Thursday, March 25, 2010

I Love You Phillip Morris: a movie that, apparently, Hollywood is afraid to release.


Trailer: warning, definitely NSFW


Plot: The story begins with Russell, played by Jim Carrey, on his deathbed recalling the events of his life that led him there. He begins with his life in Texas as a happily married police officer who plays the organ at church, prays every night with his wife (Leslie Mann) and spends his off hours searching for his biological mother who gave him up as a child. That, and he's gay. But after finding and being handily rejected by the mother who gave him up as a baby, Steven leaves his life and family behind to go out into the world and be his true, flamboyantly gay self. He moves to Miami, finds a boyfriend (Rodrigo Santoro) and begins living the high life. He realizes quickly though, that a life of luxury is expensive, leading this resourceful former cop to turn to a life as a conman. But when his con work finally catches up with him, Steven is sent to prison where he meets, and almost instantly falls in love with Phillip Morris, played by Ewan McGregor. From there the story becomes a Don Quixote-esque story of a forlorn lover who cannot bear to be separated from his soul-mate. He will go to any lengths to be with Phillip, including but not limited to breaking out of jail on multiple occasions, impersonating Phillip's lawyer and fraudulently becoming the CFO of a major corporation.


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Ok, now that you get a general idea of what this movie is about, I guess you can see why it's been going through delay after delay since the beginning of the year. At first, the movie was supposed to come out at the end of last year, then got pushed to February, then to March, and now to April 30th? Damn. It's Jim Carrey! And Ewan McGregor! What's stopping this from getting a wide release? Because the main two characters are gay!

How does Bruno get such a wide release and not this? At least this movie actually has a story and the humor is definitely not as crazy and offensive as the humor in Bruno (ok it might be slightly as crazy). Sure, as you can see, there may be some sex scenes involving two men. I never really understood why guys cared so much. I'm engaged. I don't care if a movie has gay sex in it. What do I have to worry about? Darren Aronofsky has a movie coming out called Black Swan which apparently has a very risque lesbian sex scene involving Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. Of course everyone wants to see that. I do too! But, doesn't it only seem fair to balance that with Jim Carrey's new movie? What's the big deal? It's like when people freaked out about the idea of seeing Brokeback Mountain. C'mon, a movie is a movie. At least, that's my take on things.

I remember the reaction to when Bruno came out last year. Now I agree that the movie wasn't as funny as Borat (even though Borat was really a collection of his best moments on his tv show). It was still pretty damn hilarious. It just had... a lot of homoerotic or blatantly gay scenes in it. I thought it was awesome how shameless and daring the movie was.

Anyway, what I'm saying here is that this movie, I Love You Phillip Morris, looks like a genuinely good movie with a seemingly great performance by Jim Carrey. Jim Carrey definitely has quite a pair of balls to take on a role like this one and what makes me want to see it is how much he puts into this role. It looks like he really goes all out for this movie. I remember reading about how Will Smith refused to do a scene in the movie "Six Degrees of Separation" because it involved kissing another man. So, to see another big star go even further than that is just awesome to me. But forget about that, this looks like a great movie... gay sex or not. People really ought to get over themselves. Don't you think?

It's funny that people are afraid to see a movie like this, but don't mind seeing half-naked men with chiseled abs for over two hours (yes, I'm talking about the movie 300).

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