Latter Days (Unrated Edition)
by C. Jay Cox
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DVD details
Actor: Amber Benson, Jacqueline Bisset, Mary Kay Place, Steve Sandvoss, Wes RamseyDirector: C. Jay Cox
Brand: TLA Releasing
Writer: C. Jay Cox
Producer: Darryl Anderle
Producer: G. Sterling Zinsmeyer
Producer: George Bendele
Producer: J. Todd Harris
Producer: Jennifer Schaefer
Producer: Kermit Johns
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 107 minutes
Published: 2004-09-01
DVD Release Date: 2004-09-07
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: TLA Releasing
DVD Reviews of Latter Days (Unrated Edition)
DVD Review: Okay gay romance, not very good movie, castrated nudity
Summary: 3 Stars
I bought "Latter Days" because I've been watching gay romance movies lately, guided primarily by Amazon reviews, and this was the next high-rated one I came across. I watched it, as I'm watching all of them, primarily for entertainment, not for help in dealing with being gay.
I grew up during the 50s and 60s in the heart of the Bible Belt, and I've been a born-again Christian for almost 40 years, so I've had a lot of experience with religious opposition to homosexuality. But I've resolved those issues for myself in a way that's a lot more satisfactory than what this movie offers, so for me it's just a love story.
As a love story, this one is okay. As a movie, it's not very good. Not bad, just a little clunky and amateurish. Maybe if the acting had been better, the romance might have been more believable and moving.
Stephen Sandvoss is one of the world's most beautiful and evidently nicest men, so it's hard to imagine ANYBODY--male or female, gay or straight--not melting into a puddle at his feet. But besides that, there's not much to make the relationship between his Aaron and Wes Ramsey's Chris believable. The two actors clearly did their best, with obvious dedication and sincerity, but they just didn't pull it off. There was neither the burning passion of movies like "Just a Question of Love" and "Shelter," nor the tenderness of "Beautiful Thing." It was more like seeing two magnets slam together and stick than watching two human beings drawn to each other by any kind of real human desire.
Until recently I would have assumed that the stiffness was partly because the actors are straight, and talent alone could never make them gay enough for the sexual attraction to be really believable. But the movie I saw before this one blew that argument out of the water. That was the extraordinary French movie "Presque Rien," whose lead actors also are straight, so I know straight actors can do it.
In "Presque Rien" (the English-subtitled version is called "Come Undone"), not only is the attraction between the two main characters completely believable--both very tender AND very passionate--but the characters themselves are deeply dimensioned, fully formed human beings, not caricatures at all. Although they do evolve to a limited extent in "Latter Days," Aaron and Chris are never more than caricatures.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with caricatures. They can be very useful in getting a point across, but they're not as interesting in themselves as real, complex human characters are. Mathieu and Cédric in "Presque Rien" are real, complex human characters who are hard NOT to believe in.
C Jay Cox's screenplay, songs, and direction in "Latter Days" are pretty good, but I found one thing he did over and over very annoying. There's plenty of full nudity in this movie--including a long scene with Aaron and Chris making love and then talking in bed, completely naked and without a cover in sight--but there's not a single frame anywhere in this movie with a penis in it. Not one. To me, that's just weird.
It's not that I insist on seeing penises--I've seen plenty of them--but it gets weird when in scene after scene after scene that's the only thing you DON'T see. And the way it's done isn't natural. The characters move around like acrobats into all sorts of positions that ought naturally to leave them exposed, but every single time that's about to happen, a knee or a thigh or some other conveniently choreographed body part--or even the clutter on a hotel-room credenza--pops up in EXACTLY the right spot just in the nick of time to be a virtual fig leaf, protecting our eyes from the ONLY part of the male anatomy we're evidently not allowed to see.
It comes off as coy and unnatural and very irritating. Men have penises. If you're going to have naked men gamboling around in your movie and you're going to show EVERYTHING else, please don't leave out the penises as if there's something wrong with them! It's just creepy. I can understand not wanting to show limp penises in a torrid sex scene (that could be even weirder), but afterwards, when the men are just talking, why not?
When I discovered that there are two versions of this DVD, an unrated and an R-rated version, I thought maybe I ended up with the R-rated version by mistake, but I checked and I didn't. Mine is unrated. There's really no excuse for this kind of coyness in an unrated gay movie, unless the actors insisted on it.
Since they're both straight and were new in the business when "Latter Days" was made, maybe Sandvoss and Ramsey just didn't want their private parts shown all over the Internet. If that's what happened, it's understandable. But if it was done to satisfy some sick standard of "decency," it's not. In either case, what Cox should have done instead was have much less general nudity in the movie, not censor penises only.
Three of the other movies I mentioned above don't show penises much either, if at all, but they also don't show anywhere near as much nudity, so the overall effect seems natural. "Presque Rien" shows a lot of both nudity and penises. Either of those formulas is fine. It's just this castrated sort of nudity that's weird.
As I said, I didn't get personal encouragement or comfort from this movie as others have, mainly because I didn't need it. But I take their word that it's here, and I deeply respect anything, including this movie, that helps wounded human beings heal. It's just not something I can testify to myself.
Description of Latter Days (Unrated Edition)
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