Say Uncle

I am a gay man in the South, and while I have spent a good part of my life working with children as a camp counselor, daycare worker, and therapist, I STILL don't think I can empathize with the character Peter Paige portrays in this movie. For one, is he retarded? I don't think any grown, single, childless man who isn't just at least a little mentally challenged would think it was appropriate to spend that much time with strangers' children without good reason. Also, this character seems REALLY mentally unbalanced. He blacks out, lies about his background, cannot form a stable romantic attachment, becomes detached from reality, can only relate to children, and has what can only be described as a hyper-obsession with his godchild. I'm thinking Kathy Najimy's character in the film is right...he DOES fit the profile of a pedophile.

I don't know where Peter Paige was going with this movie, but I think he missed his mark. I rented this film, hoping for something that would break down the stereotype that gay men are freaks and pedophiles. Instead, this movie just made my skin crawl. I would NEVER, EVER let my child near a man like Paul Johnson.

Ick.

-s-

First off, I have to say I adore Peter Paige. I loved him as Emmett in QAF. If I lived in Portland, I'd be trying to date him. That is, if he were single. I saw this film out of curiosity. I was wanting to see him stretch. Even cast off the QAF persona. And that was done. I did not see him as Emmett here. But the film was hard to sit through. I knew the content was going to be difficult, and that is not what I mean. Throughout the film, I kept thinking "No one is that naive! Not in this day and age." Nor can anyone afford to be, no matter how idealistic you are. So, ultimately, FOR ME, the film was a far-fetched unfolding about a dead-serious and scary issue. Worthy of exploration, undoubtedly, but this film missed the mark. Please please keep working, Peter! You are a man of much talent.

i don't know where this guy got the balls to do something like this. to tackle suburbia, fear, profiling, gays, children - in a comedy. i love how they never tell you what to think or how to feel. everybody's screwed up, just like in real life. there's not one bad performance in it. kathy najimy is awesome - totally different than the way you think of her. peter paige is great - sad and funny and weird. and gabrielle union and anthony clark are great, too. oh, and melanie lynskey is freakin' hilarious. it's worth taking a chance on - seriously. it won't be everybody's thing, but if you're tired of movies where everybody's perfect and you already know how it's going to end, check this out. i loved it.

A gay man with a love for children gets accused of pedophilia. There's a couple of problems here. One is that if Peter Paige (writer/director/star) is trying to make a point, he's doing a poor job of it. The message is rather unclear. At one point he seems to be saying that parents shouldn't be so uptight about letting men play with their kids, and later seems to be emphasizing that it's gay men in particular who are demonized, and then he compounds the issue by making the protagonist unbearably stupid and naive (adding hints of mental disturbance didn't help one bit). He tries to mitigate it by saying "I know I made some mistakes" at the end, but that only ends up confusing the message more. I did appreciate that there was some complexity to it, but it was just too muddled. Also, the second act involves a lot of repeating the same points over and over again and feels sluggish. I think the largest problem is the Kathy Najimy character. Paige paints her (this is an extremely clever pun if you've seen the movie) with a very broad brush: she has knee-jerk reactions, blows things way out of proportion, tells lies to whip up hysteria, has mechanical sex with her husband, isn't a very good parent. This is a character who belongs in a much more satirical comedy, something like CITIZEN RUTH. She doesn't match the quieter (and not terribly funny) humor of the rest of the film. However, it's not all bad. Despite a low-budget production (right here in Portland) it feels pretty professional, and the performances are good, even when the characters aren't very well written. The film is somewhat pleasant to watch, despite the subject matter. And I really did enjoy the complexity and that it wasn't as broad as it could have been, if only the Najimy character had been toned down. Overall, though, it's a near miss.

Some funny lines and smart commentary in this low-budget comedy about a young gay man--an overgrown kid in an adult's body--who is left rudderless after his best friends move to Japan with his beloved godson; totally enamored of and devoted to children in general, our hero starts hanging around the playground, where a single man with no kids causes red flags to wave in front of the resident moms. Writer-director-co-producer-star Peter Paige has some interesting things to say about unmarried men in our society who adore--and can relate to--the innocence of childhood yet no have little ones of their own. Unfortunately, the film's second-half is pretty much consumed by the rampant paranoia of the playground flock; this material is all too real for a little comedy to handle, and one tends to recoil from it even though the satiric points Paige makes are thorough and justified. ** from ****