging by the lack of polish. The lighting is crap. The camera work is distracting. The casting is good. The dialogue is effective but the plot jumped around too much for me to follow. Makes me feel like I have A.D.D.

The technical flaws kept me out of the film and I was left with an overpowering sense of watching a film rather than experiencing it.

This is on of the darkest gay-themed films released in America I have seen. Most reviews have not been favorable, so I'll do my best to tell you what I liked, and what I didn't like. This is not a bad film, a 1 or 2 star rating seems quite unfair, but reviews are subjective. It doesn't hold a candle to other gay films I have enjoyed, but the subject is very different.

Why I Gave It 7 Stars: It was a solid 6, leaning towards 8 in the beginning, and towards the end, so I compromised. A solid B- film you might say.

The Story: It centers around Henry (played by Matt Newton). Henry is the son of a ultra conservative Senator from the south. Think of "The Birdcage", minus anything to laugh at. Henry is also gay. The film, told in "flashback style" as Henry tells his story to a reporter unfolds over the course of 6 months. Basically, Henry comes out, and family chaos follows. But not for long, as we're almost to the end of the film.

What I Liked: Personally, I liked the edge. This was almost more of a docu-drama, albeit a fictitious one, which could easily be based on truth. The actors were good to very good, the overall production was good as well.

What I Did Not Like: I was nearly half-way through the film, starting to get concerned where it was going, before all the character/story sub-plots were connected. The second half of the movie was strongest.

The Rest of the Characters: Besides our lead, Henry, we also focus on his stereo-typical bigot Republican Father/Senator, and his "senator's wife" Mother. And to the mix, a straight girl Izzi, and her gay male friend Anthony, whose relationship was unusual at best. Anthony and Henry meet under some unusual circumstances at a college party.

The Ending: I never give away specifics, but let's just say it's not a "Brady Bunch" wrap-up. If the ending was all tidied up for viewers, I would have knocked this down to a 5 or 6. Everything about the film was somewhat gritty, dark, "off". It's not the type of film that usually comes out of the USA. We usually have to watch films like this with sub-titles, so kudos to Here! films and those involved for producing the film.

Final Thoughts: This is not a laugh-out-loud sex romp. No, not at all. It's a good story trying to make a point about politics, sexuality and family values. It does all of those well.

Unrelated Chatter: Jack Noseworthy, the actor who played Anthony also starred in "The Brady Bunch Movie" and in his early years, "Cats" in the theater. Matt Newton (Henry) has appeared on the "Gilmore Girls" and "Judging Amy".

The drama POSTER BOY begins with such a solid premise, the screenplay could have practically written itself. Perhaps it would have been better if it had. Though certainly well acted by some of the cast and directed by first-timer Zak Tucker with a degree of skill, the film is bogged down by its script; written by Lecia Rosenthal and Ryan Shiraki, it is laden with preachy platitudes and simple-minded stereotypes. You can sense that the writers weren't satisfied with just hoping to pen a good story, they wanted to make it an "important" film, which is all well and good, unless you sacrifice the drama for the dogma.

Matt Newton plays Henry Kray, the college boy son of Jack Kray, an outspoken conservative senator facing a re-election vote. The son is gay and very much in the closet -- though apparently quite sexually active; while the father is a "family values" candidate with a history of particularly harsh and homophobic stands on various issues. The clueless Jack bullies Henry into being active in his re-election campaign as a way of reaching out to younger voters.

This is a great start; especially if you add in a plot twist wherein Henry unknowingly has a one-night stand with Anthony, a gay rights activist who has a particularly strong dislike for Senator Jack, his politics and his political party. Henry finds himself caught between a father who wishes to exploit his son's youthful and apparently straight-arrow image and a lover who hopes to out him in a cheap attempt at embarrassing the father. This is a nice set up for a potentially complex drama, maybe even an intriguing thriller.

Making an admirable effort to establish an Altmanesque feel to the film, director Tucker finds his attempts at realism at odds with the script that seems contrived and phony as the screenwriters fumble the material in infuriatingly inept ways. For one thing, as played with a perpetual snarl by Michael Lerner, Sen. Jack Kray isn't just a conservative, the story goes out of its way to make sure we know that he is (and by extension, all conservatives are) controlling and hypocritical and poor at parenting to boot. He isn't just a conservative, he is "the Nazi of North Carolina" whose campaign seemingly is financed by the tobacco industry. Gay issues aside, it is not surprising that Henry has great animosity toward his dad. And that is the problem: The film quells part of its strongest source of drama from scene one by obliterating even the slightest suggestion of there being a genuine loving bond between father and son. Indeed, the entire film is told via flashbacks as Henry spills his guts to a reporter in what seems to be a spiteful attempt to get back at his father.

