The Coffee Shop (U.S. 2014)

The Gist:

Various mostly, though not entirely, related events take place at a gay coffee house: a bisexual man has dating problems, a young woman comes out to her mom, a gay male employee acts slutty, the drag queen coffee shop owner needs to find a new employee, vampires stop by for a drink, etc..

Comments:

I've found very little information about the movie, so I don't have an explanation for why it is so odd. Is it a movie intended to be a series of shorts using the same setting to pull them all together? A compilation of various episodes of a web series? A film school project with other short stories added to bump up the time to full movie length? 

Whatever the answer, the result is a movie that doesn't work. None of the shorts are particularly interesting, well acted, or funny. It is also borderline offensive, or at the very least annoying in dealing with bisexuality. The expected standard when you have your main characters telling offensive phobic jokes is to take a position that they're wrong. Something that doesn't happen here. Jokes are made about the bi dude, and nothing is said or done to show this is wrong. So by implication bisexuality really is wrong?

The best thing about the movie is that not everyone in it is a young gay white man, so it almost resembles the real world. Unfortunately, other than that, everything else is pretty much wrong. 

Women: Yes 

People of color: Some

Gratuitous Nudity: No 

• Director: A. J. Mattioli
• Writer: Many people 
• Actors: Blanche Baker, Keith Collins, Edvin Ortega, Julia Weldon
• 90 min
• IMDB

Leather Jacket Love Story (U.S. 1997)

The Gist:

Young eighteen year old, privileged, pretty boy Kyle decides that his 'artificial' West Hollywood lifestyle is hampering his ambitions of becoming a poet, so he moves to the bohemian neighborhood of Silver Lake where life is "real" and poets abound. Once there he promptly meets and falls for an older leather man named Mike. Will Kyle succeed in becoming a "real" poet? Will he convince commitment-phobe Mike that romance and monogamy are worthwhile pursuits? 

Comments:

I saw the movie many, many years ago on VHS after it first came out and had totally forgotten just how "porn adjacent" the movie was. Meaning that there is a lot of casual full frontal nudity and many sex scenes. So many sex scenes. Apparently it's a major selling point, that it was the first gay movie to treat nudity and sex the same way straight movies did. I'm not entirely sure that's accurate though. Both in not being the first gay flick to feature naked dudes sexing each other up everywhere, nor that this level of nudity and sex was really that common at the time in non-gay movies.

Beyond the sex, the movie was both better and worse than I remembered. 

The better than I remembered part of the movie is that the production level is pretty good and there's a drag queen trio who are pretty cool in action, if not acting skills. 

The worse than I remembered part is the story of Kyle and Mike's romance, or rather Kyle's idea of romance, that the two men should immediately become boyfriends in a committed monogamous long term relationship after spending one night together. In a movie where nothing comes off as particularly realistic, their destined fate is total fantasy. The characters don't have anything in common so the romance doesn't come off as particularly believable. 

Another issue is that they conveniently ignore that Mike is already in a relationship. Granted an extremely open and casual one where both men get to do whatever / whoever they want. A fact that apparently nullifies its existence, since after being mentioned once, everyone, even Mike, forgets he is not actually single. 

Romance aside, while largely fluff, it isn't that bad a movie, and it does offer a look at what gay life in Silverlake in the past aspired to be, if not what it actually was, making the movie a sort of fictional-historical documentary, since changing populations, economics, and gentrification has made the 'raw' and funky, non-affluent, leather - bohemian - queer world our leather lovebirds live in a thing of the past. 

Women:

A few. 

People of color:

A few.

Gratuitous nudity:

Yes, very much so. Gratuitous sex scenes as well.

• Director: David DeCoteau
• Writer: David DeCoteau, Jerry Goldberg
• Actors: Sean Tataryn, Christopher Bradely, Mink Stole
• 85 min
• Black and White 
• IMDB