The Picture of Dorian Gray (2007) Reviews

• Duncan, what were you thinking???

  collhic2007-05-01

  Being a great fan of Duncan Roy's "AKA", I was very excited to see this work at the Miami filmfest. Sad to say, I was pretty much embarrassed to have brought my friends to "Dorian Gray." Where to begin? The film was plodding and in great need of editing. The dialog was unnatural & postured..even to the point of being silly. And plot...was there one? The split screens effects were interesting at times and more gimmicky at others. Even cute eye candy could not make you care about the characters or this sophomoric, unoriginal endeavor, for that matter . Most of the audience started shifting around & checking their watches halfway through the film...their thoughts mirroring mine of "when will this be over?!" Duncan, please go back to narratives

• Dull, vapid and wholly misjudged adaptation of Wilde's classic.

  willthind2007-04-05

  Last night I witnessed something quite extraordinary - Oscar Wilde's masterful, urbane 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' reduced to something artless, woefully pretentious and, most miraculous of all, crashingly dull. The promising opening 2 minutes very quickly evaporates like an unreliable memory as soon as the real business is introduced. Narrative is sketchy to say the least and even a knowledge of the novel is not enough to get you through 90 of the longest and most incoherent minutes I can remember. The film is tolerably well acted and populated by very pretty people. There's a particularly well-judged performance by Christian Camargo. But it's as if the cast have as little sense of where the film is going as the director himself. Tone and pacing are clueless. I'm sure that the director believes that his film is a potent comment on empty, drug-fueled lives, but unfortunately there is nothing on screen that ever rises above the predicable and tedious. With many of Wilde's most famous aphorisms picked out for our amusement, in this director's hands they fall flat like lead balloons. It's a completely humorless piece. One joke about Wagner raised a laugh, but the majority of the laughter was of the unintentional variety. To add to the general unpleasant feel of the film was a scene near the end set in a crack den inhabited entirely by African American people - the only African American people in the film until this point. It's a long time since I've watched a race reduced to a stereotype as blatantly offensive and ignorant as this. Just as offensive is the director's portrayal of AIDS - signaled by the word written in a title that fills the screen in giant letters in case we are too stupid to guess what's going on. Here AIDS is presented as nothing more than a bad case of acne. Seeing Dorian with a face full of spots does not quite present the horror you'd expect of the infamous portrait in the attic. The director gives himself more credits than you could shake a stick at. There was a Mexican wave of laughter along my row when the director's ego enabled him to receive solo credits for production design and executive producer (now, that's desperate) above the title. The film was shown as the closing night of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and watched by an audience who clearly didn't get it. As the end credits rolled there was an exodus of biblical proportions, desperate to escape before the director returned to stage to bore them some more.

• Disjoint, confusing

  JetBoy2007-07-31

  At the Outfest screening in July 2007, the director told us "If you haven't read the book, this picture will make no sense. For those of you who have read the book, I sincerely apologize." He also said "This is a difficult film." We thought he meant difficult to make, but after seeing it we realize he meant difficult to watch. He said his intent was to remake "The Picture of Dorian Gray" with the gay undertone highlighted. For whatever reason, he chose to throw out conventional film narrative style and make an experimental film. The result is dream-like, confusing, and disjoint. It's a hard film to make sense of, even if one knows the story well. If you aren't already familiar with the story, you'll have no idea what is going on. The film does succeed in making explicit the gay subtext of the story and previous adaptations, but don't expect a conventional film.

• Terrible, pretentious mess

  tennisttw2007-10-18

  Wow what a spectacularly pretentious and boring film. The first act of it is nearly unwatchable and comes off like a bad Calvin Klein "Obsession" ad parody. I give the film 2 stars instead of 1 because, with a couple notable exceptions, the acting is quite good for this type of movie. Also, I applaud the director for at least trying to be daring. But those are the only compliments I can find for this movie. I thought that just about everything else in the film failed miserably. The direction was utterly incoherent with only those already very familiar with Oscar Wilde's original story able to piece things together at all in the first half of the film. The film is unsettling, sometimes presumably intentionally so, because there is nearly constant background noise distracting from the dialog/narrative. Televisions or unseen radios blare out repetitive monologues or inexplicable buzzing sounds can be heard. This aspect could have been worsened by a poor choice of the theater I saw it in where they apparently chose to turn the volume way up so the often mumbled dialog could be heard. Whatever the cause, the background noise was extremely grating. At least the terrible sound mixing would occasionally have the unintended consequence of waking up the bored audience when an inappropriately loud sound would suddenly slap them upside the head. I can see the intention with a buzzing snooze alarm, but when someone setting a glass on a table gives the audience a jolt (and a headache), that is not a good thing. One of the worst failures of the film itself is the mixing of Wilde's dialog with contemporary dialog. You can certainly take old dialog and modernize everything else about a story very successfully (see "Romeo + Juliet" for one example). And I'm sure there are other movies that mix old and new dialog in a contemporary setting with success. But here you can always tell which lines of dialog were lifted from Wilde because they sound like they came from a much more interesting story. Often times, embarrassingly enough, they are used in a way that suggests the director has misinterpreted their meaning or tried to give them much greater meaning than Wilde intended. This is not helped by jarring and pretentious screens that pop up showing some of the lines of dialog. So many others have listed other big problems with the film (casual racism, over-reaching and offensive AIDS story) that I won't detail them. Suffice to say this film is a mess and should be avoided.

• What the heck is the point?????

  preppy-32007-05-19

  Pointless and badly done update of "The Picture of Dorian Gray". It takes place (I guess) in 2006. Dorian (David Gallagher) has some media exhibit done of him by his friend Basil (Noah Seagan) who is madly in love with him. The exhibit shows Dorian's face and body on various screens. Dorian says he would never betray a friend, kill somebody or have sex with a man. Naturally he does all three and the exhibit shows the ravages while he remains youthful. What the hell was the director thinking of when he did this? First of all an updating of Dorian is not needed. Secondly he adds nothing to the tale. And, third, this movie thinks VERY highly of itself. The characters don't talk--they mumble speeches and, for some reason, the director constantly has other voices on the soundtrack when main characters are speaking. This just renders some of the dialogue incomprehensible. Also some lines people say inexplicably appear on the screen in big bold letters. I guess the director thinks we're too stupid to think things out by ourselves. The acting is as good as it could be. Gallagher is actually quite good as Gray. He's tall, handsome with a nice body and is a pretty good actor. Segan is a little whiny as Basil--but that is his character. I didn't know what to make of Henry played by Christian Camargo. He's always giving these vague sentences with a blank look. I did something I never do in movies--I walked out (I wasn't alone). After about 80 minutes I had reached my point. The movie was stupid, annoying, incomprehensible at times and--worst of all--dull. This is a pretentious, needless art film that thinks it's something that it isn't. A 1 all the way.