"Maybe that's it, man," Lauren says, shooting the breeze with fellow actors. "The ideas of things are so much f-----g bigger than they actually are."
It doesn't take long to figure out that "Interior. Leather Bar" won't spend much screen time re-creating lost footage from "Cruising." The film is mostly talk interrupted by occasional shots of flirtation or sex between men in studded leather. After a while you catch on that the talking is probably scripted as well (or improvised from a scene outline). Mathews, who's credited with editing and writing "Interior. Leather Bar", always seems to be in just the right place with his camera to get an attractive yet functional shot, and there's often more than one camera covering important moments. Even if all the actions captured by the filmmakers were truly spontaneous, you'd still question how "spontaneous" they were, because almost everyone onscreen is a professional actor.
So what are you looking at, really? Is the movie a bait-and-switch? Probably. The film has fun with the idea that nobody would have gotten involved were it not for the chance to work with James Franco and perhaps perform in a sex scene with James Franco (there are no sex scenes involving James Franco, if you were wondering). How much does Franco really have to do with the project, though? Maybe not as much as we're led to think; the more you watch "Interior. Leather Bar," the more apparent it seems that Mathews is its creative force, and Franco is there mainly to lend industry clout and a famous name, and indulge his sociopolitical and personal agendas along the way.
I've seen quite a few movies that try to do what "Interior. Leather Bar" is doing: get audiences to think about what "normal" means, and how tough it is to get sexually frank stories about homosexual characters and situations in front of heterosexual audiences who are conditioned to think of all sex as "deviant" if it's not straight (or "tasteful," meaning brief and suggestive). And I've meet very few straight moviegoers who aren't film critics (or film buffs) who've seen those sorts of movies. That's because straight moviegoers are raised to think that stories involving gay people are foreign to their experience. There has to be an obvious way into the story for them, such as a homophobic lawyer character ("Philadelphia") or a ruggedly macho "family man" who identifies as straight ("Brokeback Mountain"). They can identify with hobbits and space smugglers and displaced Kryptonians, but not gay people.
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