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I just saw it and I found it to be a very peculiar and not sure what to think of it. I like the premise a lot, about a straight police detective having to go undercover in the homosexual BDSM underworld, in order to find a serial killer.
SPOILERS
But I thought maybe the movie kind of got repetitive a lot in the second act, as Pacino's character, spends most of his time just cruising around at random hoping the killer will pop up by luck, and he doesn't really do much else.
I mean in a lot of detective thrillers like Chinatown, The Big Sleep, or Seven for example, it's a puzzle that unravels with one piece of evidence, taking you into the next piece, etc. Here it just feels like maybe he is going through false suspects to fill in the second act, unless I am reading it wrong.
There is also the part of the plot, where the police Captain and his superior are talking and the superior tells him how the gay community is breathing down the department's throat to find the killer and they have to take off the gloves to find him
So their definition of taking off the gloves, is arresting a suspect, who they don't have much significant evidence, on and try to get a confession out of him. They do this by having a muscular man, wearing a thong, come into the room, and beat a confession out of him. They won't let him talk to a lawyer either.
So they want to take off the gloves cause the gay community is putting pressure on them, but wouldn't the gay community come down on them a lot harder, if the suspect decides to go to the media, and talk about how the police arrested him and wouldn't let him see a lawyer, and how they allowed a muscular man beat a confession out of him. A muscular freak in a thong at that.
It seems to me that the gay community would have a much bigger problem with that, then the police not being able to find the murderer yet, and it seemed so illogical.
Also, the ending is meant to ambiguous as to what really happened, but I felt it was too ambiguous perhaps, to the point where it came off as gimmicky, as if the filmmaker wanted to say look how far I can take the ambiguity, but I think he went too far, where the viewer just feels jerked around, at least I did.
But what do you think, maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way.
I have never seen it. But a lady I used to work with (who was a lesbian) not only HATED this movie, but to this day hates Al Pacino because of it. She thought it painted such an unfair picture of the gay community that she never forgave Pacino for it.
the movie is like 30+ years old and deals with social issues that have experienced recent significant changes.
just saying digging through my closet i cant find an old hat that fits good enough to figure what they were thinking
I have never seen it. But a lady I used to work with (who was a lesbian) not only HATED this movie, but to this day hates Al Pacino because of it. She thought it painted such an unfair picture of the gay community that she never forgave Pacino for it.
Don't tell me she never watched Scent of a Woman and Heat because of Cruising.
Well I didn't think of the movie as anti-gay though. The gay BDSM bar was just the setting for the serial killer. The same way The Silence of the Lambs for example, had a serial killer with gender identity problems, but that doesn't meant that every person with gender identity crises, is like the character in the movie.
As for Pacino's views, I copied this quote of the wikipedia article:
Quote:
Al Pacino said that he understood the protests but insisted that upon reading the screenplay he never at any point felt that the film was anti-gay. He said that the leather bars were "just a fragment of the gay community, the same way the Mafia is a fragment of Italian-American life", referring to The Godfather, and that he would "never want to do anything to harm the gay community".
I think after seeing the movie I have to agree, that the way the homosexual characters are portrayed in this movie is not meant to be a representation of the entire population.
That's like watching a movie like New Jack City, and assuming the movie is anti-black, just because a small portion of the black community in the story is manufacturing and distributing narcotics.
Well as far as the homosexual community being offended by how they are portrayed in the movie, doesn't the movie portray them ahead of it's time though?
I mean usually in older movies, whenever there is a gay character, the filmmakers feel they have to portray the character as flamboyant, or effeminate.
Here, we have a lot of homosexuals in a bar that act the same as any other guys in a bar, minus the leather, and so I felt the movie was ahead of it's time on it's portrayal. Unless I am wrong.
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