Sex, Politics & Cocktails Movie Review

Sex, Politics and Cocktails? Well, sex and cocktails mostly. Not necessarily a bad combination, but this yearning-to-be-earnest sex farce by writer/director/producer/star Julien Hernandez ends up as just one more low-budget analysis of the toxic world of the gay dating scene in West Hollywood. We’ve seen this before. A lot.

Such movies always begin with the main character lamenting the fact that if you’ re over 30 in this world, you’re totally screwed, or, to be more accurate, you’ re not screwed and never will be again. Finding Mr. Right is impossible. Of course, spend a few minutes watching these people and ask yourself: would you want to live the rest of your life with any one of these shallow, bitchy, philandering characters?

31-year-old Sebastian (Hernandez), who is sexually unfocused rather than totally gay, arrives in L.A. to be a moviemaker, natch. Given a gig to make a documentary about gays, he asks his soap star friend Daria (Marisa Petroro) to introduce him to her many gay friends, all of whom know how to make great margaritas and most of whom start hitting on the overwhelmed Sebastian.

This wild crowd is full of stories, and Hernandez gets credit for his clever editing (he did that, too) as he tells these tales through a tightly constructed roundelay of flashbacks within flashbacks, spilt screens, and quick cuts. There’s even one bit where he gets so deep into flashbacks that he actually rewinds the movie several minutes to get the main story back on track.

Not that there’s much of a story. Sebastian has anonymous gay bathroom sex (does this really happen as often in West Hollywood as it does in movies about West Hollywood?) and starts to slide along the Kinsey scale, eventually crushing on a wealthy Beverly Hills entertainment executive. The rest of the crowd flails around looking for connections buy mainly embarrassing themselves on excruciating blind dates and in goofy sexual encounters. And yes, in case you’re wondering, there’s the obligatory scene in which a sexual encounter with a banana leads to a comical trip to the emergency room. The only person who seems fully in control of her sexuality is the man-hungry Marisa who, unfortunately, discovers that her boyfriend swings both ways. To quote Joan Cusack in In and Out, “Is everybody gay???”