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Al Mar (Spanish) [The Sea]

By Golu
This movie was just plain weird. I really went in wanting to like it, but the whole pretentious, overly poetic vibe, combined with this choppy editing that keeps hopping back and forth in these tiny five to ten second bursts, just made it feel dragged out for no real reason, way too self indulgent if you ask me. Honestly this could've been trimmed down to a fifteen minute short and lost nothing. And I still don't get what the deal was with women dancing along the beach while some overwrought, flowery narration plays over the top. The plot creeps along at a snail's pace, slowly building toward some confrontation that you can see coming from a mile away and that just gets duller the closer it gets. By the time it actually happened I'd totally checked out as a viewer, even with two genuinely good looking guys leading the film. The setup itself is pretty basic. Lorena and Diego are trying to settle into a new life in a small town by the coast, both nervously starting fresh ...
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Acts Of Love (Documentary)

By Golu

Honestly I couldn't quite decide if this counts as a film or a documentary. Since it's shown up at a few doc festivals, I'm just going with documentary for now. The setup is that after his older boyfriend loses interest in him, a filmmaker packs up and moves to Chicago, then starts using dating apps to recruit new guys into this loose, undefined project exploring attraction, compatibility, and attachment, something his own mother apparently can't stand. Sitting through all seventy something minutes of it, my honest take is this thing feels completely aimless, and even the people who made it seem to admit that themselves. It does raise some genuinely hard questions, but they come across more like natural byproducts of trying to figure out intimacy in a situation where nobody ever sets clear boundaries.

Bethel splits from his older boyfriend and settles into life in Chicago. He knows he wants to start some kind of film project but has zero clue what it's actually about. He narrows down a pool of Grindr matches and invites around twelve guys to meet him face to face. These conversations kick off in Bethel's studio and wander through a ton of territory, how Grindr has reshaped their whole approach to dating, their libidos fading over time, their sexual tastes, the subcultures they're part of, and their thoughts on art in general. The energy mimics a first date almost exactly, flirtatious, disjointed, awkward at times, then suddenly turning sharp and openly sexual. From there it gets even more experimental, with each guy handed a kind of script drawn from these encounters, digging into attraction, desire, sex, and closeness. Randomly, we also get cut ins of Bethel on the phone with his mom. She's warm but wary, and she keeps pushing him to think through the ethics of what he's doing and what he's actually hoping to get out of it. She brings up the risk of broadcasting his private life so publicly, possibly overstepping boundaries with these men, and openly wonders if the whole thing is really just narcissism dressed up as art. At some point his ex boyfriend resurfaces too, and this attempt to patch things up understandably knocks Bethel completely off balance.

There's a genuinely interesting concept buried in here about gay love and sex, but the execution just never delivers on it. A handful of the guys share thoughts that actually land, but most of that gets cut or sidelined entirely, and the editing itself is a mess, stitched together with random self indulgent narration and still photos thrown in. The mom pushes back hard on the pretentiousness of the whole thing, yet the filmmaker basically shrugs off any real criticism, hers included. On the whole this film just feels pointless and empty. If I'm being honest the only part that actually worked for me was the first five minutes, where Bethel talks about falling for an older man. If he'd built just that into a tight twenty five minute short, it would've been a far stronger piece of work. As it stands, this was just bad. (2/10)

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