Interior. Leather Bar.

This film promotes itself suggesting it re-imagines the 40 minutes excised from the movie "Crusing". It is actually a contrived and boring "behind the scenes" making of 10 re-imagined minutes from the original movie and, as shown, I highly doubt they are what Friedkin would have actually filmed.

The re-shot "Crusing" minutes are provocative and very sexually explicit, but they don't make up for the other 50 minutes where we watch the straight actor in the Al Pachino role trying to come to terms with taking on a gay-themed role.

I thought the 60 minutes of this movie would never end.

Went into this expecting to be let down after some of the reviews. I found it far more interesting than expected.

It felt to me a lot more about motivations, fears, attitudes and trust than about sex. Yes there's some glimpses of sex play - that is necessary though, as it forces the other reactions.

It makes you think about your own reactions as well, whether you as the viewer are gay or straight. Do we judge the actors who are involved directly in the sex different to those who aren't? Do we view the gay actors in the project as lesser than the straight actors? Do we still respect those involved in the project or are they in some way artistically devalued. And why is a bit of pleasure between 2 (or more) people seen as worse than all the violence seen on screen in film and TV. Can it still have artistic merit as part of telling a story.

The longest scene featuring sex is outside of the bar, a frankly lovely scene between a real couple. Framed against the discomfort of the lead character (played by Val Lauren), and his fears of how it would affect him, his friendships and relationships, and his own standing as an actor.

One thing to remember is the era when Cruising itself was made. Also the fact the film was received very much as an anti-gay statement as it depicted Pacino as entering some kind of dark underworld of dirty sex (and murder). From the reactions from one of the leads friends in a series of phone calls, you can see that attitude to sex, in particular full-on gay sex, has not totally gone away. Also the fears of the affect on an actor's career.

The only thing that stopped me giving this a 9 is it needed an extra maybe 20 minutes after filming and editing, to explore how people felt after taking part, how James Franco felt, was the project a success and did it achieve what he wanted. However I definitely recommend.

"Interior. Leather Bar" shouldn't have been made. It didn't need to be made. Only the reigning poseur king of "art" filmaking James Franco and his idiot director friend Travis Mathews would have thrown this sixty minute hairball up on any screen.

Yes, William Friedkin's "Cruising" was controversial. The bad press it received before and after being made and released effectively killed it. It was pretty much forgotten by everyone, even those gay men who arrived in the life long after it was made and rejected. The stories that sprang up around "Cruising" are more interesting than the film itself, i.e. the crowds of LGBT activists picketing and disrupting the actual filming, the disclaimer Friedkin was forced to add to the credit sequences which stated the film was not a blanket condemnation of the entire gay community, and the "lost" sex scenes filmed at actual NYC leather bars. As it is now known, there never were explicit sex scenes filmed. It's an urban legend.

"Interior.Leather Bar" is a sham from beginning to end. Nothing looks correct, the music is wrong, and let's not get started on the eyeshadow being applied to the men in their borrowed leather gear. Franco and Mathews simply wanted to make an "important statement" buried under gay porn so they hitched their exploitation horse to an antique cart full of actors (both gay and straight) who were never actually there during the leather heydays of the late 70s. Everyone is acting and discussing their motivations in the spaces between filming. You know there's going to be trouble when the camera searches actor Val Lauren (who's pretending to be Al Pacino) driving to the shoot and listening to his phone messages. The first call from his wife or girlfriend establishes his heterosexuality and the second is from an unknown man who dismisses Lauren's decision to appear in "Franco's f*ggot movie". Lauren agonizes for an hour about the sex that may or not happen and tries to find his inner Pacino. He can't find it and comes across as both whiny and pretentious, as if his involvement in this project is beneath him.

Leather bars are a dying institution. Their function was derailed by the AIDS crisis and more recently by the tsunami of "normalization" for LGBT people over the past decades. The raw acting out of men who played games without rules has been traded for SUVs, parenting, and PTA meetings once a month. Franco's soggy pretend leathermen can all be found waiting tables at any West Hollywood restaurants. The exposure and decline of the leather and backroom world began with "Cruising" and deserves a better, more fitting eulogy than this stupid mess. Two stars for the exposed dicks and at least one actor who actually looks like he stepped out of the 70s onto the floor of the Mineshaft NYC.

This ridiculous twaddle was made only to pad the resumes of Franco and Mathews, who think they're really saying something about sexual freedom. It's disingenuous in the extreme and not worth losing an hour of your life to view it.

Maybe James Franco was a little ahead of his time with this? He does make a point towards the end that illustrates the pointed refusal of mainstream American cinema to show scenes of active gay sex. People can merrily blow each other to bits, heterosexuals and lesbians can fill their boots - but man on man penetrative sex without recourse to endless shadows or subtly placed duvets is as rare as hen's teeth. That may have been his laudably ultimate point here, but the remainder of this rather dull documentary pits together a bunch of largely straight actors, clad (or not) in skimpy leathers and plunged into darkness for a sex-room style series of supposedly random sexual encounters - one or two of them briefly graphic and another quite painful! Anyone expecting the missing forty minutes from "Cruising" (1980) to be presented is in for quite a disappointment. The vast majority of this consists of talking heads between the Z-list "talent" recruited who are struggling to intellectualise the fact that they are just required to get naked and fumble with another bloke. It's called acting, boys - it's not Shakespeare! Good on James for asking some questions, but most of this is just like porn in general - it's much more fun to take part the to watch.

I saw this film at the Berlinale film festival 2013, where I felt myself severely misled by the synopsis on the festival website. I saw a lot of meta-talk about cruising, about straight actors playing a gay role, about an actor being advised against getting involved in the project for the sake of his future career, and so on, with emphasis on "meta" and "about". And the bit of sex that was shown, was in a dancing atmosphere and not the traditional dark room. Maybe offensive for straight people but not very explicit, yet the festival website devoted a lot of attention to the revival of scenes deleted for fear for censors. Finally, I completely missed the insight in the film making process that was promised too. In short, an unnecessary film, not even a bit informative about this different universe we know nothing about.