dibeyendu

This series didn't work for me at all and I blame it on the casting. For a movie to work, you have to empathise, if not actually like the characters. That doesn't happen here and it's because the young actors can't pull it off. First there's the character of Alaska, who is at the centre of the story and who everyone else seems to be head-over-heels for. The way Kristine Froseth plays it, she's just an annoying brat and you wonder why everyone else is so crazy about her. The other lead character played by Charlie Plummer is just as bas. His voice, the way he looks, the way he behaves (especially with his Rumanian girlfriend) is quite repulsive. The third character, played by Denny Love, keeps telling us he's very smart, but he doesn't seem to do anything smart. Mostly he's an aggressive bully. I'm sure John Green's book made these teenagers more likable. The series makes them utterly bad.

Eighty years after the end of World War II, it is finally Hollywood's time to make movies that depict the Nazis as oafs. But unlike Inglorious Bastereds, which it vaguely resembles, The Ministry of Ungentemanly Warfare doesn't even have a nasty Nazi villain who we can shudder at. The Germans are all there just for the British to shoot at close range. Henry Cavill is no Brad Pitt and Guy Ritchie, alas, has proven himself to be no Tarentino, not even close. If the story is really based on true events, and the Nazis were really so easy to kill, I doubt the War would have lasted as long as it did.

Sigh. What a bad film. And it stars Zachary Quinto of Star Trek and Margin Call fame. Why did he choose to be a part of such a bad project, I wonder. As a gay man, does he think it's his patriotic duty to act in every gay film he's offered? Why can't he be more choosy, like, say, Andrew Scott?

In this film, Quinto plays a 48 year old repressed gay gay man named Gary, who is introduced to the wild "gay life" by a masseur. This includes getting on a dating app and calling home some strange men and then getting high on crack and swimming naked in a lake. After this, Gary is seemingly transformed from a square to a proper gay man. Like Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady.

Fortunately gay men are no longer patriotically required to give such idiotic movies a high rating, as may have beeen the case when gay movies were few and far between. This movie has very little going for it and I feel really bad for it.