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 ...
Valentino is a porn star and Gary is a hustler and they are a couple, though it's far from exclusive. Valentino is also seeing Mary, , a fiery waitress with a curious inability to respect her customers. This love triangle is all well and good, until Valentino is stricken with an unnamed disease (read AIDS). At the same time Mary finds she is pregnant, so now the three must work through hard times together.
It's a premise that certainly holds the potential for an honest examination of how AIDS affects both its victims and their friends, ut the director instead fills the screen with garishness - in an effort, one suspects, to shock viewers that aren't familiar with this sort of lifestyle. This means we're treated to sequences in which transvestites parade around in bizarre outfits and interminable jaunts to loud clubs, with quieter moments of Valentino dealing with the disease few and far between. It sounds quite provocative, but it never quite develops three-way erotic charge it should have, for the balance is tipped heavily toward Valentino and Gary. Once Valentino starts to die of AIDS, and the film becomes awash with earnest sentiment--sentiment that isn't quite earned, for it's hard to care a whole lot about these self-involved characters. For the most part, the actors don't fill in the cracks. They try their best to keep up with all the hijinks, but despite their best efforts, none of them are able to create characters worth caring about. It's an overall quite a boring film. It is good to see the now famous faces do an indie film like this. I bet even Salma Hayek forgot she did a film like this. (1.5/10)
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