Interior. Leather Bar. (2013)

That was an excellent one.

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

I like James Franco as an actor, and he seems like he'd be a cool person to hang out with. It's James Franco the writer/director/artist/poet/musician/provocateur that's a problem for me. Part of it is envy, I'll admit (I wish I had freedom and funding to indulge all MY creative whims), but a larger part of it is I suspect that James Franco the Multifaceted Artist is a total poser."Interior. Leather Bar." doesn't dispel my belief that Franco is a poser, but it also re-enforces my belief that he'd be a cool friend. Val Lauren, the actor playing Al Pacino's character from the movie "Cruising," thinks Franco is a cool friend, Franco's involvement the primary reason he's agreed to participate in this project, even as his agent strongly advises him not to (his wife just wants him home in time for dinner). He seems more intrigued by playing a role originated by Pacino than Franco's and co-director Travis Mathews' stated thesis that the leather bars of "Cruising" represent a subculture that's fading away as homosexuals gain greater acceptance in mainstream society. (AIDS might also have had something to do with it but I guess that's too sad. Also: "Cruising" as a gay culture touchstone? Not sure about that.) When Lauren questions James Franco directly about why he thinks the missing 40 minutes from William Friedkin's "Cruising" needs to be explored, Franco says something about needing to confront the world of gay leather bars to challenge fears he has only because he was raised to have them. This seems like something that could be challenged by getting a trial subscription to any one of a number of gay porn sites, or while making all the gay-themed movies he's been a part of ("Milk," "Howl," "The Broken Tower"), but maybe he just wants to be sure he's been thoroughly challenged.But "Interior. Leather Bar." does more meandering than challenging. Actors, both gay and straight, spend most of their time wondering what's expected of them. Some of wonder if James Franco will be in the movie and if he will get naked (not really and no, respectively). Others wonder just how far they are expected to go. Pretty far, as it turns out: real, non-simulated sex takes place, though it barely makes up five minutes of screen time in the total ten minutes of leather bar footage. Consequently, the movie is labeled porn by some, though I don't think it is. In fact, one sex scene seems realer than most, and you actually sense an emotional connection between the couple involved. Pretty impressive when you consider they've got an audience — including an Oscar-nominated actor — circling them as they get busy on a sofa. It's not a surprise to learn immediately after that the actors are a couple off-screen. Though Lauren seems pretty shell-shocked by the action on set, he compliments the two men, telling them they appear to have a great relationship. For his part, Franco isn't a co-director so much as the project's instigator. Mathews does the bulk of the directing, with Franco shown leaving early, right after watching two dudes have sex. Make of that what you will."Interior. Leather Bar." is presented as being the re-creation of the missing 40 minutes from "Cruising," but it's more like a glorified DVD extra accompanying a movie that was never finished. It's strangely fascinating but also frustratingly pointless.

I don't know where to start with this piece of rubbish.I had read about the controversy surrounding the "film" (??) and thought it would be interesting to see what the fuss was all about.First we sit through auditions of gay men "cruising" into the camera, which is just unbearable to watch. Then we see everyone questioning why this is being made, what's the purpose, what's the point?? James Franco says that gay sex should be shown, as sex is a beautiful thing. Unfortunately we don't see gay men have sex. We see one man have his penis sucked and one man lick shoes.The end. Pointless.James Franco was trying to be daring and controversial, instead to me it has come across as completely vain and boring.James Franco - clearly a bisexual man, just wanted to grab some attention. He hasn't got the guts to come out of the closet, yet wants to gain attention from the gay community. Vain - yes. Creative - not at all in any way.If you need to see a great gay film, watch "GBF" or "Another Gay Sequel" these REAL films are creative, colorful, fun and would have been made on much smaller budgets than this piece of utter garbage.

