Interior. Leather Bar.

"Interior. Leather Bar" shouldn't have been made. It didn't need to be made. Only the reigning poseur king of "art" filmaking James Franco and his idiot director friend Travis Mathews would have thrown this sixty minute hairball up on any screen.

Yes, William Friedkin's "Cruising" was controversial. The bad press it received before and after being made and released effectively killed it. It was pretty much forgotten by everyone, even those gay men who arrived in the life long after it was made and rejected. The stories that sprang up around "Cruising" are more interesting than the film itself, i.e. the crowds of LGBT activists picketing and disrupting the actual filming, the disclaimer Friedkin was forced to add to the credit sequences which stated the film was not a blanket condemnation of the entire gay community, and the "lost" sex scenes filmed at actual NYC leather bars. As it is now known, there never were explicit sex scenes filmed. It's an urban legend.

"Interior.Leather Bar" is a sham from beginning to end. Nothing looks correct, the music is wrong, and let's not get started on the eyeshadow being applied to the men in their borrowed leather gear. Franco and Mathews simply wanted to make an "important statement" buried under gay porn so they hitched their exploitation horse to an antique cart full of actors (both gay and straight) who were never actually there during the leather heydays of the late 70s. Everyone is acting and discussing their motivations in the spaces between filming. You know there's going to be trouble when the camera searches actor Val Lauren (who's pretending to be Al Pacino) driving to the shoot and listening to his phone messages. The first call from his wife or girlfriend establishes his heterosexuality and the second is from an unknown man who dismisses Lauren's decision to appear in "Franco's f*ggot movie". Lauren agonizes for an hour about the sex that may or not happen and tries to find his inner Pacino. He can't find it and comes across as both whiny and pretentious, as if his involvement in this project is beneath him.

Leather bars are a dying institution. Their function was derailed by the AIDS crisis and more recently by the tsunami of "normalization" for LGBT people over the past decades. The raw acting out of men who played games without rules has been traded for SUVs, parenting, and PTA meetings once a month. Franco's soggy pretend leathermen can all be found waiting tables at any West Hollywood restaurants. The exposure and decline of the leather and backroom world began with "Cruising" and deserves a better, more fitting eulogy than this stupid mess. Two stars for the exposed dicks and at least one actor who actually looks like he stepped out of the 70s onto the floor of the Mineshaft NYC.

This ridiculous twaddle was made only to pad the resumes of Franco and Mathews, who think they're really saying something about sexual freedom. It's disingenuous in the extreme and not worth losing an hour of your life to view it.

In 1980, Exorcist director William Friedkin made yet another movie that found another great way to stir up controversy and etch itself onto the front page of newspapers. His directorial effort Cruising was a film about Al Pacino's cop character going undercover in seedy gay bars in order to catch a series of murders in the specific area. The film divided critics, enraged the homosexual community, who even held boycotts and sent Friedkin death-threats over the film, and the film forever lived with a looming cloud of infamy over its head, with more comments being made about its impact over its quality.

As someone who has recently sat through Cruising, I fully understand why. It's an only adequate little thriller that is levied by the fact that it is such a curious piece of film history. There's not too much special about it other than a decently ambiguous Pacino performance and some well-photographed atmosphere, specifically inside the gay bars. Adding to the curiosity of the film, legend has it that forty minutes of the film had to be cut for it to achieve an R-rating rather than the ominous X-rating films were being stamped with during this time. The forty minutes are rumored to contain graphic gay sex as well as intimate scenes in the gay bars between its patrons.

This brings me to Interior. Leather Bar., a sixty-minute film by the likes of James Franco and Travis Mathews. The film is a mockumentary, following the Franco and Mathews as they attempt to assemble, cast, and reimagine the lost forty minutes of Cruising themselves. From the way Franco acts and interviews, one can easily see he's intrigued on how actors create an image once they begin and how they go about enforcing or affirming the image throughout careers.

Evidently, Franco has used his fascination for public personas and celebrity images as the basis for Interior. Leather Bar., a thoroughly intriguing and deeply-contemplative film that possesses lengthy dialogs on the public's perception of sex as well as mumblecore-esque aesthetics and structure. I walked in assuming I was going to see the full forty minutes from Cruising recreated to fit Franco and Mathews' idea of how the scenes were actually conducted. Instead, both men recreate the experience of working on the set of a film with graphic scenes of gay sex when a majority of the actors - at least the main ones - are straight males, many with wives and kids. We get the opinions of all the actors working on recreating this lost footage to Franco and Mathews' liking. This provides for a feeling of seeing unseen parts of a film without seeing the specific parts, if that makes even an inkling of sex.

