Misconceived: When three-for-one movies is still a rip-off

Comments (0) By Nick Pinkerton Thursday, Jan 21 2010

The least bad Watercolors

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The social-networking site gay.com and distributor Regent Releasing present a tripl bill of same sexer–themed movies. In descending order, from middling to empirically bad: Watercolors — the most professional job, and the only one that takes a stab at eros — is a My First Time jock-on-nerd love affair done with chiaroscuro cinematography and awful dialogue. Misconceptions has the most star wattage, with Mr. Orlando Jones himself as half of a gay couple fished out of water when a Southern conservative Christian woman — her husband just to the left of a Westboro Baptist Church member — agrees to be their surrogate womb. The twang is community theater Tennessee Williams, but it declines from taking easy shots at Red Staters, and deserves faint praise for its optimism. The same can't be said of Murder in Fashion, True Crime dreck melodramatizing the breakdown and killing spree of Andrew Cunanan, which ended in the assassination of Gianni Versace. As over-the-hill-at-27 rent-boy Cunanan, Jonathan Trent licks vodka off a magazine cover shot of Versace and says things like "You play for me you play for keeps — I'm pretty but I'm deadly!" while hack Ben Waller works the jerky-zoom PsychoCam effect liberally. Fashion contains the worst FBI procedural scenes in collective memory — possibly good for a laugh in the right frame of mind. (Sunset 5)