Get A Life was a direct to video release that certainly had a singular vision in mind. I'm sure that the creators had a valid enough story to tell, although I just don't see how marketable that story could be with the general population. I far that there's a more personal angle to things in terms of why this story was created in the first place. And I certainly don't want it to seem like I'm picking on the person behind the story more than anything else.
But man, it's hard to even imagine how this movie could have been more tolerable at the very least. There's not all that much that I can salvage from this story to make it somehow palatable.
Synopsis: Get A Life is a 2006 direct-to-video gay movie written and directed by Toby Ross.
Jaime (Brian Cambell) is a self-identified troll within the gay community - those who feel they're too old or somehow else undesirable from a physical perspective. He remains single and is increasingly frustrated with his lack of prospects - and this is despite regular visits to a rather sleazy establishment hidden in the back room of a local bookstore.
Things seem to change for Jaime when he meets Monty (Michael Gonring), a visiting young man who is experimenting with bisexuality before his inevitable marriage. And Monty seems to have a thing for "trolls" and thus Jaime finds he's competing for Monty's attentions from time to time. We continue to follow along Jaime's routine and all the different things that make up his life. His boss at work supports him, but he has an extremely homophobic co-worker who is determined to make Jaime's life difficult. And Jaime's desperate search for love also leads to a few odd situations including a formal arrest and Jaime experimenting in drag.
My poor appraisal of this movie has nothing to do with the actual video quality. Indie movies are indie movies and you don't exactly need a Hollywood budget to tell a good story. But that's what this movie lacked - a solid story worth telling. There may have been one buried somewhere in this movie, however the result was this odd steam-of-consciousness narrative. I can generally understand that perhaps the creator wanted to do the whole slice-of-life sort of narrative, but we have to concede that Jaime isn't exactly someone that you'd really want to know more about.
The characters are depressing and with very low self-esteem. Plus no one in this movie could really act, and so you're sort of half-expecting that the whole thing will shift into a skin flick at some point in the movie. Instead the horrors never end and at times you may feel a little lecherous yourself for even participating in this movie experience by taking the time to even watch it.
The central theme of the movie (I think) stems from the often repeated statement "I want a straight lover who is gay just for me." If that's not a horrible, depressing statement that no self-respecting gay man would say, I don't know what is. It just sends the wrong message on so many levels - gay men should never aspire to find the myth that is the straight man who somehow becomes gay for you out of love. Sure, you can probably find a guy who'd be intimate with you for the right price, but again that's hardly something to aspire for.
Get A Life needs to get a story first before it can hope to gain any kind of a audience, even in the home video market. So save yourself some grief and don't even bother thinking about watching this movie. It gets half a start out of five only because I don't feel right about giving zero star ratings.
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