Kiss Me, Guido. – movie reviews
Jan Stuart
Quick test: If you can swallow the
possibility that there is any grown man who lives
within smelling distance of Manhattan who (a)
believes he can find a one-bedroom apartment
there for $200, (b) thinks “GWM” in a
roommate-wanted ad means “guy with money,”
and (c) doesn’t know Julia Roberts from Julie
Andrews, then they’ll be scraping you off the
floor after Kiss Me, Guido. Chances are, you
could be this guy.
Director-screenwriter Tony Vitale
may or may not mean his title to be a
nod to Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid, but the
limitless moronic capacity of the new movie’s
eponymous character is never in doubt. Frankie
(Nick Scotti), the film’s Bronx-bred Guido and
hapless apartment hunter, is an ethnic
Frankenstein stitched together from every
condescending thought ever entertained about an
outer-borough homophobe. What’s more, his
extended family are the Munsters of urban Italian
America: a meatball-thumping, gut-growling circus
of high-decibel communication. When your name is
Vitale, apparently you can still get away with this.
The checklist cliches, as it
turns out, are all setups for what is
presumably a gay Italian homeboy’s
revenge. (Vitale, however, has so far
cagily sidestepped discussing his own sexual
identity.) When Frankie discovers his brother
humping his girlfriend and decides to find new digs,
this sneeringly straight actor wanna-be is thrown
into the path of Warren (Anthony
Barrile), a gay star of kickboxing sequels.
Warren recently broke up with his
self-loathing boyfriend (Christopher
Lawford, son of Peter Lawford) and is
being stalked for rent by his romantically
frustrated landlady (Molly Price, gamely
doing the Mercedes Ruehl
ball-busting-babe duties). Because Vitale
strives to be an equal-opportunity
stereotyper, Warren blanches at the
thought of sharing his space with a
breeder and sequesters himself in a
ghetto of gay men with such pulp-purple
names as Terrence, Dakota, Chandler,
and Sebastian. Could their parents have
known so early?
The filmmaker runs afoul not with his
primary-color strokes–intransigence is
the soul of good farce–but rather with
the lack of go-for-broke comic prowess
that enables you to get away with them.
In the most telling moment, Frankie is
schooled by Warren’s prissy chum
(Swoon’s Craig Chester) in how to mince
it up for a gay play in which he’s been
cast: It’s a sly reverse on the classic La
Cage aux Folles cafe scene in which
Albin tries to butch it up, but neither
Vitale nor his actors have the first clue
how to make it fly. In a switch that may
be some kind of first, Warren’s nelly
sidekick is also the movie’s unfunniest
character, which would be a genuinely
subversive gesture if only it were
intentional.
Kiss Me, Guido began its life as a
low-budget indie film but has the
requisite broad sensibility and faultily
detailed vision of New York City living
to make it credible with the Hollywood
big leaguers (enter Paramount Pictures).
Its favorite camera shot is from the
inside of a pizza oven looking out, but it
has the constricted feel of glimpsing the
world through a peashooter. The crowds
reportedly loved this at Sundance, where
the air is thin and audience favorites (The
Spitfire Grill–puhl-e-e-eze) are to be
given as wide a berth as possible.
There is plenty of vintage disco over
the action for those who believe that
movie sound tracks all went downhill
after Thank God, It’s Friday. The music
typifies the sort of retro yearning film in
which a gay man can still be found
wearing his baseball cap turned around.
But then, Kiss Me, Guido is just another
pseudo-queer picture in which the
heteros have sex and the homos merely
talk about it.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