In 1980, Exorcist director William Friedkin made yet another movie that found another great way to stir up controversy and etch itself onto the front page of newspapers. His directorial effort Cruising was a film about Al Pacino's cop character going undercover in seedy gay bars in order to catch a series of murders in the specific area. The film divided critics, enraged the homosexual community, who even held boycotts and sent Friedkin death-threats over the film, and the film forever lived with a looming cloud of infamy over its head, with more comments being made about its impact over its quality.As someone who has recently sat through Cruising, I fully understand why. It's an only adequate little thriller that is levied by the fact that it is such a curious piece of film history. There's not too much special about it other than a decently ambiguous Pacino performance and some well-photographed atmosphere, specifically inside the gay bars. Adding to the curiosity of the film, legend has it that forty minutes of the film had to be cut for it to achieve an R-rating rather than the ominous X-rating films were being stamped with during this time. The forty minutes are rumored to contain graphic gay sex as well as intimate scenes in the gay bars between its patrons.This brings me to Interior. Leather Bar., a sixty-minute film by the likes of James Franco and Travis Mathews. The film is a mockumentary, following the Franco and Mathews as they attempt to assemble, cast, and reimagine the lost forty minutes of Cruising themselves. From the way Franco acts and interviews, one can easily see he's intrigued on how actors create an image once they begin and how they go about enforcing or affirming the image throughout careers. Evidently, Franco has used his fascination for public personas and celebrity images as the basis for Interior. Leather Bar., a thoroughly intriguing and deeply-contemplative film that possesses lengthy dialogs on the public's perception of sex as well as mumblecore-esque aesthetics and structure. I walked in assuming I was going to see the full forty minutes from Cruising recreated to fit Franco and Mathews' idea of how the scenes were actually conducted. Instead, both men recreate the experience of working on the set of a film with graphic scenes of gay sex when a majority of the actors - at least the main ones - are straight males, many with wives and kids. We get the opinions of all the actors working on recreating this lost footage to Franco and Mathews' liking. This provides for a feeling of seeing unseen parts of a film without seeing the specific parts, if that makes even an inkling of sex.A masterful scene comes about halfway through the film, with Franco talking to the project's main star Val Lauren, assuming the role of Al Pacino's character from Cruising. Lauren is a longtime friend of Franco, willing to help him out even on the most uncertain and unpredictable project thus far, but is having a hard time going through with a lot of the heavily gay scenes. He also has a difficult time understand the project's significance and Franco has a hard time explaining it. When Lauren and Franco (who, I believe, is playing himself here) sit down to talk about the scene, Franco goes into a discussion similar to the one I've had many times about how in many pieces of media, even something as minute and as trite as a commercial for toothpaste or toilet paper, we see a man and a woman. When we do see two men or two women together, presumably in a relationship, it isn't uncommon for there to be some uncomfortable vibes oozing through, to which Franco (and myself) blame on our exposure to one particular lifestyle for much of our life.Franco then dives into a discussion about how censorship boards shiver at the thought of graphic sexual content but barely flinch when they see explicit violence on screen. 'So violence is natural but sex, something everyone does, thinks about, and even views, isn't?' is a question he asks Lauren. Franco basically settles on the idea that he is making this film to try and steer us away from the thought of one particular lifestyle, as well as breaking down his own personal apprehension and uncomfortableness around this kind of material.Interior. Leather Bar. also seems to be acceptable to view as a time capsule for how gays are portrayed in cinema. Cruising wasn't blatantly homophobic in my eyes, but did possess somewhat understanding apprehension and caution to the lifestyle it greatly involved itself with. Interior. Leather Bar. presents its club scenes (when we do get a chance to see them, though they make up less than ten percent of the film) and even one major gay sex scene with a beautiful tenderness that would be given to an explicit sex scene between two women. Franco and Mathews' depiction of gay sex is a harmonious and wonderfully raw approach and an experience that could very well emphasize the theme of equality in the regard of how gay sex and straight sex are depicted.What a beautiful film Interior. Leather Bar. is, centering its sights on conversation and emotion rather than basic shock and awe. I'm still not one-hundred percent show I know what to make of it, but to speak fairly, I don't believe Franco really is either. However, I believe he has made something that he will likely look back on as one of his most audacious and daring films ever, which says a lot for an actor in his thirties who, judging by some risky choices recently, is just getting started.

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.