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Chained To My Bully Stepbrother (AI Vertical BL Drama)

By Golu
This is the second vertical AI BL drama I've sat through, and honestly I went in knowing better. I had it on while I was doing cardio at the gym, and what struck me was just how much the plot echoed the last one I watched. Same step brother romance angle, same mystery girlfriend showing up near the end, same extra guy pining after one of the leads. Genuinely the only thing going for it was the runtime, the whole thing wrapped up in forty five minutes flat.  The setup kicks off with Finn moving schools because his mom just married into money. He finds out his new step brother Aiden goes to the same place, and he's warned to keep his distance from him. Their first run in at school is rocky, just like you'd expect, but there's this odd pull between them neither can shake off. Finn keeps telling himself not to read into it because Aiden's straight and openly homophobic. Things shift when some kids start bullying Finn and the student council president, Ryan, steps in to ...
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The Skin Of The Teeth

By Golu
In the days of social media and dating apps, it's easy to pretend someone you are not and hide information about you be it age, your occupation, health status anything at all. All it takes is some hot pictures and need for sexual fulfillment. This experimental film tries to show us what happens if a person is forced to come clean and be truthful about themselves, are there repercussions to that?

The plot is simple yet complicated. A young gay man named Josef goes over to the apartment of an older man named John for a date night. After taking a pill in John's bedroom, they both start dancing and soon Josef starts to find reality slipping. Next thing you know is John falls down and Josef is arrested for allegedly murdering John. Now he's forced to deal with two boxer-clad police detectives, a mask-wearing public defender, and all kinds of odd figures who come in and out of the interrogation room, trying to extract information about him and decide whether or not he'll be charged for murder. But is this really happening or is this all after effects of this experimental drug that he took?

It feels like the director was going for an experimental cinematic vibe, but its strangeness seems even more arbitrary than it needs to be, preventing us from being emotionally invested in the proceedings. We are told absolutely nothing about either Josef or John to either empathize or have an opinion. You're forced to construct your own idea of who the character is solely through the dialogue-heavy scenes, but a lot of it is merely fed to the viewer instead of being shown. There is a scene in middle of interrogation where Josef is seen waking up in bed next to John, suggesting that the freakish events may be a nightmare or perhaps a hallucination induced by the drug he took. But then nothing comes out of that scene. The film is not bad, it's an interesting take but sadly a one that goes nowhere in particular. An attempt to show a gay man of  color dealing with voyeurism, police brutality, privilege and prejudice but without real depth or complexity. Even the ending wasn't super clear, since he comes out of interrogation room , back to John's apartment. We just don't know everything that is happening is real or imaginary. Maybe neither or maybe both. (5/10)
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