Eating Out (2004)

Best movie of this year hands down!

You won't be disappointed!

Why so much hype?

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

When you watch a gay indie film, you have to accept the fact its going to have a budget smaller than one episode of a TV game show. So if you're expecting Juila Roberts in "My Best Friend's Wedding," go rent the real thing and enjoy its $50M budget. That said, there's a lot to like here. It's a twist on Victor/Victoria with a straight boy pretending to be gay to attract women. We get quite a few delightfully uncomfortable scenes where the straight dude has to put up or shut up. Personally, I would like to have seen this taken farther. If this were a European film, Caleb (Scott Lundsford) would have been persuaded to try gay sex and, perhaps, actually enjoy it--a little. This is probably why many reviewers criticize the film as "homophobic," because it seems to reinforce the notion that M to M sex is kicky. The very, very, very brief nude scene between Caleb and Marc is rather pointless. (I'm surprised the straight actors agreed to do it.) There was a missed opportunity for a very funny (and sexy) scene with the boys getting undressed for the big event--and Caleb being both modest about his own body, while very interested in Marc's. The script could have certainly used a polish, bit it isn't bad. It's main weakness is the ending, which should have given more weight to the Kyle character (Jim Verraros) in the story line. As presented, the story seems to be about Caleb, but with the ending as written, the movie is really about Kyle. So we should have had some foreshadowing scenes to back up Marc's reveal about being a secret admirer all along. That would have taken the movie to the "comedy of errors" level I think a lot of reviewers have expressed disappointment about. Casting is a bit of a problem too. Verraros is BY FAR the best actor of the bunch, but he's relegated to the "incidental sidekick" role for most of the movie. While he's not quite as gym toned as Caleb and Marc, he's got the cutest face and dresses like an Abercrombie model. Hardly the nerdy, unlovable character the script suggests he is. Again, Marc's reveal at the end would have made more sense if the audience had been aware of this earlier in the film. Where was the scene of Marc secretly attending Kyle's concert? That should have been scene one. (BTW, the character the audience MOST wanted to have do the gratuitous nude scene was scruffy A&F boy Kyle).Caleb's family is one note too many. This 90 minute film tries to cram too many characters into a small space. The focus should have been on the characters in the love triangle (well, quadrangle in this case): Caleb-Marc/Marc-Kyle/Gwen-Caleb. Finally, as others have noted, both Gwen and Tiffani are way too cartoonish to be taken as serious love interests. We can overlook this in the case of Tiffani, who is the comic-relief character of the piece, but it's hard to imagine soft-spoken, sensitive Caleb falling for bombastic Gwen.

This film is about a man who pretends to be gay and has a date with a gay guy, in order to get the girl he wants."Eating Out" is a low budget comedy, but it has all the right ingredients to be an entertaining film. I like the story as it is a refreshing change from all the standard romantic comedy. It has adult themes and at times stretches on for a bit too long, but these scenes do not feel out of place. There is a lot of positivity and social support for the main characters too, which is uplifting and empowering."Eating Out" is fun, lighthearted and makes people happy. That's all that matters for a comedy.

I became 100% convinced that I would hate this film the second some supposedly "British" guy opens his mouth and starts talking with an accent reminiscent of Dick van Dyke's performance in Mary Poppins. Others have said it better than me, so I'll just summarise: the idea that the best way into a girl's pants is pretend you're a gay man never, ever made sense. How anyone, gay, straight or vegetable, could find the foul-mouthed, insecure, nasty-minded "leading lady" attractive is something that I will spend the next 15 seconds wondering. The writer could have done something interesting with the idea, and said something vaguely interesting about fluid, non-polarised sexuality, but nah; instead he chose to ram the film so full of stock clichés about queers that it undergoes gravitational collapse. Oh, and, just maybe, having one of the main characters summarise the plot of the entire film only twenty minutes in probably isn't that great an idea.

Remember MTV's "Undressed" -- that nightly, shameless bite of over-earnest sexual situation comedy? Everyone was just slightly insecure and prime-time-friendly kinked, and sexual preference made everyone awkward until exactly what they wanted fell into their laps at the end of the episode? Yeah. This is "Undressed, The Movie." The production values are low (in fact, it looks like it was filmed on the same minimalist sets as the show) and there are no points for art, aside from the uncomfortable but amusing first scene, which mimics classic repairman porn that suddenly goes bad, then funny. The actors are each given one adjective (uncomfortable; hot; gay; sexual) and they run with them like an improv comedy troupe without an audience to play off of. The writing leaves them without an ounce of subtlety or realism, but that's okay. The point of the film is not to create truly great characters, aside from oversexed loudmouth Gwen, whose squeak of a voice makes her foul language and unabashed proclivities almost endearing. The point is to create fun new sexual situations, then pretend that sex and love correspond.