User Reviews

When young twinky Ricky is left alone with the goldfish to housesit and spend Xmas on his own he finds it dreadfully lonely.

As Xmas day looms with all the dread and loneliness that Xmas day can bring, Ricky sitting alone staring at the Xmas tree feels abandoned, rejected and miserable and he has every reason.

Distracted by his loneliness and wretchedness he gets into online dating, cruising and other ways to fill the void, but he's not actually very good at it. The boy is far more of a romantic, simple at heart than just a slut and so he's playing with fire trying to be one. How long will it last? Do we care? I did to a point.

This is a film which attempts to use the fairy lights of Xmas to explore gay self worth, loneliness and self destruction, how well it succeeds is debatable.

Xmas and family are of course supposed to go hand in hand so using this lonely Xmas theme is familiar. I enjoyed most of it once I had accepted it as a good idea - sweet lonely boy goes all slutty and crazy over Xmas at odds with himself- but I needed to suspend disbelief in order to fully accept Ricky was real rather than an idea, a composite character.

Overall it has some good moments especially when Ricky goes home with an older gay man and ends up insulting him. I found that scene oddly tense and distracting, but nothing to do with the character Ricky before that scene or afterwards. He obviously was distracted, but so was the script.

See it for yourself and judge. It did make me think afterwards, but mainly about the style rather than the content.

It's surprising that anyone would think this is typical of a gay person's lifestyle; everything in the movie does happen -- some gay men are very aimless, spend a lot of time on line and look for casual pleasure, usually sexual, and some gay guys also abuse drugs. It can even be prevalent but it's not typical.

Probably the most realistic of the interludes was the one where the older gentlemen picks up the titular "House Boy," likely thinking he's homeless on a cold winter night, takes him home and offers him coffee in lieu of the hot chocolate Ricky (the HB) desires, and when Ricky goes to repay with oral sex (because, after all, that's all that a 21 year old aimless, depressed suicidal gay boy can offer in return), the older man reveals that he is HIV+ positive, which -- all of sudden -- makes Ricky want to dash out and away from this older, friendly face, even being rude in doing so with an offhand remark. This does happen, every day.

However, it's typical of the film (such as filling the gay couple's apartment with "strays" to bludgeon the audience with the plot point that the HB himself is a stray), to get its points mixed up, to confuse them with plot and character development and to use them to not only take an easy way out. Or the "hate the sin, love the sinner" phone call, with a sister who sounds old enough to be the protagonist mother's. The film is full of these elements to, once again, to hit the audience over the head with, such as the kitten at the end of the movie to mirror what Simon would find if Ricky did, indeed kill themselves, the entire seasonal aspect of the movie is just one easy, short-hand cop out by a filmmaker who lacks the true talent to make a genuinely touching movie.

This is just a bad movie with little rationale, poor dialogue, bad acting, an uninteresting, unimaginative plot and simplistic, narrative devices.

It makes no sense, for example, for Ricky to willingly do lines of one kind of drug but refuse to smoke an equally potent and harmful other kind of drug, at a later date, to be willing to let the Christmas tree die, to not take care of the pets as requested. Or to be willing to let an obvious user personality, invite guys over for his own pleasure, bringing excessive guys over, even when Ricky earlier on said "no more than one extra guy" and not care about feeding the turtle, and more importantly go on and on about committing suicide and not be willing, in this day and age, to do what countless of men who hook up for casual sex do, which is go down another guy. The scene where one of the guys on drugs chats with the HB about death and asks him Ricky to perform an unsafe sex act to completion with him and Ricky says no, makes little sense when the filmmakers are implying in the H**g2727 on line chat that he can't use a condom because none are big enough for him (thus suggesting they would have sex without condoms) and then moving to a scene of the same guy having anal sex with Ricky to completion. Finally, if he wants to die, one can see that he would think HIV would take too long, but if he would be dead within a few days, there isn't much rationality in the character's thought process to refuse unsafe sex or drugs -- for what? A prettier corpse?

Except for the drug fueled orgy, the guys he scores on his own are also way out of his league. They are not only older, better looking, better built, but appear far more functional; given the choice, there's no reasonable reason for them to have paired up with Ricky. Other than to get some gratuitous, unnecessary nudity. And like the nudity, the movie itself is pointless and arbitrary, just like the tacked on hot chocolate happy ending.

While not specifically about drug use and gay men, Half Nelson is a better movie about that, and for a movie that wants to explore intimacy and loneliness among gay men, and what extent they may go to find what they need, Circuit, as just one example, is far better.

A completely pointless movie, about a guy having one meaningless sexual encounter after another. At the end of each trick, he announces that he's going to commit suicide on Christmas Eve.

I left the theater thinking, "Wow, what was the point of that?" There was no character development, and no plot. A few of the scenes were strange, but none of them were interesting. The only selling point seems to be a parade of naked guys that the main character has sex with. But really, if I wanted that, I would just rent porn.

Hasn't gay cinema developed beyond this point by now? Putting a few hot naked guys in a film is not enough.

I saw this at Outfest, so I can't comment on the DVD features.