Thursday 7 January 2021

INTERIOR. LEATHER BAR no stars


 This cross between a documentary and a piece of staged 'cine-fiction' speaks volumes about James Franco as a film-maker and probably as a person. You might say it's as close to a major player 'coming out' on screen without actually saying 'I'm Gay'; rather what does come out is Franco's ego though if he thinks "Interior. Leather Bar" is some kind of testimony to his genius as a film-maker he's sadly mistaken.

The idea is that Franco and co-director Travis Mathews are 'recreating' the lost forty minutes cut out of "Cruising" by the studio at the time while at the same time making a documentary about the making of the film or 'the footage' and what emerges is an extremely boring picture of beautiful young men showing their ignorance about cinema and life in general as well as a lot of stiff genitalia.

If there is plus side to any of this it's that the 'recreations' of the scenes from "Cruising" are very well done and much more sexually explicit than anything a mainstream movie might give us but divorced from Friedkin's film they just seem like so much porn and in this context, totally pointless. Franco's heart may be in the right place but if he and Mathews are to convince us of their talents they need to do a lot better than this.

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