bkoganbing
Make The Yuletide Gay is a wonderful film that I would recommend to far more than LGBTQ audiences. It is to be fondly hoped that more and more gay youth experience what the leads Keith Jordan and Adam Ruggiero at Christmas time.Jordan plays an out and proud college student and Ruggiero is his boyfriend. Except for one thing, neither has come out to parents. Their concerns are quite real. In my own life I've met too many gay people who were disowned by families and had some terrible life experiences stemming from that.Jordan is heading home to his Wisconsin family and Ruggiero was going to go home, but his parents Ian Buchanan and Gates McFadden are busy in their social world and have just won a cruise for two. So left on his own devices Ruggiero comes to Jordan's and the two have to figure out where their relationship is going.Jordan's parents are an interesting pair. Derek Long was a Grateful Dead fanatic in his youth, now he seems like someone who's just retreated from life. Kelly Keaton is in her own world and appears totally clueless about all around her.Without going into too much detail let's say it's Merry Christmas to all. For a gay themed movie this thing is practically G-rated. Sad to say that the sight of two attractive young men showing passionate care for each other is still likely to earn a restricted rating. Really there's nothing here,even the youngest audiences could see it and not be 'damaged' for life. But just the subject of same gender sex is enough to get the Puritan in some going.I would recommend this as a model film for PFLAG to show how some parents really do care for their children first no matter what their sexual orientation may be.
tatararabuga
it's as bad as Christmas movies can go. poor making, bad acting, cliché jokes badly delivered and above all, so sugar-y it'll make you cringe. I was attracted by the theme and the nice poster. the beginning certainly seemed promising. but as it went on, i was only more and more astonished to see how truly bad it was!A movie made in 2009 should not be yelling 'being gay is okay!' like a pamphlet and hoping to win us over with that only. It should have at least some emotional depth. And I did not even get a very 'okay' feeling from its condescending attitude. I mean, a movie can have low production value and story-without-surprise and still produce empathy for the characters. take latter days for example. but the storyline has to be developed properly and credibly.they fail to come up even with a decent crisis.a problem does occur, but there is no real building-up OR resolving. This one also wins the award for holding the highest amount of familiar sexual innuendos. but my insides are cramped with all the cringes resulting from very bad delivery. There are so many not-so-bad light-hearted movies about young people coming out to the family... Mambo Italiano and Touch of Pink for example. Then there's Get Real, Edge of Seventeen, Summerstorm, Wedding Banquet, Saving Face and many others. This one is just a punishment.
johannes2000-1
Due to my own not-so-good experiences with my coming-out (thanks, mum and dad!!), I'm a real sucker for feel-good coming-out movies - they never fail to bring me to some heartfelt tears of shared happiness. So with these kind of movies I'm not that critical as to whether the script, the direction or the acting is really above par. That's a good thing with this movie, for it's rather balancing on the verge. Although I enjoyed it and it served it's purpose, there are many flaws.For starters: there seem to have been made some strange and awkward choices in the editing. At many, many points the movie comes to a stand-still, when the camera lingers far too long on the face of a person after he or she has said or done something. When you want to stress some Deap Meaning this can be quite functional, but in a comedy, or at least at moments when comedy is intended, it's killing: it not only effects the pace but it sucks the punch out-off every punch-line! This brings me to my next reservation: there are way too many double entendres in the script, it dangerously tilts the movie to the point of below-the-belt cheapness. Sure, I laughed at some of them (even at the beaver-joke), but it annoyed me too, this movie didn't need all that, since it's a situational comedy the fun should come out of the situation itself and the opposite characters.Another reservation concerns the side-characters (and thus again the script). When you have so few characters in the story (in fact there are only four important ones, apart from the girl next door), and two of them (both parents) are personified and pictured in such an extreme and surreal way, then in my opinion it becomes totally top-heavy and negatively affects the balance of the story. One lunatic parent, with maybe one or two lunatic neighbors would had been quite enough.A last negative remark to the script: although it's a comedy, there ought to be maintained - especially in this kind of situational comedy - some sort of basic feeling of reality. Here this was put to the test way too often. Can a renowned professor walk around for a whole professional career being perpetually stoned out of his wits? Are these