Ariztical Entertainment
Eating's Stiles, Carnes, and Lunsford (from left) are cuter than their material.
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Eating Out
Opens Fri., May 13, at Harvard Exit
Let's say this for Q. Allan Brocka's otherwise-flaccid debut feature: Its characters are horny as hell at a time when many depictions of gay Americans are studiously well zippered. The only good scene in the entire film, in fact, lets everything hang out— literally and figuratively—for a few minutes of convincingly hot play: Mischievous Gwen (Emily Stiles) seduces out-of-his-element straight stud Caleb (Scott Lunsford) with hot talk over the phone while her homo roommate, Marc (Ryan Carnes), takes the opportunity to give Caleb more person-to-person oral service. Too bad the rest of the movie can't keep it up.
Though Eating Out is filled with further sexual hijinks, it can't shake the desultory feeling that it's been made by a homosexual who's unknowingly regurgitating decades of straight stereotypes concerning queer funny business. Caleb, you see, is playing gay at the suggestion of his roommate, Kyle (Jim Verraros, perhaps the most annoying of American Idol alums), who claims that "chicks" like Gwen only get hot-and-bothered by unavailable men-who-love-men; Kyle is hoping, naturally, that Caleb's presumed rejection of Marc's attentions will throw that hottie into hangdog Kyle's awaiting arms. You'll be sorry if you think Caleb's confused family and former flame don't show up for a surprise dinner. It's as if writer-director Brocka thinks that meshing La Cage Aux Folles with the perpetual hardness of Porky's will make for exhilaratingly fresh farce.
To say it doesn't is to understate the insulting vacuousness of even Brocka's blithely low ambitions. All the women are reduced to grating fag hags, females who treat their gay friends as either pets or missed opportunities. In addition to Stiles, who mostly overcomes her dire circumstances with a no-nonsense adamance that hints at greater comic depths, there's Rebeckah Kochan doing her best as Tiffani, Caleb's voracious, aforementioned ex. She's wedged into supposedly spicy but heartbreakingly unflattering costumes and a role that's somehow even less appetizing. Worse? Brocka gives Verraros a faux-fabulous vernacular that will ride your last nerve; if you make it past exclamations like "This could be parfait!" or "Do not Heche me into a Mariah!" your steely constitution is to be commended. Both Lunsford and Carnes (who's currently providing a gay subplot on Desperate Housewives) make for nice eye candy, but after an hour and a half of wearying contrivance, even those treats go sour. (NR) STEVE WIECKING
It's All Gone Pete Tong
Opens Fri., May 13, at Metro
The megaclub dance-music scene is tough to mockumentarize. The excesses of Ibiza bacchanals have been highly self-parodic right from the jump-off. And those fans and DJs who take their trancey transcendence quite seriously may be beyond the reach of satire. But neither that nor the fact that the scene is well past its late-'90s heyday ever dampens Michael Dowse's exuberant desire to poke belated fun. In his festival crowd pleaser, what's all gone Pete Tong (i.e., "wrong" in Cockney rhyming slang) is the career of DJ Frankie Wilde (charismatic Brit Paul Kaye), a super-stoned deity of the Pacha decks. Wilde is a gold-toothed, projectile-puking party machine touting his flip-flop collection when he's not sailing triumphantly over the heads of adoring Ibiza clubbers in a crown of thorns.
If Dowse's parade of deadpan talking heads—still-faceless megastars like Paul Van Dyk and Lol Hammond—seems kind of stale, his deft dance-floor swoops manage to capture the ravey thrill that eluded "electronica" cash-ins like Groove. It's all giggles until Wilde goes deaf. Then the tone changes completely. Though Kaye's performance doesn't, er, miss a beat, Tong concentrates on bringing us along into Wilde's new silence. Lots of the movie's ideas work well—the ringing tinnitus, the conversion of sound to visible waves, the trimming of treble and bass for underwatery effect, the removal of ambient noise entirely. But as the humor flags, Tong starts to feel more like an exercise. Also, since Wilde has mainly been a cartoon thus far, it's strange when his 24-hour party morphs into a sweet little tale about lipreading and Photoshop beat matching. (R) LAURA SINAGRA
Mindhunters
Opens Fri., May 13, at Meridian and others
It's been ages since director Renny Harlin stomped in from Finland to give Hollywood action flicks a revivifying jolt of his rakish whimsy. Now he's just a sad old Hollywood hack. He refreshed the conventions of Elm Street and Die Hard, but his talent never recovered from Cutthroat Island. His update of 1945's And Then There Were None is about as fresh as 60-year-old lutefisk. Agatha Christie's original 1939 novel, inspired by the murderously racist 1869 music-hall song "Ten Little Niggers," which ripped off the racist 1868 American song "Ten Little Indians," was a masterpiece —you couldn't guess the killer, only admire the aptness of the deaths, rooted in each character's idiosyncratic sin.
The sin of Mindhunters is that it doesn't give a shit about the characters. It's a reversion to the original song's contempt for the individual. Val Kilmer, another once-rising talent slumming for a quick paycheck, plays a gonzo trainer of FBI serial-killer catchers. As a truly final exam, he sends his students to a remote island, where there's a movielike set of a small town rigged with booby traps—dummies that pop up without warning, forcing students to make split-second decisions. Did you just shoot a bad guy, or an innocent child? Turns out the booby traps are actually rigged to kill the students one by one. If you're a smoker, you're ill-advised to use the island's cigarette machines; if you're afraid of water, be very afraid of pools on the island.
