Fluff is sixty-five minutes long. I just spent the last ten minutes going through my video collection, and the only movies I own that fall under the eighty-minute mark are animated.
I don’t particularly care that the movie is sixty-five minutes long. No, let me amend that, I do care, but probably not for the reason you’d suspect. I care because the credits start rolling long before the movie should actually be over.
“Fluff” follows the story of a group of guys running an experimental theater. The audience vacillates from night to night between two and zero people, and the mortgage for the theater is about to be foreclosed. The group is given a month to raise the money to keep the theater open.
Now, a premise like this is as old as the hills, or at least as old as “Breakin’ 2.” Obviously, what’s coming is some big, moneymaking show that’s going to pull them out of debt and allow them to keep the theater.
So, the question becomes, what kind of show are they going to put on?
Well, it isn’t a show, per se. They figure the best way to raise money is to shoot a gay pornographic film, based around the great stories of the ancient Greeks. They decide to name it “Greek Love,” until they discover that the Web site is already registered. So they rename it “Greek Love 2.”
I suppose I should mention there’s a subplot going on around the same time, about a group of lesbians trying by consensus to write the libretto to an opera. It’s worth a chuckle or two, but overall it doesn’t really further the plot.
For that matter, most of the film fails to further the plot, and that’s just the problem. There have to be at least a dozen characters wandering in and out of the film without having any real impact on it.
Consider the long-haired actor who wants to rewrite all of his character’s dialogue in haiku. He comes on the set of the film, and does his scene. The writer is upset because he’s been rewritten. There’s an argument. The writer and the actor reconcile their differences with the help of the director’s boyfriend.
Later, the actor hooks up with another actor. They do this in a way that I guess was supposed to be funny, or perhaps poignant, or cute, or something, but is none of those things. It’s two guys in a hallway reciting lines.
Another example. There’s a heterosexual character in the film. He’s married to a woman who is equally heterosexual, and somehow heterosexual man ends up having gay sex on film. I guess this is supposed to have an effect on his marriage, but aside from some unfunny bickering about it, the film ends before we find out whether it affected them or not.
Here is where the sixty-five minute length of the movie really comes into play. This film lacks an ending. I mean, it ends, it has to, there’s no such thing as an infinite film, but it plays out as though there’re another twenty minutes to go… and then credits appear.
Think I’m joking? Nope. The central premise of the film – will they save the theater – is left completely unresolved. What’s going to happen to the heterosexual couple’s marriage? Unresolved. The point of watching ten minutes worth of lesbians writing opera? Unresolved.
Looking back on it, I suspect this movie was probably written around the “humor” of a gay Greek film, without consideration given to things like, say, story. Or original jokes. Or interesting characters. Or anything really, besides a man lip-synching the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony with as many ridiculous things as possible going on around him.
Well, maybe that and “Epic Love,” the love theme of this film that runs over the closing credits.