A masterful scene comes about halfway through the film, with Franco talking to the project's main star Val Lauren, assuming the role of Al Pacino's character from Cruising. Lauren is a longtime friend of Franco, willing to help him out even on the most uncertain and unpredictable project thus far, but is having a hard time going through with a lot of the heavily gay scenes. He also has a difficult time understand the project's significance and Franco has a hard time explaining it. When Lauren and Franco (who, I believe, is playing himself here) sit down to talk about the scene, Franco goes into a discussion similar to the one I've had many times about how in many pieces of media, even something as minute and as trite as a commercial for toothpaste or toilet paper, we see a man and a woman. When we do see two men or two women together, presumably in a relationship, it isn't uncommon for there to be some uncomfortable vibes oozing through, to which Franco (and myself) blame on our exposure to one particular lifestyle for much of our life.

Franco then dives into a discussion about how censorship boards shiver at the thought of graphic sexual content but barely flinch when they see explicit violence on screen. 'So violence is natural but sex, something everyone does, thinks about, and even views, isn't?' is a question he asks Lauren. Franco basically settles on the idea that he is making this film to try and steer us away from the thought of one particular lifestyle, as well as breaking down his own personal apprehension and uncomfortableness around this kind of material.

Interior. Leather Bar. also seems to be acceptable to view as a time capsule for how gays are portrayed in cinema. Cruising wasn't blatantly homophobic in my eyes, but did possess somewhat understanding apprehension and caution to the lifestyle it greatly involved itself with. Interior. Leather Bar. presents its club scenes (when we do get a chance to see them, though they make up less than ten percent of the film) and even one major gay sex scene with a beautiful tenderness that would be given to an explicit sex scene between two women. Franco and Mathews' depiction of gay sex is a harmonious and wonderfully raw approach and an experience that could very well emphasize the theme of equality in the regard of how gay sex and straight sex are depicted.

What a beautiful film Interior. Leather Bar. is, centering its sights on conversation and emotion rather than basic shock and awe. I'm still not one-hundred percent show I know what to make of it, but to speak fairly, I don't believe Franco really is either. However, I believe he has made something that he will likely look back on as one of his most audacious and daring films ever, which says a lot for an actor in his thirties who, judging by some risky choices recently, is just getting started.

I love reconstructions, forensic investigations and film mysteries, so I was really looking forward to this. Alas this film lost me about five minutes in, when Mathews casually declares they haven't got the money or the time (nor, I imagine, the discipline or the ability) to reconstruct the missing footage, so they are going to do a bit what they want. Ah, great -- not. It goes downhill from there, pretty much. In reality it isn't even a re-imagination: it's more like a making-of of itself. A big theme is the squeamishness of the straight actors, which is so very 2005. Perhaps at the time it was still a big deal for a straight guy to play gay, I am not sure. In any case, this is pretentious, meaningless rubbish.

Maybe James Franco was a little ahead of his time with this? He does make a point towards the end that illustrates the pointed refusal of mainstream American cinema to show scenes of active gay sex. People can merrily blow each other to bits, heterosexuals and lesbians can fill their boots - but man on man penetrative sex without recourse to endless shadows or subtly placed duvets is as rare as hen's teeth. That may have been his laudably ultimate point here, but the remainder of this rather dull documentary pits together a bunch of largely straight actors, clad (or not) in skimpy leathers and plunged into darkness for a sex-room style series of supposedly random sexual encounters - one or two of them briefly graphic and another quite painful! Anyone expecting the missing forty minutes from "Cruising" (1980) to be presented is in for quite a disappointment. The vast majority of this consists of talking heads between the Z-list "talent" recruited who are struggling to intellectualise the fact that they are just required to get naked and fumble with another bloke. It's called acting, boys - it's not Shakespeare! Good on James for asking some questions, but most of this is just like porn in general - it's much more fun to take part the to watch.

How this 60 minute piece of drivel ever got made, or was released, is beyond comprehension. It is nothing more than an extremely tedious version of what used to be known as "vanity press". Franco should be ashamed of himself. Why he, his collaborator, and the "actors" in this piece of garbage thought they had anything constructive to say about "rumored" cuts made to a 50-year old film, borders on the incredulous. Anyone can "imagine" what those phantom 40 minutes of sex in a leather bar might actually have shown. I imagine it would be a whole lot less boring and painful to watch than this waste of film (or tape). Anyone who had anything to do with this dreadful enterprise should be forever banned from film-making!