Love Life
(2006/Gay)
Picture:
C Sound: C+ Extras: C Film: C+
Damian
Dietz attempts to examine a married couple whose union goes bad as they both
find gay lovers in Love Life (2006)
starting with a interesting premise and going nowhere with it. I was no fan of his Peter Pan take Neverland
(2003, reviewed elsewhere on this site) and thought this was only marginally
better.
Stephen
D. Gill is the husband, Stephanie Kirchen the wife, trying to be happy and
failing badly. They have the two cars,
the house and money, but it is all a sham that is about to unravel. Though it is predictable and obvious, he
could have at least made this an attempt at a character study, but wastes all
72 minutes (this could have been longer) on mechanics, sex scenes and no point.
What’s
worse, it is told in flashback in a terrible scene with a marriage
counselor. Why are they there? Could they possibly be happy now that it is
over? This also distances the weight of
the implications of their lives. Worst
of all, we never see why they got married in the first place and have zero
evidence that convinces us that they would ever get married.
The 1.33
X 1 image is soft and shot on low-definition digital video. Color is barely consistent and can be hard to
watch at times. The Dolby Digital 2.0
Stereo is simple and suffers from bad location audio too often. The combination is trying. Extras include stills and an audio commentary
by Dietz and Kirchen. Oddly, while the
feature is in Dolby, you get PCM 48/16 2.0 for the audio commentary!
That
makes no sense, or is an admission they knew the feature audio had issues. All in all, this is only for the very
interested. Others should move on.
- Nicholas Sheffo