The film would be much more powerful had Henry been torn between two loves; one, his familial love of his father, and the other, his sexual attraction to his lover. The film would be so much more compelling (and believable) if Senator Kray were to be basically a good man with extreme beliefs or if Henry were to be a true believer in his father's politics, who had to face how it conflicts with the reality of his own sexuality. Or what if Sen. Kray were a liberal whose politically correct rhetoric masks a homophobic mind? And though Anthony and his fellow activists aren't shown in a particularly flattering light either, the story overly stacks the deck to the left by making Senator Kray an oh-so obvious right-wing villain in a tired attempt to make clear the film's already obvious left-leaning bias. The result is weak propaganda and even weaker drama.

Worse, all the cheap political shots detract from the film's strongest relationship, between Newton's Henry and Jack Noseworthy's Anthony. Both actors give fine performances, helped considerably by the fact they are given the most realistic characters to play. Newton captures the anxiety of Henry, a guy who just wants to live his life out of the public eye, but finds the comfort that comes from living in the closet comes at a high price. Noseworthy makes credible a character who can't quite separate his sexuality from his politics, which, ironically, is the problem with the film itself. The film's most potent message would have been in exploring this love story rather than in focusing on all the yammering political noise that surrounds these two men.

This film seems to have come in for much criticism from the reviews on here, so I'm hoping to redress the balance here. As a film, it's OK, but compared to other gay indie films from America it sits near the top of the pile. The acting is generally good, the directing is competent. The script seems a little outdated for 2004, but I remember reading somewhere that there had been delays to the making of the film and so i wouldn't be surprised if the script was actually written in the late 1990s.

What makes this particularly interesting is that it is a far cry from other gay films out there. It isn't a love story, it doesn't try to woo in the punters by having stunningly handsome men who go full frontal or through strong sex scenes. That isn't what this is about. It has a message, though, and some of the scenes are a little clunky (especially the linking sections with the journalist), but that's a small price to pay for a good solid story that is well told.

The two young actors play the leads without making them into stereotypes and there isn't a screaming queen in sight. Thankfully. What makes the two protagonists most appealing is that neither of them are perfect human beings. The senator's son is cocky and arrogant at times, and the boy he meets has his own faults. The supporting cast is also very good, with some nicely drawn characters.

For a low budget gay effort, this is really good stuff.

"Poster Boy" tries so hard to make a statement—so very, very hard—that I really wished it was better than it is. Henry Kray (Matt Newton), the closeted gay son of a conservative North Carolina senator (Michael Lerner), grudgingly agrees to introduce the senator at a rally held at the fictional New York college he attends, if only so his father will stop smacking him at the breakfast table. But then Henry attempts to escape the duty, high-tailing it to the family's house in Palm Springs. Alas, an eager-to-please young Republican (Ian Reed Kesler) is sent to retrieve Newton and drag his ass back to NYC, though not before Newton can drag him to a gay bar then rent Kesler a shapely call girl for the night. Meanwhile, Anthony (Jack Noseworthy), a former gay activist and recently fired fashion house go-fer, is looking for love but only finding one-night stands while his roommate, Izzy (Valerie Geffner, doing her best Ally Sheedy-in-"The Breakfast Club" impersonation), pops Prozac and snarls at anyone within spitting distance as she tries to cope with being HIV-positive. As is to be expected, all these characters' paths will cross and collide (at times literally) on the way to a Big Moment.

Heavy-handed though it is, the script actually has a few good points to make. If only screenwriters Ryan Shiraki and Lecia Rosenthal put as much thought into telling a story as making a statement, especially when they're preaching to the choir. As it is, the narrative is more like a series of contrivances meant to move the characters toward that Big Moment rather than plausible events arising from believable circumstances. Luckily, the movie is buoyed somewhat by fairly solid acting. Karen Allen is a welcome presence as the senator's chain-smoking, heavy drinking wife, even if her Southern accent is a tad bit overdone (conversely, Lerner's Southern accent is almost nonexistent). Director and co-editor Zak Tucker packs the movie with lots of style—from quick cuts to split screens to moody gels and filters—making his movie nearly unwatchable in the process.

"Poster Boy" also has continuity errors galore. Cigarettes are a particular problem, be it a reporter lighting a half-smoked cigarette in the opening scene, only to be shown seconds later with a fresh one dangling from his lips unlit; or Allen smoking a newly lit cigarette, then shown lighting it a quick cut later. There's also the extra so nice we have to see her passing Newton and Noseworthy twice in the same scene (made worse by the fact that Newton calls attention to her the first time around), and Lerner is shown getting into a limo with his hair a mousy brown when in the rest of the movie it's white. Other distractions: How do Noseworthy and Geffner—one unemployed, the other a bookstore clerk making $7 an hour—afford a chauffeured Town Car? And why the gratuitous female nudity in a movie that features gay men with hyperactive sex lives? Sadly, the two male leads are only fleetingly shown in their skivvies.

For all its problems, "Poster Boy" isn't awful, but it made its statements so loudly and so often that I found myself tuning them out, wondering instead whether anyone in wardrobe was going to rustle up something else for Ms. Allen to wear besides that lavender suit.