A Revry original, Unconventional is a really well-liked queer dramedy that feels totally different from the usual stuff. The heart of the story is about two pretty eccentric queer siblings and their partners trying to build a family that doesn't follow the traditional rules. It takes a super raw and unfiltered look at queer life, diving deep into things like mental health, addiction, and how complicated identity and relationships can get. It’s not afraid to get messy or show people at their most vulnerable, and it really pushes boundaries while showing a lot of different queer experiences. The first season has nine episodes, and each one is about a half-hour long. The story centers on Noah, a grad student who’s been struggling for years to wrap up his PhD. He’s been with his husband, Dan, for nine years, and they’ve recently gotten married and moved to Palm Springs. While they're trying to figure out how to start a family and have a baby, they decide to shake things up by in...
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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