If I hadn't known any better, I would have sworn it was about 1983-1984 while watching Mulligans (mainstream Hollywood always is a few years behind the times as, apparently, is so much of gay-themed cinema). Upper-middle-class white males in the throes of a Sexual Orientation Identity Crisis. Class and race usually don't figure into movies like this, though I must admit I spent more time wondering what exactly this Dad did that he could not only afford a Porsche, a sumptuous summer home, AND the ability to take off work for what appears to be an extended vacation than I did on, you know, the actual plot. But, since this is a generation AFTER Making Love, etc., we have the added twist of a father and his son's best college bud as unexpected (well, maybe not so unexpected after all...) lovers (well, maybe not lovers, per se, but it certainly sounds better to say that than what is actually the case: a blissful One-And-A-Half Night Stand Gone Horribly Horribly Wrong).
It's all too Lifetime Movie for words, with everything played for Maximum Emotional Impact, including a music score swelling to ridiculous proportions (the better to milk that pathos). It's not that it is a bad movie; it's just that it's all been done before. And with more than 20 years of gay-themed cinema now under collective belts, isn't it about time that OTHER stories were told instead of yet another coming out melodrama? Can we at least have a coming out melodrama that is not afraid to explore the *consequences* of said coming out? I would have been far more interested to see what happens AFTER Mr Hottie Newly-Out Daddy drove away than in anything that happened before...
It's all too Lifetime Movie for words, with everything played for Maximum Emotional Impact, including a music score swelling to ridiculous proportions (the better to milk that pathos). It's not that it is a bad movie; it's just that it's all been done before. And with more than 20 years of gay-themed cinema now under collective belts, isn't it about time that OTHER stories were told instead of yet another coming out melodrama? Can we at least have a coming out melodrama that is not afraid to explore the *consequences* of said coming out? I would have been far more interested to see what happens AFTER Mr Hottie Newly-Out Daddy drove away than in anything that happened before...
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