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Ten Bad Attitudes

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    I don't know why, but I dreaded watching 10 Attitudes, a new comedy that pro motes itself with the tagline "Finally - a gay Swingers."
     Was anyone really waiting for a gay Swingers? Have any gay people even seen that 1996 movie about wannabe actors who hang out in LA? If the best you can do is proclaim your movie the "gay Swingers" what’s next? The all-female Midnight Express? The French True Grit? The white The Wiz?
      Hoping to get some background on 10 Attitudes, I surfed over to the International Movie Database at IMDB.com. There, I saw the movie got a shockingly low user rating of 1.7. Granted, only six people voted, but 1.7 is still pretty low. To put that number in perspective, the stinker Ishtar has a user rating of 3.7, the leaden Valley of the Dolls gets a 5.4, and Pia Zadora starrer The Lonely Lady rates a 2.4.
      Just in case you think 10 Attitudes' low rating might be due to homophobia, two other gay comedies, Trick and The Broken Hearts Club, get a 6.9 and a 6.7, respectively.
     But the good thing about low expectations is that they can only go up. Hoping for the best, I invited my neighbors Gary and Real over to watch 10 Attitudes with me. If I turned out to be pleasantly surprised, I'd be happy to share a good time with them. If the movie turned out to be bad, well, misery loves company.
     As the DVD started, the full face of comedian Bruce Villanch appeared in what I first assumed was a public service announcement. Nobody quite heard what he had to say, and then the title music started playing.
     "Was that part of the movie?" Gary asked.
     "Who knows," I responded.
     Bruce was followed by a completely bizarre montage of unrelated shots. A muscle-bound stud emerges from a pool. A car drives down a street. Three men enter a sauna. A palm tree. All poorly lit and accompanied by bad music.
     "This looks like an infomercial," Gary observed. I thought of bad '70s porn, myself.
     The movie goes on (and on, and on - never have 88 minutes felt more like 800) to tell the story of Josh, a thirty-something caterer whose life falls apart when he finds his lover cheating on him. Josh vows to move back home to... wherever, I can’t even remember... but his best friend challenges him to go on 10 dates before giving up on LA.
     Technically, the movie is a horrifying mess. Bad camera angles, bad music, bad lighting and bad set design give new meaning to the word "amateurish." The film was obviously done on the cheap, and not endearingly so. Scenes shot at night are difficult to see, dialogue is hard to hear, and the handheld camerawork is at times nauseating to watch.
     The editing is sometimes jarringly staccato - not so much for artistic reasons, one suspects, but because the filmmakers didn't shoot enough coverage of several scenes. Other editing snafus include the bizarre disappearance and reappearance of the lead character's goatee over the course of the film, and frequent cutaways to characters whose facial expressions appear inappropriate for the scene in which they're appearing.
     All that aside, there are entertaining moments in the film. Some are due to the cast, which includes a very funny Judy Tenuta, David Faustino (from Married with Children), and openly gay comic Jim Bullock. Other funniness is contributed by the film's star, openly gay comic Jason Stuart. Stuart is OK, but he has neither the looks nor the charisma to carry a film. At one point, he appears shirtless, and you have to wonder what he was thinking.
     Stuart also co-produced and co-wrote the film, so you could say he has only himself to blame for the mess in which he finds himself. His penchant for casting very good-looking men as his dates might have inflated his ego, but it didn't do much for the film's believability.
     Stuart is a better writer than he is an actor. I loved Josh's reply when his boyfriend insisted that the adulterous sex he was caught having was just something that was "happening."
      "This isn't a 'happening'," Josh screams. "A 'happening' is something that happens with Barbra Streisand in Central Park!"
     At one point, Josh is propositioned by a male prostitute, whom he politely informs "I'm sorry, I just broke up with my boyfriend. I don't know if I'm at the point where I have to pay yet."
     Is 10 Attitudes worth seeing? Probably not. But it does show that even when buried in mud, talent will sometimes shine through. In this case, though, you have to look really hard.

Scott Sherman telecommutes to Washington, DC from the Richmond, Vermont home he shares with his partner and son.