Shortbus
Shortbus was an ultimately unsatisfying movie. It had me for about half of the movie, and it had some engaging scenes, but I felt the ending totally failed to deliver. The vignettes of different couples (and non-couples) obviously went somewhere during the course of the film, but where to is fairly ambiguous. If it was all woven together as mere observation without moral, it might have worked, but the tone of the whole movie feels like that of profound statement. If it had anything profound to say, I missed it. Is that my fault, or John Cameron Mitchell's?
Update: Man, reading some of the reviews of this movie around teh intarnets (particularly on imbd) is kind of depressing. Most of them focus completely on the sex scenes, and about the "controversy" of including them in the movie. By the time I had gotten home, I had actually forgotten that there were graphic sex scenes in the movie at all. Obviously, the sex was what I had mostly heard about before going to
see it, but afterwards, it wasn't what was on my mind, I was mostly trying to parse the ending. I don't know if it's just that I'm jaded, but in a movie basically focused on the characters'
sex lives, it didn't seem out of place. I'm sure it was played up and as much as possible in the press in order to generate buzz, but since when has that been unusual? All I wanted was for all the story lines in the movie to come to closure at the end, and I don't think they did. That would be the only thing I hold against this picture.