DVD The Cost of Love

Sometimes when a very bad movie gets a great review, it's because a friend or relative of someone involved in making the movie wrote it. Sometimes that's obvious just from reading the review, but not always. Having now seen this movie myself, I cannot trust any positive review it gets.

This movie is just terrible. Everything about it is bad: the strident, preposterous screenplay; the harsh, always-on, NEVER-believable acting (if it's fair to real actors to call it that – Michael Joyce and Mandeesh Gill in particular are embarrassingly bad, although Joyce has a bigger role so he sticks out more); the noisy, too-loud and never appropriate music; the interminable fake sex scenes that are always shot from the same weird angle, with the same frenzied, mechanical, totally fake grunts, groans, grimaces and spastic moves – scenes that last ten times as long as they should even if they were good; and the idiotic photography.

The normal way to film a conversation is to film each actor separately and then edit the shots together into a conversation. THIS director or cinematographer sometimes chose instead to swing the camera back and forth between actors: one reads his line, then the camera swings quickly 90° to the other actor, who says his line, then back to the first actor, etc. In at least one scene he does it between THREE actors. It's dizzying, and not in a good way. I've never seen anything like it. Whether it was done to save production time and costs or with some crazed idea that it's a cool way to make a movie, it's a big, BIG mistake.

Every character in this movie would be unbearably obnoxious if they were at all believable; as it was, I just kept hoping against hope that the counter was wrong and there weren't REALLY 53 minutes left, then 52 minutes, and so on. I forced myself to stay with it all the way to the end, but I wouldn't wish such torture even on Dick Cheney. This is the worst movie I've seen in years.

I really want to like this film, but the problem revealed itself on the end credits: written, directed and produced…but the same guy. Every single movie I've seen where this is the case has pacing and story problems, lingering scene problems, and cohesion problems.

There is something really poignant about the idea of 'feeling', sex addiction, sexual compulsion, and the layering of the platonic friendships mirroring the drama of the sexual lives…but they just didn't hit the mark with the direction and execution.

The scene of the dinner party was so slow and boring and then cliché I could not believe it made it through an editing session. And the director DRAGGED OUT every scene, no pun intended, and the relationships were not fully developed. Some even, were over developed = the Sean character and mother – lots of hits, no home run. They can snipe at each other, OK, we get it. But it was not funny, because the pace was as if both were heavily sedated on barbiturates.

Again, great material, and I had high hopes for something new in gay-related cinema, but no cigar.