Average Rating: 4.2/10
Reviews Counted: 17
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 13
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 4.1/10
Critic Reviews: 8
Fresh: 1 | Rotten: 7
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.1/5
User Ratings: 1,342
Jimmy Zoole (Steve Guttenberg, also making his directing debut) has been having bad, bad day. Not only has his one-man version of Hamlet (performed with hand puppets) just tanked, his girlfriend has left him, his cat is gravely ill, and his unfinished novel has been stolen. Plus, it's New Year's Eve. So when Jimmy finds Eddie (Lombardo Boyar), a gay burglar, lurking in his apartment, he isn't exactly thrilled. On the verge of a major breakdown, he ties up Eddie and uses him as an outlet for his
Jan 17, 2003 Wide
Aug 12, 2003
TLA Releasing
All Critics (19) | Top Critics (8) | Fresh (4) | Rotten (13) | DVD (2)
[The Boys in the Band] is much wittier and funnier than the comparatively frantic and frenzied shouting matches devised by Messrs. Guttenberg, Korn and Kirkwood.
Remains too much a filmed play.
It's another world now, which is why Kirkwood's play, adapted to the screen by actor Steve Guttenberg, feels so moldy and out of date.
It is, inevitably, an actorly exercise -- not off-puttingly so, perhaps, but at no time do we have a sense that we've transcended the stage. Or, for that matter, 1970.
The performances are solid, but as a screenwriter, Guttenberg can't make the situation seem like more than a theatrical construct in a contemporary setting.
The story doesn't have anywhere interesting to go once Kate, appropriately humiliated, slinks away.
Canned theater.
In 1975, the idea of a straight man tying up a gay burglar was exotic, darkly humorous and sexually charged. In director/star Steve Guttenberg's new film version, it comes off as no big deal.
Guttenberg is a capable director; his framing is crisp, his pacing brisk, his eye alert to telling detail.
Guttenberg ... obviously meant this as a major stretch, and does his best acting work since his breakthrough in Diner.
A two-character roundelay whose modicum of enjoyment depends largely on your own personal appetite for social commentary transparently dressed up as assertively quirky entertainment.
Guttenberg's Jimmy is such a natural extension of the actor himself, which adds a dimension the original playwright never could have imagined.
Dominated by an unshaven Guttenberg mugging, ranting, screaming and hurling himself around the luxurious loft set we're meant to believe is a squalid dump that serves as a nagging reminder to Jimmy of his inadequacies.
The film's completely declawed of energy and comedy.
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