denny321

This film is ostensibly intended to be a drama but it has so many elements of cheesy comedy it's difficult to tell what vibe the filmmaker is going for. Sadly, it fails either way. The "dramatic" scenes (people yelling at each other) play like a telenovela, and the ridiculously improbable ending could've been lifted from an Eating Out sequel. Everything is overplayed, for no worthwhile reason.

The lead character Josh (Andres Roma) is the archetypal nerdy, pasty-white, camera-toting gringo tourist. He speaks excellent Spanish, but with a blatant gringo accent that doesn't fit a guy at his fluency level who's had a Mexican girlfriend for 10+ (?) years; he can't even say the name of his new friend Leo in a non-Anglo way. When he speaks English, Roma pulls off a passable whitebread American accent but can't sustain it; he often lapses into a Latino rhythm of speech. At first this made me cringe as I thought Josh was mocking the locals, but his very Mexican pronunciation of certain words like "stubborn" (stah-born) reveals it as simply a case of bad acting.

Josh's awkward cluelessness is cartoonish and relentless. The utter lack of sexual chemistry with his new friend make Leo's persistent and obvious pursuit of him seem predatorial. There's nothing here that resembles a romance, although that seems to have been the filmmaker's vision. All in all, the film plays like writer/director Juan Frausto pulled two characters out of the 2014 HBO series Looking - the uptight ginger nerd and the scruffy Latino musician - and stuck them into a very improbable, overly burlesqued, and ultimately unsatisfying story line.

The 1955 Boise scandal is by far the best known example of a McCarthy-era homosexual witch hunt, thanks to the 1965 bestseller The Boys of Boise, by John Gerassi. But Gerassi's book was very much a product of its still-homophobic times. As an important touchstone in the history of LGBT rights, this story begged to be retold with a modern sensibility, and made accessible to an audience who have been offered very little information on the pitfalls of being gay in the era.

The film does a remarkable job of presenting the truly astounding facts of the case, giving insight into the culture of Boise at the time, and documenting the lives of many of the people involved, on both sides of the investigation. Clips of interviews with some of the witch hunters, filmed decades after the fact, are chilling for the persistent, antiquated mindsets they reveal.

Many today will be shocked to learn something like this ever took place in America. The sad truth is that while the Boise investigation was among the largest of its type in American history, it was by no means an isolated event. Similar events were occurring in cities and small towns all over the country, but few have been as well documented.

The Fall of '55 is an important film in that it exposes a history few today are aware of, either inside or outside of the LGBT community. It is a well-made film in that it presents a level of detail that will interest even those who thought they already knew the story, and does so without bias; the facts are allowed to speak for themselves, and no more explanation is needed. It is essential viewing for anyone with more than a passing interest in the history of civil rights and social justice in the U. S.

This is a movie about a white closeted married guy who dates a black single guy with a history of dating white closeted married guys. While the premise seems to hold the potential for an engaging story and the production is at least competent, it falls hopelessly flat in every respect. It simply isn't dramatic enough, funny enough, heartwarming enough, or steamy enough to be worthwhile. Everything here is skin deep. There's no reason for the audience to get behind a guy who seems to see his devoted wife and daughters as mere baggage, and shirks his responsibilities to them at every turn. A couple doleful piano notes as the boyfriend is left hanging again (as if he couldn't see it coming) isn't near enough to tug at my heartstrings. I'd suggest the filmmakers go out and live a little, and find something more substantial to write about. But at least they got the title right - there's plenty of Zero, a bit of I Love You, and not much in between.

Oh, and - there's not a closeted guy on the planet who'd ask his secretary to send a dozen roses to a man.