Goodbye Seventies

By: Do not waste your time or money

By: First Time Reviewer

If this hadn't been a Todd Verow film I would have just accepted it as a banal and cliched gay film and not said anything. But it is a Todd Verow film and thus a huge disappointment. Where is the provocateur and edgy artist who has, over many years, tested and expanded the limits of the gay independent film on every level? The artist who bared his soul and body on film to make us look at his gay experience. Unfortunately, that Todd Verow didn't show up for this film. I didn't believe a minute of it and I lived through the era he was recreating. I get that the focus is on the characters and their live choices and how AIDS destroyed everything, but come on - a film about the making of gay porn and the only cock in sight is a stunt dick for one of the main characters? The sex scenes and nudity are coy and unbelievable and there is no way these 'films' would have been successful anywhere but on a wall in a squalid backroom bar. I have no idea what the tone of the film is supposed to be; it veers from realism to movie of the week to soap opera and there is even a scene stolen from 'Beefcake' where one of the character's mother makes lunch for the cast and crew of the current porn film being made. Maybe Verow tried to cover just too much of the era - he just didn't have time to really delve deep into his characters and make us care about them.

This won't stop me from seeing Verow's next film. I still think he's one of the most important gay filmmakers in the history of independent film and hope this was just a bad dream.

By: Amos Lassen

"GOODBYE SEVENTIES"
Todd Verow Is Back
Amos Lassen
Director Todd Verow takes us back to the past with his new film, "Goodbye Seventies." We have a feeling it will be uttered with the same relief that we will all be saying Goodbye 2020. Bradford Christianson (Chris Rehmann) is a wannabe Broadway dancer who slips on the stairs to an underground gay club in 1970s New York.
Bradford is so badly injured that he has to find an alternate profession. He and his best friend, Vinnie (Ken Kaissar) decide to earn a living by making gay adult films for an arthouse cinema. They convince the cinema owners to give their movies a chance and they become very successful and a source of income to provide to Bradford and the performers that he finds during his visits underground sex clubs.
However, the success does not last long with the coming of the AIDS epidemic. Verow, with this film, shows us how to make a bad movie. "Goodbye Seventies" hovers somewhere between satire and trash.
The film uses 70's techniques and seems to be an amateur attempt at making a movie. "Goodbye Seventies" is "about the making of the films and this family that develops". There is no explicit sex because it is not important. What is important is that sexually explicit films were made and they were successful." This is really about the filmmaking and the characters rather than the sex."