MiloMindbender

In a movie that is about so little, attention to detail is important and in this one the director completely missed the boat. It opens quite nicely and even though it begins as a typical coming of age/coming out story, the cinematography promises something bigger. However the film never delivers. For starters the central character, Pim, has no personality. He is a complete dud. The director tries to show him interested in drawing, but Pim only does it occasionally and seems to have no passion in it whatsoever. The film also opens with Pim as a much younger kid who is somehow fascinated by his mother's beauty queen crown & sash, both of which he puts in a shoebox (the mother doesn't notice? doesn't care?). It is clear that the director is just accumulating things for Pim to put in his collection box, but with little reason to do so except fulfill a director's plot device at the end of a movie.

Although the actors do an admirable job, the film is just not very well conceived. The beginning has lots of quick cuts, that end abruptly & leave things unexplained, then the film ends with longer shots in which very little happens. Pim's love interest runs off with a girl, and then all of sudden he comes back....no explanation, no development of the characters means the viewer has no explanation for why things happen except that it's just a series of random events a director tried to string together. Beautiful Thing, Ma Vie En Rose, My Beautiful Laundrette....the list of films that explore the themes that this film only touches on is quite long & they do a much better job, so I don't really see any point to this one.

I started watching his specials in chronological order. This one is interesting not because it is funny (which it's not), but because it is interesting to see how far he has come. I always remember him being funny from the get go, but revisiting this one clearly shows that his act has evolved significantly (and for the better). Here he relies more on his mannerisms for humor, while much of the material is pretty banal & doesn't hold up that well. His later career is much more focused on language & politics. It seems that as he has gotten older he has become less concerned with offending people, which means a much funnier act. The only parts of this show that still seem funny are those that are the crudest (ie. farting, bad language...).

As someone who grew up with religion & was gay, the topic of the intersection of the 2 would be potentially interesting. However, I just found this to be a rather banal documentary. It's a rather superficial. Just people stating the same thing over & over... As a budding gay boy, I looked at religion & saw it for what it was...a load of bunk. So, listening to a bunch of people hem & haw about reconciling the differences between the 2 just sounds tiresome & confirmed that renouncing religion (superstition) is the right decision.

If there wasn't so much footage of people bloviating about themselves & more about either the history of treatment of homosexuality in Judaism or more about actual philosophical underpinnings of religion that could still make it relevant in a secular society, this could have been much better...However, as others have mentioned, it's mostly just people kvetching with annoying music in the background. Had Oprah done a show on the topic, it would have been more interesting.