Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Weekend

Oddly enough, in the week since seeing this, I've seen two separate movies that could potentially be a good thematic pair: Like Crazy, another movie about young people in love, and Unhappy Birthday, another gay-skewing movie from the UK (though horror rather than romance). Unfortunately, this one has felt like it took far too long to write, so... Time to move on.

Well, one other thought: I do sort of wonder how some of the gay-specific stuff which seemed interesting to me (coming out as a rite of passage, claiming that in some ways things are better off in America than the UK, etc.) played to the home crowd. I arrived late, so I was sitting away from the usual folks I'd ask for insight there, and I wonder if it was true but little-discussed or trite.

Weekend

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 October 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run)

It would be nice to say that Weekend is a good example of those independent movies where two people meet, talk, flirt, and fall in love in a short time period and have the fact that both people are men be a minor detail rather than an important one, but we're not quite at the point where we can expect it to work that way. That's about 50% of what this movie is, but the other half is interesting as well.

Russell (Tom Cullen) is pretty well-adjusted; he's shy, but doesn't seem excessively uncomfortable either when hanging out with his straight friends on Friday night or in a Nottingham gay bar after. It's there he meets the extroverted Glen (Chris New), a would-be artist who whips a tape recorder out the next morning and starts asking Russell what he thought about the night before. Despite this awkward start, they hit it off - so of course Glen has plans to fly to America Sunday evening.

Weekend is a hang-out-and-fall-in-love movie, and like most of those it rises and falls on what the actors playing the central couple bring. Cullen and New make a nice pair, with the actors able to pick up on the aspects that are opposites both above and below the surface. Cullen makes Russell pleasantly soft-spoken but not weak-seeming; there's a level of comfort with who he is that belies his shyness. New, on the other hand, gets that while Glen may be much more forward, he's uncertain about everything.

Full review at EFC.

No comments: