Shortbus

suggest me movies like this

Director John Cameron Mitchell dares to take a retro-clinging America into the twenty-first century with this brave, humanistic art-house film wherein an ensemble cast of little known actors and numerous non-actors portray characters exploring emotions and relationships in a New York City underground club called the Shortbus. As a gay couple with relationship problems, James (Paul Dawson) and Jamie (P.J. DeBoy), consult a young sex therapist named Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee) who, as it turns out, is in need of some therapy herself. The film's weak plot steers them to the Shortbus, wherein sex and open relationships trump everything else in life, as if people obsess about sex every minute of every day. The film's sex scenes are explicit and graphic, but never exploitative. Most of the characters are to varying degrees pleasantly unique. I especially liked Justin Bond, the club's tour guide. The film's costumes and production design are terrific. Artwork is mod, as you would expect. And the film's music captures a progressive feel, and varies from nouveau jazz to the stirring humanistic anthem "In The End", performed by the entire cast, and led with flair by Justin Bond. Unorthodox both in substance and style, in a society that too often demands traditional correctness, "Shortbus" is Mitchell's cinematic plea for cultural compassion and mercy, tolerance and acceptance. It is a cinematic theme that is much needed in America, where hatred and intolerance toward all things nonconforming seriously risk diversity of thought and behavior. At the very least, the film is a welcome change from your mainstream Hollywood assembly-line cinematic trash. I suspect, however, that "Shortbus" really is the wave of the future, particularly in forward-looking societies. More power to it.

First of all I am a "straight" man so I wont let this cloud my review of this film... I found this movie hard to watch at times but the fact that this was toted as "real" sexuality peaked my interest in the first place. I thought I knew what I was getting myself into but even my own preconceptions were shot to hell by this. If you have a problem with the interactions of 2 or more of the same sex partners then this is NOT the movie for you... But if you can keep an open mind then it may be something that may give you some insight into the homosexual culture. Like most people I had seen sex in one form or another already on screen but that was something that was somewhat scripted... This movie was as real as you could get without seeing it live I guess would be its best compliment.... But its not all about just throwing people out there to have sex and film it. There are deeper subjects that John Cameron Mitchell tackles, such as fears of not being loved as you once were by your partner, trying to achieve * that a lot of women might have a problem and just finding true love.... As I said about the car wreck, even though the film made me incredibly uncomfortable I found myself trying to open my mind to other things so I kept looking back at the film, to see what the message thats trying to be portrayed to those with a closed mind...

This must be one of the worst films I have ever seen. It encapsulates everything that is wrong with the world today. All the characters were shallow, stupid, self-obsessed, false and had no apparent sense of their own identity and really should have pulled their heads out of their backsides (to put it politely for those more sensitive readers). And those people who gave it good ratings or good reviews should do likewise. It was a film about people with neurotic complexes FOR people with neurotic complexes. If only the characters took a second to look outside themselves instead of navel-gazing, they would see a world of REAL pain, real sorrow, real misery, starvation, war. And this film offers nothing except the cause of these things. Because most of the world's trouble is caused by the Fatman himself and those that feed him - Uncle Sam and all he stands for - the illusion of the American Dream/Nightmare. The reason I went to see this film was because it had good viewer-ratings but I realised after seeing it that most of these ratings must have been given by viewers from the States. I was reminded of the fact that a large percentage of New Yorkers have therapists/shrinks. Well if they're like the people in this film I can understand why. Because they're living in a dreamworld where the only hell they have to face is their own unending hell. It was utterly pathetic. An embarrassment. Not really worth me wasting so much time writing this comment on at all. Anyway, maybe this is acceptable in America, or to not be so general, New York, but here in Scotland it isn't. It was a small screen with maybe 20 people and I was one of five or six people to leave the cinema and I stayed for at least an hour and a half but couldn't endure any more and thought why waste more time watching this self-absorbed nonsense? Honestly, don't waste your time. Be thankful if you're lucky enough to be as sheltered/deluded as those in this film. You owe it to the world for being alive.

Terrible, pretentious film. The director is so busy being smug that he's managing to shove pornoish amounts of sex into a legitimate feature film that he forgets to create believable characters. In the end, the entire film is a lie, which roughly translates as "sexual freedom and experimentation plus a big dose of gay kookiness will magically save us." From serious mental illness, for instance. But nothing can save this movie from its own triteness (sex therapists who can't have organisms, for instance, and blather on about "owning emotions" in a stale, circa-70s-Woody Allen way). After a decent attempt to dramatize the isolation of depression, the film offers a typically simplistic fix. And then winds it all up in a forced "happy ending," at which point it starts to resemble Caligula as remade by Disney.

An extremely weak excuse for a plot and even more a weak excuse for entertainment. A sex therapist can't have an *. She reveals this to two of her clients who invite her to a place called "Shortbus" where all kinds of sex goes on. The sex is shown graphically, even down to the "money shots" that * relies on to pay the bills. The movie is incredibly sad. No one is happy and everyone is a victim. If you like sex, love or intimacy, stay away from this film. It will make you prefer taking a vow of chastity for a more entertaining lifestyle. Seriously, "Shortbus" features scene after scene of people chasing that first *. There is no love, no fun, no caring, no sharing, just orgies, sex toys, * and a pathetic grasping for a drug like euphoria through mindless sex. A lame excuse for a provocative study of sexual proclivities. If romance killing is your cup of tea, rent this film.

