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Sunday, May 12th, 2013

The Men Next Door

This is the latest movie from writer/director/producer Rob Williams who is a leading exponent of  a genre that I call ‘Boy-Lit’.  Light bubbly stories where boy meets boy, boy loses boy, then boy meets (another?) boy again, and lives happily ever after. Nothing heavy to test the brain, or challenge any assumption that love always wins in the end, and they also make perfect ‘date-night’ movies.
This story opens with Doug alone on at his 40th birthday dinner party at home after all of his friends have bailed on him one by one.  The door bell rings and there standing on the mat is Colton a hot young man who Doug assumes is a stripagram sent by a guilt-stricken absent friend. He is actually the new next-door neighbor who has just come to drop off mail that he got my mistake, but once that’s cleared up, he drops his pants instead and stays the night.
Doug has recently started dating Jacob another new neighbor who is 50 years old, a big difference from Colton who is just 30. It eventually turns out that he is also Jacob’s son, which is a tad icky.  When everyone in the ‘triangle’ realizes the facts, they decide to continue seeing each other anyway as both relationships seem to work, in and out of the bedroom.  Until feelings start to grow that is, and father and son demand that Doug chooses one of them.

 

It’s a cute story and Mr Williams does it well as a small budget production. He deliberately throws in some full frontal nudity (evidently considered de-rigour in this genre) at the beginning of the movie to keep you hooked I guess.  The main actors are hot … Eric Dean (Doug), Benjamin Lutz (Colton) and Michael Nicklin (Jacob) who so reminded me of Christopher Plummer, but a couple of the supporting cast are a tad too enthusiastic playing their roles that made them quite unrealistic esp Heidi Rhodes who played Evelyn, allegedly Doug’s best friend.

 All in all its rather a fun piece of escapism that encourages a cynical old (single) gay man to think that the course of love does run true. For 90 minutes at least.


Posted by queerguru  at  19:38


Genres:  rom-com

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