parents (obviously from the 60's love-generation) blind as bats, not to see that their son's room-mate Nathan is gayer than gay?! Is the switch of the neighbor-girl from love-sick goody two-shoes to an almost professional foul-mouthing fag-hag not a tiny bit too abrupt and weird?? And is the almost utopian coolness of both parents at the eventual outing of their son not a tiny bit out-of sync with the beforehand constant hammering of at least mama with her son on the theme of girls, marriage, family etc.? Wouldn't such cool and unorthodox parents (who make out with each other almost publicly, have such loud sex that their son has to put a pillow over his head, and with a father who walks around the house with his morning-gown hanging open and in that state even opens the front door when a stranger calls) - wouldn't such cool and care-free parents have already brought up the topic of sex with their only son a long time ago?? Well, anyway, now for the good things. This is without any doubt a very sympathetic, warm and sincere movie. There is, thank god, not so much a Big Message that has to be drilled-in, it just keeps close to the real-life fears of a gay adolescent when being on the brink of revealing his true self to his family: will they accept me in this new light? will I disappoint them? will things change between us? The script doesn't provide a big plot - like in so many other comparable coming-of-age movies - with complicated misunderstandings, plot-shifts and all kinds of side-stories; no, it just sort of strolls along on it's basic theme and in this way gets a nice and quiet development. The comedy-elements are, as said, not of the most subtle kind, but in spite of the serious theme the lighthearted tone of the movie succeeds in making you smile all the time, and that is not a bad thing. The characters of the parents are unrealistic and over-the-top, so it must have been hard for the actors to make something out of it, but I have to give credit to Kelly Keaton who gives, within the limits and pitfalls of the script, a very good, enthusiastic and affectionate performance. The main characters are of course Olav and Nathan, both are given a fine and convincing portrayal by Keith Jordan resp. Adamo Ruggiero. I didn't know Ruggiero, I never saw "Degrassi", he's certainly beautiful and very cute and I thought that he grew in his role; he was supposed to be the gayish extrovert of the two boyfriends, but he proved that within that stereotype he could actually find his own nuances - for instance when father Gunnunderson finds him all alone on a sidewalk terrace, Ruggiero really succeeds in moving you. But I especially liked Keith Jordan, he had this subdued, under-cooled (as we say in Holland) way of acting that only enhanced the feeling of reality, and he is so cute and endearing in his seriousness, that it made me want to put his head on my shoulder and tell him that eventually everything would be okay!All in all the good things far outweighed the bad, and I vote it a heartfelt 8 out of 10!
Havan_IronOak
I've been a fan of Adamo Ruggiero since his earliest Degrassi days and I really wanted to like this film. Unfortunately it was so poorly made that I can never recommend it to any of my friends. The film just couldn't seem to get out of it's own way.The parents and the neighbors were more caricatures than characters. In fact they would have had to have been toned down considerably to have been reasonable caricatures.The dialogue was good in spots but then seemed to immediately slip off the rails. The dialogue jokes were forced at best and often groan-worthy. If half of them had been removed, the story might have been able to carry them but as it was they were just too much. Just as there always seemed too be one syllable too much in the name Gununderson, the lines always seemed to go a bit too far.Actually, the main characters Olaf and Nathan were OK and both actors were adorable and able to make me care about their characters. However, the mother's character was just too far over the top and the father was beyond "beyond." (I've seen Derek Long in one of this director's earlier works and he was MUCH better in that) I'm not saying that the actors didn't do a great job with what they were given but this film could have really used at least one more script revision before it was shot. I've often railed about the lack of perspective that occurs when the writer is also the director and this film is just another example of that problem.Just one example should suffice but this does contain a spoiler so be forewarned: When Nathan returns to the Gununderson's house after claiming that he's going to fly home. The audience is concerned with what Olaf will think and do. Will he welcome Nathan back? Will he finally be honest with his parents? Instead we're given a meaningless joke about headless gingerbread men. The joke was entirely unnecessary, and then it isn't even executed correctly as Nathan lifts a normal gingerbread man from a plate that has just been shown to contain only headless ones.Overall I really wanted to like this movie and it wasn't as painful as a few gay films that I've been unable to sit through but it was clearly pushing that limit.
