Plan B (2010)

The greatest movie ever made..!

Don't listen to the negative reviews

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Plan B works off a fantastic premise and keeps you hooked for most of the movie. I found myself personally rooting for the relationship while also wanting better for the girl. The film doesn't treat her as badly as, say, straight women fetishizing gay men in fandoms would (this is a whole big thing altogether), but she still deserved better. The camera also just lingers, and the audience takes in whatever they could from the zoomed out frames and certain angles highlighting certain body parts. Therefore there was this disconnect from the audience with the characters, and it could also be the actors at fault. But the film thankfully runs off a premise so enticing, and mostly delivers what it builds up to.

This film tells the story of a man meeting another man in the gym, and they befriend each other. It actually is not a chance meeting, but a carefully planned meeting in order to break up the new relationship of his ex-girlfriend.I have to say that the subplot of trying to destroy the ex-girlfriend's relationship is not very obvious to me. All I see is a gay man who seduces a straight man, and to various degrees of success at different time points. The pace is slow and there are many stationary shots which prolongs the film unnecessarily. I can't say I liked the film too much, but I did find it cute that the gay guy has to test the water and come up with different excuses to make a move on the straight guy.

Plan B is a really good film, one where the groundwork is laid out beyond "two men meet and fall in love". You can still sort of see where the story will go, but it doesn't matter. It's done and told in such an effective and mesmerizing way, you can't help but really invest in it and these characters. The two leads are pretty fantastic and are totally up for the ride. The film uses a lot of long shots to establish its mood, and I personally think it helps to set the events a lot. It's paced very patiently and effectively, and I think the realism and the acting is what helps bring these characters to complete life and makes you want to see them together.

A fine motion picture about male friendship taken to the physical plane and turned into a homoerotic relationship. Certainly the undercurrent was there (as seen in the last reel), moving the characters together rather unconsciously, but the liaison had not been expressly planned. In my opinion, the script has a few shortcomings, starting with the initial proposition: a young man who cannot win back his ex girlfriend, decides to seduce the guy she is having an affair with. That is the "excuse" to develop the story of how two normal guys find out they love each other, first just as candidly as two 12-year-old kids would love each other, and then making it grow as adults, just as plain lovers. I had my doubts about watching it, but after it was finished I was more pleased than hypercritical. My problem with most films with homosexual stories is that I believe they hardly get close to what the "real thing" is: many are advertising campaigns for the unwary; others, plain pornography, and far too many, soap operas with stories that probably would get better after The End, and so on. "Plan B" goes beyond these stereotyped formulas, and tries something different for a change. Nicely acted by the two lead players, with a cast of (apparently) non-professional actors that makes things more believable. Give it a try, no matter what your sexual orientation is.