GAY MOVIE REVIEW: Ethan Mao

This is a new feature here at QC.com! We have gotten a lot of hits for our movie stuff -- in fact, if you had typed in "lgbt movies" in google for a few days there, QC.com was the number three hit!!! :-) So we'll keep that up, shall we? Besdies, I do a lot of sitting in front of the TV with my computer studying, so there's lots and lots of time for me to watch...

Ethan Mao

It has sat on my shelf for almost a year now, and I kept swearing I was going to watch it. I got it in the bargain bin at Blockbuster like I do all my movies. Thanks to my affection for Happy Together,  the first gay movie I ever watched and was about Asian gays, I thought this would interest me as easily.

The story is about Ethan, and his roommate Romeo, accidentally-on-purpose taking his family hostage a few months after he gets kicked out for being gay. Predictably, in independent gay movies, the boy turns to hustling and drugs as a way of coping and making money. In an attempt to steal money from his father, they show up unexpectedly and suddenly we have a hostage situation on our hands. Not so unexpectedly for a movie of this genre. I often wonder if the difference between big-budget movies and independents is that big-budget movies depict stories that are thought out and purposeful... where as independents show the randomness of life. 

There are very few surprises in this flick. Not so surprisingly, Ethan and Remigio (pronounced Romeo) are in love and don't know it. Not so surprisingly, there is a really strong mom issue throughout. Not so surprisingly, someone sells them out when they say they won't. Not so surprisingly, there is an evil stepmom twist and an attempt to seduce one of the two hostage takers. On top of that, the accting is mediocre to good, and the lines are sometimes delivered as if in a high school play.

Honestly, Ethan screaming to his stepmom "I said piss in your pants, bitch!" (and she does) could have been a great one-liner out of this flick, but it was delivered weakly. 

That said, I'll probably watch it again. The boys are passably cute, and, despite the inevitably of jail at the end, it is a rather interesting love story. The final kiss is sweet, though the final line about it -- "you'll be the first person I kiss if I ever love anyone" -- is weak and pandering to the main story line. Sadly, I kind of wanted just to see the two main characters doing that a quarter of the way into the movie, during one of their drug highs, rather than five minutes before it ended. 

The character development is astounding for everyone involved, right down to the brothers. Everyone grows, and it is believable growth that we see. The script is excellent and the movie is worth it for that much, at least. 

I also expected more out of Quentin Lee -- the director. Honestly, some of the shots were weak and blocked half of the face of the character in the middle of action. There was too much panned lighting, though the shot of the urine going down stepmom's leg onto the nice carpeting was sheer brilliance. The out-of-focus-into-focus shot is overdone in the genre, too, btw. I get it. Things are becoming "clearer."

At only 87 minutes, it's easy to get through, though the dream sequences will leave you going "what what what" more often than not. Watch it, but take it as a slightly different twist on the typical gay love story, but you'll find yourself often thinking "yea, I feel like I've seen some of this before."

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