VerhoHo

For anyone who lives anywhere near where this story is supposed to take place (Bronx, NYC) you can't help either laughing at or being offended by most of this movie. Gus Van Sant has moved well beyond the decent movies of his early career, and now is nothing but a sell-out, making the worst kind of Hollywood garbage for mass-multiplex consumption. His early obsessions with drug addicts and underage male prostitutes have mellowed into milquetoast in-the-closet tales about attractive and gifted young men who require the guidance of a much older man. It's like ancient Greece without the anal sex. Don't be misled.

This sounded like a hideous, shallow, self-righteous vanity project when I first read that it was being made, and surprise! That's exactly what it is. Laden with enough TV movie-cliches to sink the Love Boat, this is a repulsive excuse for cinema, directed by a once-great filmmaker who made The Believers not too long ago...What the heck happened? When they started singing "American Pie" around the coffin (with Doogie Howser as the bereaved widow) I actually started laughing out loud. This product causes brain-rot. Avoid at all costs!

This may be Haynes' last great film (Velvet Goldmine was AWFUL) but what a great film it is. It's on my all-time top ten, and I'm not the only one: I thought I would mention this since it isn't on the awards page...Every ten years about 75 or so film critics get together for the legendary Village Voice and rate the top films of the decade. In the 80's, if memory serves, the number one film of the decade was voted to be Raging Bull (or was it Wings of Desire?). What was voted the number one film of the 90's?

Safe.