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You Can't Stay Here (2023)
Worse than bad.
Verow is known for making extremely low budget movies that rely heavily on explicit (usually not simulated, meaning they are actually having sex on camera) sexuality. These films aren't GOOD, they're often trite and more often than not he is the star as well as writer and director. So you end up seeing quite a lot of Todd Verow having pornographic sex on screen.
"You Can't Stay Here" is his first film that does NOT have unsimulated sex scenes, which is likely because of the fact that he somehow managed to rope in big name stars like Diaz to appear/star. It's a shame because this incredibly boring movie could have used SOMETHING to make it interesting.
The film literally has no perspective, nothing fresh, nothing new going on. The plot has been done to death: closet case gets caught by wife having gay sex, turns to anonymous park sex for thrills, gets caught up in a murder mystery scenario. It's been done before, but so much better.
It's hard to tell if the acting in the film is uniformly terrible because it just is, or because the writing and dialog are so awful, but either way it's very nearly unwatchable. There is nothing suspenseful, thrilling or scary going on for a single second of this movie.
It looks like it was shot on iPhones, and not even the latest model. In that respect it just adds cheapness to the already cheap feeling the entire project elicits.
It's just BAD, from start to finish, and a low point in the ouvre Verow who has already made quite a lot of absolute garbage. Only people who are easily impressed or are trying to kiss the behind of famous people within queer cinema would find merit in this absolute slop.
Crated (2020)
SO boring.
Literally the first 12 minutes of the film were so boring that I stopped watching. Like, we get it, this guy is trapped in a crate. But do we need to watch three minutes of close-ups of his fingers trying to dig out screws from the crate using his car keys? Do we need two full minutes of him slamming his shoulders and feet against the walls trying to break down the crate?
If it's supposed to create a feeling of tension of suspense, it doesn't. It just makes you feel like they had an idea and very little content, so they were forced to create filler footage in order to make the film last an hour.
Bonding (2018)
Season 2 is unwatchable
I don't know what happened in the years between season 1 and season 2 to make it go from good to TERRIBLE but talk about a nosedive.
Expecting Amy (2020)
Brilliant Insight Into the Process of Creating Stand-Up Comedy
What a lot of reviewers who have posted here don't seem to have grasped is that although this is undoubtedly a raw and real depiction of Amy Schumer's very difficult pregnancy and the birth of her child, moreover it is an allegory for a woman's process as a comedian. The first two episodes of the series focus far more intensely on Amy's creation of a new set of material that leads up to her stand-up special "Growing," and how that material changes, shifts and improves as her real life experience as an expectant mother and new wife to a man with austism influences her writing. In fact the first few acts of "Expecting Amy" are broken down with chapter titles of the phases of pregnancy that are actually referring to the process of writing her comedy show, leading up to "Giving Birth", when the show finally debuts.
The insight into her creative process is quite honestly a master class in stand-up comedy, and as this part of her professional life gives way to the birth of her son, the tone shifts in the third episode. But make no mistake: the series shows that a woman can have a career and a family on her own terms, and it's one of the most moving and brilliant documentaries on the subject.
Lazy Susan (2020)
Wanna-be Quirky Comedy Misfires on All Cylinders
Susan is a middle aged middle-American woman who has resisted employment or any form of life success for her entire life. That's it, that's the plot.
"Lazy Susan" wants to be a quirky movie about unlikable characters whom we come to like by the end of the movie, but it never quite hits the marks in any way, shape or form. Hayes stars as the titular Susan, a choice that never quite lives up to its intent. He plays the character straight-forwardly: she's a cis woman, not trans, nor are we ostensibly supposed to laugh because the woman character is played by a cis man actor. So what's the reason for the casting in the first place, then?
Nothing about Susan is likable: she's not just lazy, she's rude, self-centered and crass. Yet the writing and acting never take her quite toward 'quirky' enough to make her interesting. Likewise, the characters around her - a mean brother, an enabling mother, an accepting best-friend - are not fleshed out enough for us to understand their motivations.
By the end of the film we've come to understand that Susan became the way she is because no one in her life ever made her feel special, and the act of kindness from a virtual stranger seems to light enough of a spark in her to put together the bare minimum to become a functioning adult, but it happens in the course of the last five minutes with such randomness that it feels hollow.
Also the occasional gross out humor feels so misplaced that it's jarring.
The movie isn't good, and it's hard to pinpoint why other than that it tries so hard to be something that it's not, yet at the same time isn't anything at all.
AJ and the Queen (2020)
AJ and the Queen is Performative Queerness For a Straight Audience
There is a lot wrong with "AJ and the Queen", but for the average viewer - who is statistically going to be a straight, able person - it's probably going to be overlooked.
The series has a flimsy premise. An aging drag queen loses her life savings after being scammed by her lover. Simultaneously, the gender non-conforming child who lives upstairs and has been abandoned by her crack addict hooker mother stows away in the queen's RV on a cross-road trip.
RuPaul is not an actor. Never has been. Never will be. Straight people love him because they have significantly less exposure to drag and queer culture, and Ru provides a safe, sanitized version of what that looks like. If they were to, for instance, view his movie "Starrbooty" that he put out JUST BEFORE "Drag Race" debuted, they would see him performing explicit sex acts in a movie about girls and druggies. They would be shocked.
Here Ru is as family friendly as ever, with the very occasional PG-13 rated sex joke thrown in. His portrayal of Ruby is not groundbreaking or even very interesting. The character stays surface throughout the show, with ambitions and emotions that play like checkmarks taken out of a book on grieving. This has been Ru's problem for a long time now. He wants to be a self-help lifestyle guru so badly that he can't just let go and be FUN. This was the reason his recent talk show bombed, and it effects "AJ and the Queen," which feels the need to turn every ten minutes into a deeper life lesson.
Izzy G, who plays AJ, fares a little better, though it takes nearly 5 episodes for their acting to move much further than "tantrum rage". Unfortunately the plot of AJ's mom being a hot hooker mess is hammered home so hard you start to feel compassion fatigue where you should just be feeling compassion.
The worst part of the show, though, is Ruby's friend Louis. It's bad enough that the blind character is being played by a fully sighted actor, but the dialog for Louis goes beyond upsetting stereotype into fully insulting. I swear to you this character shouts or screams some variation of the phrase "I'M BLIND!" in *EVERY EPISODE*. News flash: blind people do not run around constantly freaking out about being blind or referencing their own blindness at random intervals.
There is not a second of moments in this show that hasn't been done to death in some variation in some other film or show, but it has just enough charm to get you through to the ending. Fans of RuPaul, especially straight fans who haven't yet reached that point with him of feeling like they've seen it all before, will enjoy watching him essentially play himself.
Beyond that, "AJ and the Queen" is more or less an odd-couple road-trip buddy comedy that can't decide if it wants to be camp, screwball or intense heartstring-tugging drama, and it definitely isn't enough to carry all those things at once.