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Well, the Finnish gay movie with an immigrant dude wasn’t BAD, but it ( Read more... ) and was composed with ample portions of (a) ultimately unalleviated social awkwardness and second-hand embarrassment and (b) nudity. Not like porn - more like Queer as Folk style sex scenes. So ultimately it was very Finnish and no doubt exactly what its mumblecore-loving auteur was intending to create. Not exactly to my taste, but still within the range of movies that I had to see because of the gayness quotient, and as far as that goes, much more watchable than some.
It's called A Moment in the Reeds and is doing the festival circuit currently, and it's mostly in English, not Finnish - in fact they accidentally sent the festival reel instead of the one with Finnish subtitles on the English to our theater and so they had to go around personally apologizing to everyone and gave us coupons for free snacks to make up for it. Nice.
I liked it a lot more than I liked Love, Simon, which was also watchable but not to my taste, but (a) romantic comedies aren't just not to my taste, I actively loathe them, while secondhand embarrassment is just sort of medium-level not to my taste; and (b) Love, Simon, due to the nature of its plot, had moral and ethical issues that rendered some characters too unlikable for me.
I can't say I'm a fan of improvised naturalistic dialogue in general, but one plus to that was that the characters' non-fluent English was more realistic (hilariously or painfully so). There were a string of scenes near the beginning where I was laughing so hard I was worried about the noise and had to sit there covering my mouth preemptively for a while just in case.
And outside of all that, the out gay Syrian immigrant actor who is one of the leads is, of course, a Big Deal.
It's called A Moment in the Reeds and is doing the festival circuit currently, and it's mostly in English, not Finnish - in fact they accidentally sent the festival reel instead of the one with Finnish subtitles on the English to our theater and so they had to go around personally apologizing to everyone and gave us coupons for free snacks to make up for it. Nice.
I liked it a lot more than I liked Love, Simon, which was also watchable but not to my taste, but (a) romantic comedies aren't just not to my taste, I actively loathe them, while secondhand embarrassment is just sort of medium-level not to my taste; and (b) Love, Simon, due to the nature of its plot, had moral and ethical issues that rendered some characters too unlikable for me.
I can't say I'm a fan of improvised naturalistic dialogue in general, but one plus to that was that the characters' non-fluent English was more realistic (hilariously or painfully so). There were a string of scenes near the beginning where I was laughing so hard I was worried about the noise and had to sit there covering my mouth preemptively for a while just in case.
And outside of all that, the out gay Syrian immigrant actor who is one of the leads is, of course, a Big Deal.
