Finding North

This film, a chronicle of road trip combining a despondent gay man who has lost his lover to AIDS with a bossy Brooklyneese woman who still lives with her overbearing parents, is calculated to bring chuckles and tears. Unfortunately, the film is riddled with improbable coincidences, hokey sentimentality, and amateurish acting and filming. One hopes to like the film, and I do commend its portrayal of a gay male in reasonably unstereotypical fashion. The blatancy of the script's contrivances, however (they "meet cute," he just happens to come into her bank the day after she saw him almost leap to his death from a bridge - and she's carrying the shoe he left behind, she pursues him all the way to Texas with no encouragement or realization that he's gay, they learn "life lessons" after meeting his dead lover's crusty surrogate mother, etc.), just sabotaged the film for me. It made me squirm in uneasiness, and I never found myself relaxing in the hands of a filmmaker who believed in her material. Thumbs down here.

The script could have been more deftly handled. The story was slow in developing at the beginning and the acting was not as wonderful as one might have liked. The actors are young and need time to develop their craft. In contrast, the script for "Green Plaid Shirt" touches one deeply. In "Finding North" one is not quite as fond of the characters portrayed. Hopefully a second viewing of "Finding North" will give a better impression of what the writer intended to convey.

Beautifully quiet film about loss and love and grief.

The acting is superb in this indy film. The two leads are just so good they make the whole movie shine.

Their friendship grows from a bit of crazy.

The music and soundtrack are special too. A whole different feel, yet a bit old fashioned, but perfect.

All the supporting cast, like Rhonda's girlfriends and parents and all the Texas cast fill their roles with authenticity and panache.

The director and writer worked a kind of flawed perfection to creating Finding North. The story, although about AIDS, that isn't what the film is about. It is sweet and hard at the same time.

these pages are for commenting on movies, not for making broad, erroneous statements about a people. so without further ado...

being a straight and married person; i was moved by the torment that our main character travis furlong was going through. the addition of rhonda portelli into his life was just a reason for us to travel with him on his journey through loss, dispare, and acceptation.

this is a good movie. and if you're straight and renting this, then you were intelligent enough to read the back of the box or the plot page here at imdb and still be interested in the story; therefore, you'll "get" it.

Most heterosexuals won't "get" this movie, because they insist that gay marriages are somehow inferior to theirs. But there is no difference, so they won't understand why the main character in this film is so devastated by loss of his husband (to AIDS) that he wants to end his own life.

This film is a lovely story, nicely done, so it is tragic that it may be 30 years in the future before straight people will finally appreciate the veracity of it.