A group of gay men in New York deal with angst by getting it on in various couplings. Meanwhile, the therapist of two of the gay men tries to have her first *. Perhaps if all this was played out as a comedy, it would have been a hoot. But writer and director Mitchell lends a very heavy hand to the proceedings, making it an unbelievably tedious experience. The dialog is extremely pretentious. The script wanders aimlessly, making the film seem like three hours long. The characters are all self-obsessed. The acting is horrible. Mitchell's singular focus seems to be naked men having sex with each other, which may be great for gay viewers but for everybody else it's tough going.

I saw this movie last weekend and thought it was the most boring film I'd seen in quite some time. The characters are such self-indulgent whiners with no basis for their angst besides 9/11, an angle that's poorly realized in the script. "I'm so beautiful and have such a great life but I'm so sad. Waaaaah!" It seemed like John Cameron Mitchell sat around a café in New York and thought up a bunch of vignettes without providing his characters any personality whatsoever. If these characters spent more time going to dinner and a movie or reading a book they'd have a lot less to time to torture themselves over their sexual problems. I loved "Hedwig", but "Short Bus" was a huge disappointment. If you really have to see actors having actual sex, rent * where it's at least erotic.

Shortbus reviewed by Sam Osborn I have a bad feeling that after the first ten minutes of Shortbus are through, much of the audience will have already left; because within this first segment, sophomore director John Cameron Mitchell has the mind to show his audience the nature of this very, ahem…frank work. Audiences will have witnessed filmed *, wild fornication in a myriad of poses, and a scene of S&M sexual nature. These are all acts we've seen before from other Hollywood pictures; but then again, those pictures only played pretend. Shortbus requires all its actors to do such acts for real. Is Porn too strong a word to describe such a film? It's debatable, I suppose. Films that boast actual penetration are usually not found in theatres anymore; instead hidden in the back of your video rental stores, or placed neatly on a shady internet site. But Pornography uses plot mechanisms only to drive the story into another sex scene. Shortbus has plot mechanisms to drive the arcs of its characters. That its characters all play roles indulgent in fornication is simply the nature of Shortbus' stories. But enough about the ethics of Shortubus; it's a good film. And if you're not too squeamish for the subject matter, and have a mind for tongue-in-cheek wit, then it shouldn't matter how close to * the film means to aim. It's a story of New Yorkers. A fringe group of New Yorkers who all meet at the underground lounge Shortbus. It's a place of casual frivolity, where people of any sexual preference are free to indulge in whatever they please. They mingle and dance and drink and have sex, all happily and without any semblance of filth or vice. These people are simply enjoying themselves and being quite hilarious while they do it. The members that we're asked to follow all come from the Magnolia school of connections, where links between characters are often coincidental and illogical, but acceptable as obligations of an ensemble drama. Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee) is a Sex Therapist who prefers to be called a Couples Councilor and who's unable to have an *. She's invited to Shortbus by the club's poster child couple, Jamie and Jamie (Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy), who assure Sofia that if there's an * to be found, it's hidden within Shortbus. In a dark room there, Sofia meets Severina (Lindsay Beamish), a lonely dominatrix who gets mean when uncomfortable, and whose longest relationship was with the geeky trust fund sexual deviant. All their stories are all human and kind of affecting, managing to dig their way out of the film's heaping shock factor to create something like empathy. It's nothing heartbreaking or particularly inspiring, but how much can we really expect from a film that has an entire scene dedicated to the National Anthem being sung into an anal orifice. But that's the charm of Shortbus, I suppose. Director/Writer John Cameron Mitchell has made a film more explicit than most * while keeping eroticism completely out of the equation. The film's sexuality is frank and the humor always constant, while avoiding jokes that patronize its cast of outsiders. It's too easy to forget the poignancy of Shortbus, though. The dialogue that's sure to be shot wild by its release won't be about its humor or spirit; talk will be of the skin that was exposed in finding the better, realer bits. It's too bad, but, again, what can we expect from a film that sings the National Anthem into a man's anus? Rating: 3 out of 4 Samuel Osborn

The film was extremely disappointing...Cameron Mitchell seemed to be going through the motions here, I can't believe that the same person who wrote and directed the amazing "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" made the ridiculously bad "Shortbus," essentially a pseudo-* film selling itself as a character study. In fact, from the first sequence onwards, JMC's movie delivers sexually graphic scenarios — erections, money shots and all – illuminated by awfully contrived dialogue, horrid performances and a plot that is as preposterous/pretentious as it is tedious. As the characters struggle to express "profundity" through dialogue, they instead slip into triteness and cliché, and the emotional catharsis that seems to be JMC's goal feels absolutely staged and as cold and dettached as some of the acting. JMC is apparently trying something serious. He seems to want to show how certain New Yorkers are coping with the numbed-out sense of disconnection they've been feeling since Sept. 11. Mitchell takes us into a world in which sexual behavior is abundant but not always satisfying, and in which it may be easier to find willing bodies than genuine intimacy, but it would have helped had the characters in Shortbus been a little more interesting and appealing than the sexual positions in which they find themselves. "It's just like the Sixties, only with less hope," a character tartly declares at one point. Actually, it's just like the Sixties, only more clichéd. In a sense it's commendable that JMC wants to promote the joy of sex, but the movie is a big, pretentious, drawn-out drag, and not even very original; aspects of its plot can be found both in Oh in Ohio and Michael Winterbottom's equally hardcore (and more efficient) 9 Songs. JMC really needed to spend a lot more time developing these characters and their story, because a soap opera with sex is still only a soap opera. And a sex film without a heart or a brain or compelling characters is basically, a * film.