The Worst Film Ever

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Blistering performances.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

"Interior. Leather Bar" shouldn't have been made. It didn't need to be made. Only the reigning poseur king of "art" filmaking James Franco and his idiot director friend Travis Mathews would have thrown this sixty minute hairball up on any screen.Yes, William Friedkin's "Cruising" was controversial. The bad press it received before and after being made and released effectively killed it. It was pretty much forgotten by everyone, even those gay men who arrived in the life long after it was made and rejected. The stories that sprang up around "Cruising" are more interesting than the film itself, i.e. the crowds of LGBT activists picketing and disrupting the actual filming, the disclaimer Friedkin was forced to add to the credit sequences which stated the film was not a blanket condemnation of the entire gay community, and the "lost" sex scenes filmed at actual NYC leather bars. As it is now known, there never were explicit sex scenes filmed. It's an urban legend. "Interior.Leather Bar" is a sham from beginning to end. Nothing looks correct, the music is wrong, and let's not get started on the eyeshadow being applied to the men in their borrowed leather gear. Franco and Mathews simply wanted to make an "important statement" buried under gay porn so they hitched their exploitation horse to an antique cart full of actors (both gay and straight) who were never actually there during the leather heydays of the late 70s. Everyone is acting and discussing their motivations in the spaces between filming. You know there's going to be trouble when the camera searches actor Val Lauren (who's pretending to be Al Pacino) driving to the shoot and listening to his phone messages. The first call from his wife or girlfriend establishes his heterosexuality and the second is from an unknown man who dismisses Lauren's decision to appear in "Franco's f*ggot movie". Lauren agonizes for an hour about the sex that may or not happen and tries to find his inner Pacino. He can't find it and comes across as both whiny and pretentious, as if his involvement in this project is beneath him.Leather bars are a dying institution. Their function was derailed by the AIDS crisis and more recently by the tsunami of "normalization" for LGBT people over the past decades. The raw acting out of men who played games without rules has been traded for SUVs, parenting, and PTA meetings once a month. Franco's soggy pretend leathermen can all be found waiting tables at any West Hollywood restaurants. The exposure and decline of the leather and backroom world began with "Cruising" and deserves a better, more fitting eulogy than this stupid mess. Two stars for the exposed dicks and at least one actor who actually looks like he stepped out of the 70s onto the floor of the Mineshaft NYC. This ridiculous twaddle was made only to pad the resumes of Franco and Mathews, who think they're really saying something about sexual freedom. It's disingenuous in the extreme and not worth losing an hour of your life to view it.

This was truly terrible. Franco wanted to make gay porn and made up a reason to do it, cloaking it as "art". It is more aptly described as "Fart" because it stinks. The film is basically 45 minutes of talking about shooting the "missing 40 minutes" of Cruising then actually showing about ten minutes of film inside a gay leather bar. Having just watched the actual movie, I can tell you that this piece would not fit into the film. Didn't look right in terms of color or atmosphere. And the guy playing Pacino? A chubby unattractive man? No. There is explicit gay sex-an actor gives oral sex to another guy and everything is shown. It's just porn-nothing more. Franco looks like a strange freakshow, almost drooling while saying "I wish I wasn't brought up in such a hetero normative world". The biggest problem here is that Franco claims that he is bothered that gay love isn't shown as fully as straight love, but then he shows 5 minutes of a man sucking another guy. Its exploitation in its worst form.

