Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

bkoganbing Some thirty years after The Boys In The Band presented a view of gay male life that was before Stonewall, before AIDS, before Anita Bryant. A lot of history and a lot of heartache individually and collectively happened in this time. So Terrence McNally penned a work with another group of eight gay men and put them at a vacation home on a lake in Dutchess County, New York. The three holiday weekends they spend there reveal a lot about themselves.Hosts of the event are John Benjamin Hickey and Stephen Sellars a same sex couple who've been together for 15 years. Like so many in those years they've seen way too many of their friends die and one of those friends invited is Jason Alexander who is HIV+ positive who comes by himself. Alexander is almost a stereotype of a gay man who loves his Broadway musicals. John Glover plays a pair of brothers both from across the pond and one of them has the disease full blown now. One brother is an acid tongued thing with no kind words for anybody. The other has come from Great Britain seeking better treatment for the disease. Mr. Acid tongue has brought dancer/hustler Randy Becker along for some personal enjoyment. But Becker likes what he sees in another guest the blind Justin Kirk brought to the weekends by his partner Stephen Bogardus.It all makes for some interesting theater and a lot is revealed about one and all.Love! Valour! Compassion! ran 248 performances on Broadway in 1995 and won a Tony Award for its author Terrence McNally. It's a lot like a Eugene O'Neill play, short on plot per se, but long and deep on the characterizations. McNally was quite the acute observer of the gay scene, I've seen all of these people one time or other in my life.The film is also like the film adaption of the Eugene O'Neill play Long Day's Journey Into Night where the house itself and the Connecticut beach location almost becomes a character in itself in the film. Here the Quebec woods stand in for the Hudson River Valley country and they stand in well.I don't think you could do much better than a film that's a combination of Boys In The Band and Long Day's Journey Into Night. That is in fact what Love! Valour! Compassion! is.The only thing that puzzles me is how director Joe Mantello handled John Glover playing twins on stage.

Armand nothing new. and this fact is great. because is a movie about small things. love, friendship, spirit of group, fight against death, a form to survive and give yourself as root, power and beauty for others. a film far by great ambitions. with a wise script and a nice acting. with crumbs of hate, joy, hope, fear and desires. circle of interesting characters and a story with many velvet nuances. after its end - image of Jason Alexander as hero out of courage, fragile, fake but axis of his existence. image of ballet and searches behind it. image of days in which few people lives together far from real world but pieces of it. beautiful and touching. like an old toy of a lost age.

Neil Doyle Adapted from an off-Broadway play, the story has a dancer (STEPHEN BOGARDUS) inviting his friends to spend the summer at his secluded 19th Century mansion in upstate New York (with Canadian locations substituting for NY). The characters are stock gay men, the kind that exist in other plays like THE BOYS IN THE BAND--only this time none of them are quite interesting enough to care about.All of them, it seems, are living under the threat of AIDS, so we have reminders of LONGTIME COMPANION here too. Most of the performances are okay--nothing really subtle here--but JASON Alexander as the campiest one who hides his anxieties with an unflappable sense of humor seems a bit out of place when it comes to the serious scenes. JUSTIN KIRK does a nice job as a blind boy whose brief fling with handsome RANDY BECKER gets him into more trouble than he can handle. BECKER is the young Hispanic dancer who flaunts his sexuality at every turn.There's some casual frontal nudity for all the skinny dipping scenes, but the sentiment gets sticky whenever the serious aspects are touched. JOHN GLOVER, as twin brothers as different as night and day, gives the most professional performance.Not likely to appeal to a wide audience, it's got some good moments but the slim plot line wears thin after the first hour. The characters are all a bit too shallow to make a deep or lasting impression and there are too many mawkish and cloying moments in times of stress.

Merwyn Grote Let's see, does this film miss any gay cliché? Hmmm ... The singing of show tunes? Check. And the references to Judy or Barbra or Liza or Madonna or Ethel Merman? Of course, check. The promiscuity? Check. The gratuitous nude scenes? Check...and check... and -- oooh!, full frontal nudity! -- that'd be a big check again. The use of the term "girlfriend" when referring to a gay man? Ditto for the phrase "bitch?" Check and double check. Plenty of mincing and prancing around? Yeah, right there. Did we overlook that a least one guy should be a for-hire boyfriend? Nope, gay equals prostitute, ya know. Excellent, it's all here. Plus, a bit of S&M role-playing, just to spice things up.Oops! Almost forgot the totally unnecessary display of crossdressing. Oh good, here it is -- and in ballet tutus, to boot. Gotta make it clear that to be gay is to be nelly. Oh, they were out of politically correct minorities, but will a Hispanic do? If not, they've got a blind homosexual and can toss in a couple of brave and only slightly self-pitying AIDS victims.LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION! is one of those films where you may be at a loss to figure just why it exists. Eight gay men gather during three summer holiday weekends (Memorial Day, July 4th and Labor Day) at the New England country home of one of them, a successful choreographer. They bicker and banter, and fight and flirt; they bare the bodies while skinny dipping and bare their souls while trading cleverly rehearsed quips -- but, so what? As sort of a gay BIG CHILL or a homosexual FOUR SEASONS, the film really doesn't give any of them a chance to reveal themselves either politically or personally. There are a few pious monologues about love and life that are so generic as to be meaningless. If the point is to show that gays are "just like everybody else," then why do all the characters seem so generically superficial and tiresomely stereotypical. If there is meant to be a message to the story, then why doesn't the film get to it? There are some nice moments here and there as two characters share an honest or intimate moment, but too often the dialogue is arch and too theatrical to be real. Other times, the material shows its theatrical roots with an out-of-nowhere dramatic moment where you can just see a character moving to center stage to deliver his big, important monologue in the spotlight. By the time you get to the end, where each character, in voice-over, reveals the circumstances of their way-in-the-distance death -- while dancing around in tutus, no less -- you just want to scream at the filmmakers. Here's a scene that totally trivialized these characters, showing them to truly be nothing but prancing fairies, yet begs you to see into the depths of their souls and weep for the fragility of their lives. The result is totally annoying, if not absolutely insulting. If it were not for the fact that many involved in the film are openly gay, you could just swear the film was trying purposely to be smugly homophobic.And you can't help but to groan at how needlessly self-important the material takes itself, even as it wallows in self-mockery. Too much of this is just pretentious, not the least of which is the three exclamation points in the title that just scream of announcing something of epic proportions; a false promise for a film with really very little to say.Three words: Lousy! Vacuous! Condescending!