GamerTab
That was an excellent one.
Beystiman
It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.
MusicChat
It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.
Edwin
The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.
hjames-97822
As a gay man I find this thing to be insulting, patronizing and, worst of all, mostly boring. There is as much creativity going on here as you'll find in a jar of generic mayonnaise. Why is James Franco wasting his life and someone's money on this. Why is he wasting ours? I see basically 3 broad types of viewers who may find this interesting: 1. People who think James Franco is a great actor in or (mostly) out of his clothing. This only proves there's someone for everyone. If you are one of these people, you would probably watch a film about James Franco shoveling dirt. And you think Kristen Bell is an actress.2. People who have no real sex life of their own and live it vicariously through films like this. You also probably think Stranger By The Lake is art and that Shortbus is an Uber car.3. People who enjoy looking at train wrecks, horrible auto collisions and the remains of people who have taken their own life.This film is just a horrible, pornographic piece of junk trying to be taken seriously. It is unbelievable to me that there are viewers who will actually sit around counting the butt shots in this nonsense.A final note. Regardless of whether you are gay or straight or somewhere in between, this work is not representative of the gay community. You can always find some people stupid enough to participate. If Franco's name were not on it it might not even have been made.And now that Sundance has become the septic holding tank for a considerable number of garbage nudie sex films, there will be a place for them. But stop trying to con people and tell em it's "art." Do yourself a favor. Skip this waste and go to the internet and look up a link to Michael D. Akers' 2012 gay themed indie "Morgan." It's a knock out film. The stars Leo Minaya and Jack Kesy bring their very real gay men to life so beautifully you could weep. Yes, there is some nudity but it is tasteful and amazingly intimate. They all draw you into their lives and make you a real, living extension of this wonderful screenplay. Franco and so many others like him just relegate you to sitting in their peanut gallery to wait for the next moan or thrust. There is so much good work being done out there in gay cinema, you don't need this. If you want porn go get the real thing for free. Then come home to a really good movie.
xWRL
As many reviewers have noted, this movie does not aim to capture the 40 suppressed minutes of "Cruising," even though it was billed as such. It's not clear what's behind that mismatch. Did the movie's intent shift while it was being made? Whatever the reason, it's hard to understand who benefited from the misleading marketing of the movie.We learn what the movie's about as we watch. James Franco explains his desire to overturn cultural conventions against explicit sex, which he finds odd because sex is constantly in the forefront of our consciousness. Porn, however socially unacceptable, is popular. Val Lauren plays a straight man in two senses: he's a straight guy in a gay movie, plus his questions give James Franco an opening to explain the purpose behind the film. As Val notes toward the end, the explicitness was there all right, but it wasn't nearly as big a deal as our minds had conjured it up to be.Whether or not this is someone's cup of tea, Franco reveals a refreshing degree of honesty and understanding. After all, most of the characters in the movie, in comments by them or by their family about the goings- on, are dubious to negative about the merits. That's what most of us probably think as well. The film is supposed to challenge that thinking.
Gordon-11
This film is the behind the scenes of re-imagining and reproducing the unseen footage of a film called "Crusing".I am disappointed and I feel cheated after watching "Interior. Leather Bar.". The description says that it is the re-imagination of the lost 40 minutes of footage, too explicit to be shown in the cinema. However, it really is just a behind the scenes documentary of why James Franco wanted to make this film, then getting the actors to play it, then briefing the actors, the actors mingling, actors telling what they feel about making the film. That takes 50 minutes of the screen time already, and there is only 7 minutes of re-imagined scene in a leather bar. "Interior. Leather Bar." is marketed in such a misleading way, it's actually all sauce and no beef.
rgcustomer
This film takes as inspiration the 1980 film Cruising, which I've only seen clips of (e.g. in documentaries about film), and the idea that there's 40 minutes or so that was destroyed in order to achieve a more favourable rating. (I'll assume you know all about Cruising because you can look it up here on IMDb).Yet this film is not a replacement of those supposed 40 minutes, nor is it a documentary about how Franco and Mathews attempted to re-imagine them. Instead, they play fictional versions of themselves, so doing. So they get two shots at re-imagining those 40 minutes.On the simplest level, there is the scene of actor Val playing Al Pacino's character Steve from the film Cruising, which to me seemed entirely believable, and could have fit into the original film. Then there are more sexual scenes, including scenes of oral sex between men. Together, these form a vivid re-imagining of what might have been shot and destroyed. Maybe.But the story is where the actual re-imagining is. Val (the character) is straight, like Steve in Cruising. Through his work, he is put into an in-your-face gay sexual environment, and overcomes initial hesitation, to become comfortable with the people in that environment. (I can't compare further with Cruising, not having seen it).I think there's a third layer, which is the audience who is also taken to a place cinema doesn't usually go to. The film doesn't interact back with us, but it's a sense of what Val and Steve experienced.In the film, James makes some interesting points regarding the explicit sex, and there's no doubt that's the big discussion topic for this film. I think he might be just a year too late to be correct about what audiences watch, but still his point that intimate love and sex should be shown without timidity in film, including same-sex, is correct.An earlier film that I really liked was 9 Songs (2004). A large portion of that film is the leading man and leading woman making love together. But it told a story about the course of that couple's relationship, and I don't think it could have been done any other way. There should be room for this kind of film in cinema, so these stories can be told without being dumped in with the porn, and then overlooked.But specifically regarding explicit gay sex in the telling of a story, it's already happened, via Shortbus (2006). Other audiences have seen I Want Your Love, a short and then a feature-length film by director Mathews (of this film) and including explicit sex between men. And the recent Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, I'm told, includes explicit sex between women. So this film is a bit late to break truly new ground.But more generally (and in stark contrast to television) cinema, and even this film oddly, has been afraid to show much in the way of male couples having the anal sex everyone thinks they're having. I don't think since Brokeback Mountain (2005) there has been a major male film star do this until this year's Kill Your Darlings. Hollywood ought to be able to do a lot better than that. Everyone is already thinking it, so just show something appropriate to the film.On the theme of missing same-sex film scenes, a (much, much tamer) scene from the film 54 (1998) was recently leaked online showing a kiss filmed between its stars Ryan Phillippe and Breckin Meyer. So apparently old footage does sometimes find its way to audiences.Part of the experience of seeing this film, I think, is the locale in which you see it. Much as I never expected to see a Bruce LaBruce film series at a mainstream festival in the middle of 1999 Dallas, I wouldn't have expected to see this in Windsor, Ontario. That's how it should be seen.