There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so

review

3-Day Weekend
Redwoods

W

riting a negative review is so much more fun than one heaping praise on a production. But I try to hold back the poison darts for deserving targets - everyone should know what hate-monger James Earl Hardy is about - and 3-Day Weekend is begging for a slating. Consider this review a community service announcement: I want to help you to avoid wasting 90 minutes of your life on this unmitigated trash.

It's 90 minutes you'll never, ever get back. Don't do it!

Where to start? Is it the dreary indie music drowning out every clumsy, wooden scene? Actors who stand awkwardly about waiting for the next guy to say his line? The endless, plodding monologues on "issues"?

Maybe it's the weird casting. The supposedly red hot male hooker, lusted after by everyone, looks like Ellen Degeneres in 20 years time (and after a bad crystal meth addiction).

The acting is strictly amatuer dramatics, like a bunch of queens prised out of some backwater suburban gay bar. God knows what the talent behind the camera was like. I might say 3-Day Weekend gives gay cinema a bad name - except it gives cinema a bad name - period.

Embarrassingly, one of the characters remarks upon how gay cinema is so disappointing these days - a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. Worse still, director Rob Williams then has another character namecheck one of his own movies (Long-Term Relationship). Wow - really? Seriously - REALLY?!

It's bad. Not even Dante's Cove bad: that, at least, skips nimbly into the so-bad-it's-good category. 3-Day Weekend, is just frustrating, aggravating, ugly, and worst of all, boring. A total waste of time.

D

avid Lewis' Redwoods, on the other hand, is a very still, handsome postcard from rural America. Poignant and romantic, it features characters you'll actually like (unlike 3-Day Weekend's cast of ghouls) and a world away from the contrived histrionics of the above picture.

Leads Brendan Bradley and Matthew Montgomery also make a cute couple, with some palpable chemistry. This picture has a soul, and its heart is in the right place. Redwoods won't set the world on fire, but it's a gentle, charming slow-burner ideal for a wet Sunday afternoon.

Title quote: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

William Shakespeare, English playwright, 1564-1616.