Angel

Today's movie is Angel, but it's pretty awful so I don't want to talk about it. In short, it's badly shot, badly acted, badly written, and the only reason it was even on DVD is because it's about two gay guys.

That's what I want to talk about, the crap except there's some gay dudes problem. The DVD itself? It's filled with trailers for similarly just awful looking movies which try to sell themselves based on the fact that there are two men in the lead roles. They're irredeemable rubbish, sure, but hey look gay guys, you don't get to see gay guys in movies very often! Look, these guys are gay, just like you, they even have vague gay problems that could be easily substituted with a vague not-gay problem except then we couldn't base the entire production and marketing around the whole gay thing.

This is not to say that there aren't very good movies about gay people, there are many. Thing is, they're generally made by people who are just good at movies, full stop, and they aren't using homosexuality as a crutch to get attention. They can also take a situation that is not universal and make it sympathetic and understandable to an audience which doesn't share it. Brokeback Mountain, for an award-winning example, connects with people because it is an understandable, tragic love story. The main characters being men is important, but the emotions themselves are universal.

The problem with crap like this is that it isn't well written enough to be universal, isn't acted well enough for people to connect, and just plain isn't good enough to matter to anyone who isn't searching desperately for a movie about gay men (which I'm not). A good movie can be about just about anything, if it makes it compelling. A bad one often finds a gimmick and uses it as a crutch. Apparently there's an entire label dedicated to that, it's kind of sad.

Here's a last comment about the film itself: I knew the one character was bad because I read Mark Trail.