Thanks for the memories!

Just perfect...

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

I stumbled upon this movie in the wee hours of the morning and couldn't stop watching it. It's not the best movie I've seen, but it's something that any gay/bi-sexual man should check out at least once in their lifetime. Ditto for those curious about what the GLBT life can be like, and anyone else who just happens to be in the mood for a neat, quick, very realistic drama. The main character is enticing and intriguing. He serves as kind of an enigma for most of the movie, until the end, when his full-on grief is laid out for all to see. It is heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. It did my heart good to see that even though there is violence in the world, that the victims of such violence can learn to forgive and to rebuild. This movie is def a classic.

I saw this movie about 2 years ago and I still recommend it to my friends. I did just that today actually.The whole movie is an emotional ride. What's going on? Why did he leave him? The ending had me in tears. It was so sad seeing a wonderful relationship destroyed. I don't want to give anything away because it was such a moving movie.Some made a comment about this movie being too gay. Yes it involved 2 gay men, but I think straight people should see this movie as well to see that relationships are all the same. Some get destroyed for the wrong reasons. And just think, gay people can say that MOST movies are too straight. But then there wouldn't be many movies to go see. So, gay or straight, just watch it for the storyline and meaning.

URBANIA (2000) *** Dan Futterman, Alan Cumming, Matt Keeslar, Josh Hamilton, Lothaire Bluteau, Bill Sage, Barbara Sukowa, Paige Turco. Futterman gives a strong performance as an insomniatic homosexual man trying to come to grips with the loss of a lover during one stressed out evening in New York City with the novelty of daylight savings time giving him an extra hour of redemption as he seeks retribution and only adding fuel to the fire by striking up conversations with urban legends mixed with anomie and angst. Original script by director Jon Shear and Daniel Reitz is crafty in its depiction of the darker side of one's mind and the lengths one can go to in a downward spiral with reminiscent tones to Scorsese's `After Hours' of Gotham as a limbo to hell.

I'd had this taped but unwatched on my Tivo several times over the past two years, because its reviews during its theatrical release described it as so dark and depressing. It appeared again this week on IFC, and this time I trusted my Tivo's suggestions. It's dark and ambiguous: both a noirish exercise in style and a surprisingly poignant, necessarily non-linear, study of loss and grief, with excellent performances by Dan Futterman as Charlie, a skilled supporting cast, and an all-too-brief appearance by Alan Cumming (whom I usually don't care for when he's playing Britoid fey, sexually ambiguous roles as in Julie Taymor's _Titus_). Anyone who can quote Glenda Jackson from _Sunday, Bloody Sunday_ and invite Charlie to stay and watch _Women in Love_ with him is a friend of mine. Given that Cumming's native Scottish accent verges on outtakes from _Trainspotting_, I appreciated how perfectly he sounded as a NYC aesthete.[potential spoilers]It may be simplistic to treat this as a revenge fantasy, and this may sound cold (and defiantly oblivious to the real-life cases) but gay bashing as a dramatic theme requires all the artistry a writer can muster, and after seeing it treated mawkishly 24 or so years ago in NYC in Torch Song Trilogy (with Harvey F. and Matthew B.), I'm inclined to view every attempt since as another exercise in agitprop. I'm not sure that Urbania completely avoids this, though it wins points for its indirection.The final scenes in his former lover Chris' "apartment" seemed like eerily prescient outtakes from today's _Dead Like Me_ or _Six Feet Under_, and the symbolism was surprisingly unsubtle. And I would swear that that Chris' tufted off-white Mies Van Der Rohe chaise-longue was featured in this week's NYTimes.Finally, maybe it's deliberate or just me, but I thought that both his former lover and the neighbor upstairs looked exactly like tidied-up versions of the street thug and were all played by the same actor. Even though they weren't, you might appreciate all three of them as variants of Charlie's "type" (would they be "Charlie's Angels"?)