This film takes as inspiration the 1980 film Cruising, which I've only seen clips of (e.g. in documentaries about film), and the idea that there's 40 minutes or so that was destroyed in order to achieve a more favourable rating. (I'll assume you know all about Cruising because you can look it up here on IMDb).Yet this film is not a replacement of those supposed 40 minutes, nor is it a documentary about how Franco and Mathews attempted to re-imagine them. Instead, they play fictional versions of themselves, so doing. So they get two shots at re-imagining those 40 minutes.On the simplest level, there is the scene of actor Val playing Al Pacino's character Steve from the film Cruising, which to me seemed entirely believable, and could have fit into the original film. Then there are more sexual scenes, including scenes of oral sex between men. Together, these form a vivid re-imagining of what might have been shot and destroyed. Maybe.But the story is where the actual re-imagining is. Val (the character) is straight, like Steve in Cruising. Through his work, he is put into an in-your-face gay sexual environment, and overcomes initial hesitation, to become comfortable with the people in that environment. (I can't compare further with Cruising, not having seen it).I think there's a third layer, which is the audience who is also taken to a place cinema doesn't usually go to. The film doesn't interact back with us, but it's a sense of what Val and Steve experienced.In the film, James makes some interesting points regarding the explicit sex, and there's no doubt that's the big discussion topic for this film. I think he might be just a year too late to be correct about what audiences watch, but still his point that intimate love and sex should be shown without timidity in film, including same-sex, is correct.An earlier film that I really liked was 9 Songs (2004). A large portion of that film is the leading man and leading woman making love together. But it told a story about the course of that couple's relationship, and I don't think it could have been done any other way. There should be room for this kind of film in cinema, so these stories can be told without being dumped in with the porn, and then overlooked.But specifically regarding explicit gay sex in the telling of a story, it's already happened, via Shortbus (2006). Other audiences have seen I Want Your Love, a short and then a feature-length film by director Mathews (of this film) and including explicit sex between men. And the recent Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, I'm told, includes explicit sex between women. So this film is a bit late to break truly new ground.But more generally (and in stark contrast to television) cinema, and even this film oddly, has been afraid to show much in the way of male couples having the anal sex everyone thinks they're having. I don't think since Brokeback Mountain (2005) there has been a major male film star do this until this year's Kill Your Darlings. Hollywood ought to be able to do a lot better than that. Everyone is already thinking it, so just show something appropriate to the film.On the theme of missing same-sex film scenes, a (much, much tamer) scene from the film 54 (1998) was recently leaked online showing a kiss filmed between its stars Ryan Phillippe and Breckin Meyer. So apparently old footage does sometimes find its way to audiences.Part of the experience of seeing this film, I think, is the locale in which you see it. Much as I never expected to see a Bruce LaBruce film series at a mainstream festival in the middle of 1999 Dallas, I wouldn't have expected to see this in Windsor, Ontario. That's how it should be seen.

In 2013, James Franco sets the gold standard for self-indulgent Auteur and on a scale that rivals even Andy Warhol. 'Interior. Leather Bar.' (Co-Directed with Travis Mathews) is just one of many Franco-projects that I've found myself viewing this past year (see also: 'Child of God', 'This is the End', 'Oz The Great and Powerful', 'Lovelace', 'Maladies', 'Tar', 'Spring Breakers', 'The Iceman' - and those are just the ones I managed to catch at various festivals). Looking forward to 2014, the man has an entire lifetime of projects (for some actor/directors) in varying stages of production. My take on his absolutely madding and eclectic trajectory; Franco has found a new type of celebrity excess and, be it a creative excess or not, I can't really purport its value to anyone except Franco himself. The films vary from insightful to entertaining, slow & introspective to over-the-top and self-aware. There is not a solid through-line to this career but there is no denying that Franco has an unquenchable thirst for experience and you gotta love him just a bit for sharing it with us. Experience has to have been the impetus for the documentary 'Interior. Leather Bar.' which followings a film crew (Franco included) as they attempt to reimagine the 40 minutes of footage censored by the MPAA from William Friedkin's 1980 film 'Cruising'. The film stared Al Pacino as an undercover cop and follows his investigation of a series of murders in New York City's gay underground. 'Cruising' explores the darkest corners of gay culture: anonymous cruising for sex in public parks and notorious S&M clubs with names like the Eagle's Nest, the Ramrod, and the Cock Pit. It's unclear what footage was actually cut from the original film as it has never been viewed publicly but the general assumption is that it consisted of actual gay sex shot in explicit detail as was true to life in these pre-AIDS-era clubs. The set up for 'Interior. Leather Bar.' is a desire by Franco to expose this suppression and to face what it is that's considered subversive in our culture and explore why it is taboo. After speaking to a number of different people at the Polari Film Festival after party (at Austin's best attempt at a leather bar), I gather that few people actually believed that the film achieved this; I, myself, being one of the skeptics. Instead of placing himself in the Al Pacino role – the straight man posing as gay in the most salacious environment imaginable – Franco recruits long-time friend and acting colleague Val Lauren ('The Salton Sea' / 'Live from Baghdad'). Lauren struggles with the content (which his agent outright refers to as pornography and begs him to decline involvement for the sake of his career), he is given no script, and only the slightest direction as he is plunged into a darkly lit set, surrounded by men in the throes of passion, punishment, and partying. Franco makes appearances, gets up close with his camera, and we get a few asides with him and Lauren as they step away from set and try to come to terms with what they are doing and why; there is a genuine sense that both are disturbed by what they've accomplished and, for Lauren, this single-day shoot might be a life-changing event. Here lies the crux of this film - Franco seems to have a legion of pseudo-sycophants at his disposal who are willing to indulge his every whim. 'Interior. Leather Bar.' seems to be nothing more than one such whim with Lauren as his proxy, playing out the experiences that Franco is too frightened to touch. Alternately, this could be a truly elaborate practical joke directed toward Lauren for reasons unknown – or, perhaps, for no reason but as a salve for Franco's boredom with his own normality. Regardless of its intention the film is an exciting experiment in documentary filmmaking and as mixed as my feelings are concerning the filmmaker, he has accomplished something truly intriguing. -David Massey (www.popculturebeast.com)