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STUDIO: Liberation Entertainment
MSRP: $24.95
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Commentary with the director and stars
• Deleted scenes
• Trailers
The Pitch
People still use the good old fashioned personal ads to pick up desperate, lonely individuals, even when there’s millions of men looking for a good time on Craigslist.
The Humans
Matthew Montgomery, Windham Beacham, Artie O’Daly, Jeremy Lucas, Bret Wolfe and Chuti Tiu
Old Dick’s looking pretty happy today.
The Nutshell
Glenn is looking for love. He’s tired of coming home and surfing porn on the Internet and having random hookups with his friends. He wants a picket fence, a house in the hills and a stable home life to look forward to. He answers Adam’s personal ad in a local newspaper and the two start a whirlwind romance as they try to figure out if they’re right for each other.
It’s every cheesy romantic comedy you’ve ever seen, just with gay guys. The two fall in love with each other, inevitably get cold feet about the idea of settling down with someone and start inventing reasons to break the relationship off and ultimately accept what everyone already knew and stick with each other. The only way that could potentially be considered a spoiler is if you’re completely unfamiliar with motion pictures and how they operate, in which case you should stay away from any films involving trains coming towards the camera. You wouldn’t want to give yourself a heart attack or anything.
Can we speed this up a bit? I have to get home and watch Logo.
The Lowdown
The romantic comedy is a genre whose well has become dryer than [insert your preferred vagina joke here]. It’s such a tried and true formula that most writers could probably crank one out in an afternoon. There are probably piles of the things just sitting around the apartments of writers until the strike is over. This one is totally different! It’s about two people who are perfect for each other but don’t realize it until they separate. The hook is…they’re cave spelunkers! It’s totally original!
The twist in this particular romantic comedy is that most of the characters are homosexual guys. Those boring jokes about relationships now have the addition of sin in the eyes of the lord. It really livens up the proceedings a bit. The jokes are funnier than those of a typical romantic comedy, but they’re too few and far in between and get lost in a muddy sea of relationship drama and touchy feely moments with about as much emotional impact as your typical episode of The Brady Bunch.
One of Threadless’ lesser selling T-shirts.
The film is ultimately too predictable for its own good. It makes absolutely no effort to turn off the auto pilot and deviate from the standard formula. It’s the same tired formula with some new window dressing. The fact that the movie is about homosexual relationships doesn’t change how boring and cliché it really is. No one would want a quick fling with this type of movie, let alone the long-term commitment required to waste 90 minutes on it.
The Package
The commentary track for Long-Term Relationship is a lot more entertaining than the actual movie. The director and the stars are completely upfront about all the film’s various shortcomings, openly admitting which scenes were improvised, messed up or done with one sloppy take. The director is even completely candid about the film’s predictable plot structure and ending, stating that he merely attempted to mirror the schmaltzy plotlines of heterosexual romantic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle, just with gay men instead of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Listening to all of these guys talk makes the movie a lot more interesting and also makes one wonder why they couldn’t have produced something more original or compelling.
What two men and a dog do in the privacy of their own home is their own business.
The special features are rounded out by some alternate scenes and trailers. The alternate scenes are merely several improvised scenes of a gay romance hotline worker trying to get his clients off. It’s all improvised and off the cuff, which means it’s pretty unfunny and annoying. The scene actually included in the film wasn’t that great, so seeing the stuff on the cutting room floor is even more torturous.