I’ve been wanting to see Latter Days for awhile now. I could swear I remember
Latter Days is the story of a mormon missionary and a gay waiter tramp. Boy meets boy. Boy makes bet about getting in boy’s pants. Boy falls in love with boy. Boy kisses boy. Boy gets found out by his fellow missionaries. Boy is sent home. Boy manages to arrange nookie with Boy. Boy goes back home anyway. Boy is excommunicated. Boy tries to commit suicide. Boy is put through variant electroshock therapy. Boy gets free. Boy finds boy again. Boys live happily ever after.
I’m both an atheist and a militant agnostic. I don’t believe in god. And I’m completely confident that ultimate causes of being and/or the existence of an omnipotent and/or omniscient entity are unknowable. I believe that others believe, but their beliefs are just guesses they’ve hung a great deal of hope on or a deeply inculcated assumption that they do not question. Probably more the latter. For a fair number of people there is a great deal of their individual and collective lives built around that premise.
That having been said, I believed. I believed deeply, more than half my life ago. I took it more seriously than anyone else I knew. A candle that burned so brightly, so briefly. The loss of belief was catastrophic for me. Life wasn’t going so hot to begin with, and the collapse of my belief system was a very big deal. Probably the central support structure in my life went byebye. My loss of belief was associated with misdeeds with a fellow a little bit younger than myself when I was a pretty wee tot. The trigger, as it were, was his suicide threat that landed him in the hospital, where he spilled his guts, and apparently went on to tell some tales that were not true. I denied everything, the true and the false, and got away with it, on some level. I denied it to my parents. I denied it to myself. I denied it to Children’s Services. But the failure of lightning to strike me, and the guilt I felt left me pretty fucked up. And my faith went with it.
Additionally, I’m somewhat familiar with the sexual lifestyle of the waiter boy, a series of one night stands. I’m have a window the sense of abandonment which that character felt when he was left behind in a blizzard by his father, from the time when I was accidentally left behind at a rest stop, on an october night, where I was sexually assaulted by a stranger.
There’s a theme in the movie about how things have meaning in the bigger picture that we can’t always appreciate as we’re living our lives.
It was a good movie, and I strongly recommend it.
I found myself strangely drawn to the movie myself despite the weak acting. I think the part that made the movie work is that buried in the acting and the “staging” was a lot of real life.
Huh. really strongly didn’t like it, and thought it was thorougly cliche. I still haven’t seen it myself.
It has alot of cliche in it. And the beauty standards are thoroughly hollywood. The big sex scene has some shots I find pretty disturbing from a ‘dear gods, please eat something’ standpoint. But the degree to which I relate to the movie…
I have not seen the movie yet, but I thought the book was a good read.
Amazon says that the book was written from the script. This makes me less inclined to purchase it. =)
The book offers few insights that the movie didn’t cover. The one notable difference is that the book provides extensive backstory on, of all people, Ryder. As much as I liked Levitt’s performance, I’m glad his role didn’t mirror what the book covered. The focus was rightly kept on the characters of Christian and Aaron.
I’m glad you enjoyed the flick. I liked it a great deal. There’s a lot of good post-movie stuff on the LD journal. 😉
I’ll have to rent that now. It’s somewhere in my rental queue I think.
There’s a mormon church near the entrance to my neighborhood. I pass by it every day. Sometimes I see the two dressed up gentleman going door-to-door on my street, after which I speed to my driveway and lock myself in the house. Occassionally I’ll think of the previews for Latter Days and have naughty thoughts about opening the door to them and inviting them inside for a “discussion”. Usually it ends when I realize how boyish and young they actually are.
I did have a moment where I saw mormons walking down the street and grinned at them. They waved back, very friendly. Reminded me they were people, and not instantiations of movie character. Poor guys.