Surfing the cable channels one night, I stumbled on this little movie and was struck first by the gorgeous cinematography: the close-ups of Kathleen Robertson were almost hallucinatory. Despite her choppy bleached hair, ordinary looks, and snippy acting style, she looked so radiantly attractive that it was immediately clear the director was madly in love with her. The director being Gregg Araki, his taste in men was actually better: he clearly enjoyed putting Matt Keeslar and Jonathan Schaech together on a couch, in bed, and in the shower. The movie is Araki's modern version of Design for Living, the old Noel Coward warhorse (note the third-act appearance of a character named Ernest, the bourgeois dullard the heroine almost marries). Too bad Araki didn't have Miriam Hopkins to work with instead of Robertson. Visually, the movie is amazing, but where it falls seriously short is in the writing... to say that Araki is no Noel Coward is like saying that Pauly Shore is no Charlie Chaplin. Like, duh. Somehow, though, this wafer-thin comedy seemed to liberate him from the cynical dead end he'd fallen into in the 90s -- his next movie (with a solid story by Scott Heim) was Mysterious Skin, a riveting, fearless masterpiece that was unquestionably the best American movie of 2004.
