David Searching

i'm gonna give it to ya straight...a low-budget, poorly filmed, plodding, boring movie. nothing really happens and you don't care. although i like the leads in other things there's just nothing special about them here. the characters and situations are so stupidly unreal you roll your eyes. both the lead characters are so whiny and pouty about their lives you don't really want to see them happy. people do complete personality changes-sluts become monogamous, weak people become strong without any reason or meaning. technically the film looks like it was shot with a camcorder and a flashlight. there's much better stuff out there that's along these same lines. keep looking.

David (Anthony Rapp), a young, gay, aspiring filmmaker moves to NYC, advertises for a roommate and meets Gwen (Camryn Manheim) who has just left her husband. Together they face the trials of being single in the city.

When Walter(Joseph Fuqua), a former tenant of David and Gwen's apartment, leaves his girlfriend and has a bit too much scotch he uses his old key to let himself in, falls asleep on their sofa and soon Gwen has a lover.

David is not so lucky. He continues his search through a series of cameo appearances, that includes Stephen Spinella , a man too fond of hummus, John Cameron Mitchell, a literature quoting man too fond of fruit, and David Drake, a man of too few words.

When David meets Michael (David Courier), he realizes this may be the one, but his love interest seems a bit too interested in sex clubs.

While David is searching for the man of his dreams, he's also trying to break into filmmaking. One night on the subway he meets Julie Halston (as herself) a successful stand-up comedienne. Curious, he attends one of her shows and then gets to know her better after she targets him during the show. What David learns from Julie is not only about success in show business but about sucess in life as well.

Overall, the movie is quirky and interesting throughout. The story is generally well told and you do care what happens to these characters. I did have some problems understanding Gwen's actions toward the end of the film. This may have been the fault of the film or just the faulty understanding that a gay man has for a woman in her position.

It starts out bumpy, and the low-budget feeling doesn't help, but stay with this ultimately charming film. Anthony Rapp, who we've watch growing up since he worked for Disney in "Adventures in Babysitting" to become a Broadway star in "Rent", plays the brooding, still-needs-to-grow-up, David - searching for a deeper meaning in life.

If David were only to get off his high horse at the end of the day, he'd realize that he's searching for the very things that we are all searching for: love, sex and a feeling of satisfaction in the broader scheme of things.

His constant brooding over deeper meanings is made trivial by his constant blunders with the simplest things in life: like listening to other people, observing and understanding. His self-absorbedness gets him in one sticky situation after the next, deriving in the end, what the absolute truths of life are: you are born, you somehow have to get by and then you die. Everything else is what you make out of it.

This movie was very uneven in script and plot development. There were points of sheer wisdom while other scenes were plain silly and stupid. Highlight was when Camryn is frantically trying to have sex on the sofa with her stud man. Hilarious!!! Ending was a miss. Lead character, David, had slugged his trick because he was suspected of having been unfaithful and then David suddenly screams from across the street that he wants to "go out" with this bruised and battered trick on date. Didn't ring true at all and was stupid. It's clear that the only person who could really act in this flick was Camryn. She was entirely natural and believable. David could act somewhat and the lady comic wasn't bad. No real message in this film except that NYC apartments are small and dingy and that even great acting can't always pull a low budget film out of the gutter. Worth seeing only because of Miss Manheim.

I found Anthony Rapp's portrayal of the lead character, David, charming, but the film was very poorly edited so that scene changes often were disconcerting. His roommate's rejection of her "boyfriend" was not credible. Did David learn any lesson from her experience? Did she? The musical interludes made the film drag on and advanced the plot not a bit; it's as if the editor randomly chose to use this device without any thoughtful reason.

The script writing left a lot to be desired, mainly the Big Question that David's documentary posed; ludicrous; boring! However, the general dialog was not bad; I've seen much worse.