10 Attitudes

10 Attitudes was so much fun! I would give this DVD to all my friends. This film made me feel I was not alone. It was about real gay men who are not perfect. Jason Stuart is the voice of the everyday gay guy. the hell with all the west Hollywood muscle Marys. Also all these Hollywood actors who think it is so brave to play gay. with there cowboy hats and perfect everything. Jason is the new breed of gay who is invisible to the mainstream studio films. he is funny, sweet and yeas sexy. Also a really fine actor who deserves the same PR as the straight actors who play the roles gay actors should of got. I just loved this film because it was so original. I cant wait to see what Jason does next!

Predisposed or not to the basic premise here of love past the high-school hormonal stage and among those who AREN'T in the running for "America's Next Top Model" (being exploited continually by straight film and TV makers - "Ugly Betty" or "Seinfeld" anyone?), the shaky camera, cinema verité style ill serves this under written gay date movie.

"Regular gay guy" (to quote the DVD box) Josh has a hissey fit when he catches his lover of 10 years receiving oral sex from someone he has... well, we never find out just how much of a low life the lover may or may not be. Like every unrealistic bride in 50's straight movies, Josh declares the marriage over and tries, as an average looking 30-something, to re-enter a dating pool stocked with 20-something eye-candy. Blinded by the partially self created rejection of his mate (the marriage's failure is entirely played out in one 30 second curbside scene and has as little credibility than Josh's subsequent "dates"), Josh meets nothing but sleazoids or those who have not yet "gotten their acts together."

After one or two bad nights out - indistinguishable from his later title "dates" - he decides to go really self destructive and move back home to Cleveland (Ohio may not be New York or SanFransisco - and why is Josh suffering in L.A. and not one of THOSE places in the first place!? - but it actually has a very active gay life - not that you would ever know it from this film).

Josh's one good friend (it is never explained why THEY aren't potential date material) bets Josh he can set him up with a perfect man in the title ten dates who - also source of the title - turn out to be ten attitudes, not ten dates - and ten that include at least three or four who NO good friend would ever set anyone up with! The potentially GOOD dates we never see through to the end. It's as maddening as HBO's Sex And The City where (with only two or three exceptions) every time one of the girls found a really NICE guy, the viewer knew they were toast so the SERIES could go on.

Given the apparent aspirations of the film makers (please festival audiences enough to support eventual DVD sales), it would have been a real surprise if there *hadn't* been a happy ending (or at least a hopeful one), but while writer/director Michael Gallant crafts a nice one, he proves incapable of crafting a believable one.

He HAS proved capable of recruiting a solid list of capable actors to represent his 10 attitudes and even a few nice people. Jim J. Bullock and to a lesser extent David Faustino turn in thoroughly professional performances and the actor playing the man a bully from Josh's past grew up to be is actually something of a find in the film's one really charming scene!

The adult women are less happy, and being a gay film is no excuse for that. It's hard to tell if Judy Tenuda's "performance" is more the fault of the actress or the script. Whoever plays Josh's mother is just as bad. The woman playing the wife of one of Josh's dates is at least interesting and layered in her obliviousness - almost and effective satire on L.A. working wives, though nothing in the rest of the film shows that kind of subtlety.

All too many gay stereotypes fall back on Tennessee Williams: "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Josh never says it - and he almost never gets it - but perhaps his film will. This was one of those films to which anyone who actually buys a ticket or decides to rent will bring every ounce of good will possible. It will need it.

This gay "romantic tragic-comedy" was not made, I think, to be watched by oneself after renting it from a mainstream video store. As the writer/director in the screening I saw here last week suggested, it is best (and perhaps only) appreciated at a gay film festival watching it with an audience predisposed to its sense of humor and philosophy of life. The video is low grade, the situations are actually a satire of West Hollywood, being so over the top stereotypical of the area and its reputation.

Though several very well known actors from "Baywatch" other major Hollywood comedy series, and network soap operas are featured, it is a very low budget production, and it shows. So, for me, living abroad, in a continental-sized country the size of the US, with a similarly monolingual culture, the true test of its success is whether the audiences here "got" the film, and whether it made them laugh or moan in the right places.

And the film did that. To a packed house. And Portuguese here is like English elsewhere - it's the only language you'll ever hear even in this, the largest and most cosmopolitan city in Latin America. Many American cultural icons (known "worldwide") like Barbra Streisand, heavily used in the movie in jokes and comments, are unknown here to anyone under 50, and I mean among gays! So, a lot of the humor and understanding of the situations are totally lost to the audience. Yet the "10 attitudes" or Ten Chances for Love (as it is known here) are UNIVERSAL, and the film makes its point very well indeed. Even here and with laughs galore! But again, it is for this specific audience or the gay friendly audience (I think it goes down well with liberal young women). And DEFINITELY do not rent it (didn't even think it would be launched as a DVD) for your Flat Wide Screen High Definition Screen. The quality of the image would be enough to make me turn it off.

Yes, we have had Flat Screen, European type (1.85 to 1 aspect ratio) TV with the same advanced audio as anyone in LA or London has for years. And nobody I know here would watch such a film on one of those. This is a definitely something to be seen at a festival screening with the right crowd, and screened there, it is a very enjoyable, funny and insightful personal experience, in addition to the movie viewing. My only negative words would be that it is about 10 minutes too long. Maybe 8 or 9 attitudes would have been enough. Still, if you're in this target audience, you'll like it.

The best thing about this movie is that its title is numerical, so it shows up among the first DVDs on Blockbuster's "New Releases" wall. That's how I came across it: the synopsis picked my interest, and I wanted to see more of West Hollywood where the story takes place.

I had my first doubt as soon as I pulled the disc out: the artwork is an amateurish drawing, likely created by a friend of the production, and features 6 guys in a giant Martini glass... but wait, isn't that movie supposed to be about "10 attitudes"?

Regardless, the movie was unwatchable in an Ed Wood kind of way--the only reason I stuck through the whole thing is because of the occasional laughs my friend and I got at some of the most "dramatic" scenes. In spite of a couple of witty lines that enlighten about 20 seconds of this 80-minute wreck, it remains a quite atrocious viewing experience sunk by porn-level acting, music and editing; a whiny and uninteresting central character; atrocious camera work; not to mention plot holes the size of Julia Roberts' nostrils.

The team behind this movie should be commanded for making it all happen on such an obviously tight budget... but everybody else, save your $5, you'll never get this hour-and-a-half of your life back!

This is a good story about a man whose friend bets him that he will find love with one of the next ten men he meets. I don't think it's such a bad thing that throughout the film I completely forgot that a bet was made, and just enjoyed watching Jason Stuart's reactions to the strange men. Some of the dates are really hokey (David Faustino's), and some of them are pretty realistic (like the rage-aholic, an exaggeration of a type that really exists).

The majority of the scenes were improvised, but I honestly didn't notice--I found out after, watching the DVD extras. I think the main reason I liked it was because I went into it not expecting much of a movie at all. While it is certainly apparent that this is low budget, it doesn't take much to tell a good story and keep me interested. I found myself rooting for this "late thirties average looking" guy. I'm glad I checked it out.