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DVD : Sordid Lives

Rating: - Not as great as the TV series
Ok.....so my first shot at watching Sordid Lives was the TV series that has been airing on Logo. The series is freakin' hilarious. I thought the movie was going to be just as funny as what I had seen on TV. Well, since the movie came before the series, I thought it would be as good as the series......WRONG. The acting wasn't that great which is kind of odd because a lot of the characters in the movie are in the series. I guess over the years they've gotten better. The scenes ran way too long and there really wasn't that much that I found funny. I thought I would have considering the TV show is, but oh well. Anyways.....you'll definately find the series more hiliarious.

Rating: - Absolutely Hilarious...
This has to be the most hilarious movie I've ever seen in my 70 years. If you enjoy laughing (and who doesn't), here's your opportunity.

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Rating: - Sordid Lives
Great easy purchase, very fast delivery - awesome product, just as described. THANKS AMAZON!! Awesome funny movie!

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Rating: - Cute but flawed
Sordid Lives is like many films that have attained "cult" status in that it's an awkward, ungainly production whose devotees embrace it for the very elements that mainstream audiences might consider flaws.

The story is simple and straightforward, and the characters are potentially interesting, but they most seem two-dimensional. Beau Bridges is wasted on a drunk buffoon who's never really funny or given much to do. Bonnie Bedelia fares better as the prissy mom of the narrating character, because she chooses to play the part straight instead of broad. Even when she's being ridiculous, she's far more real than most of the cast, who, while energetic, are often not likable and frequently cartoonish. I suspect this is more about the script and the direction than the actors.

The gay subplot of the film is handled with a surprisingly heavy hand, and while Leslie Jordan's character Brother Boy is played with a certain level of dignity, the part as written is more stereotypical and broad that you'd think. Cooped up in an insane asylum for 23 years, Brother Boy lives vicariously as Loretta Lynn, but it's never clear if he's adopted his country music queen persona as a mechanism for distancing himself from the horrible world he inhabits, if he has gone slightly nuts from his years locked up, or both. The story takes a cheap way out by having him confronted by a psychologist who's clearly the biggest but in the booby hatch. The character of Ty, who narrates the story from his therapist's office, is bland, and for every story he tells that feels real and touches a nerve, there's something else that feels worn and retreaded. Ty never seems to be connected to the world he describes.

There's fun and funny stuff here, but the morals are heavy handed, and the story tries too hard to be outrageous, often resulting in forced comedy.

That this film is adapted from a play is readily apparent and all too obvious. I've not seen the play, but its fingerprint are all over the film: the staging and the dialogue and the fact that the whole story plays out in essentially four locations (house, mental hospital, bar and church) all point out this origin in really obvious ways. The thing takes place in essentially four scenes, and while intercut, it's still obviously four scenes. Those scenes would have been better off subdivided into smaller scenes and played in different locations.

Worst of all the technical execution is terrible. Apparently being one of the first indies shot on high def video, the film has a weird flat quality that isn't helped by amateurish lighting schemes where actors actually step into key lights of their fellow performers, casting them in shadows. The camera work itself is shaky and the setup and angles are often clumsy. The deleted scenes on the DVD demonstrate how bad this work can be, as some of the deleted material is so poorly photographed that one suspects it was dropped for its lack of visual quality as opposed to its narrative effectiveness.

In a way, the TV series spawned from it is better than the film itself, because it's written in bite-size scenes suited to television and film.

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Rating: - sordid lives
The dvd arrived in excellent condition. I would continue to do business with this company. The product arrived sooner than expected. I was extremely satisfied.

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