Doug Sebastian’s “And, There You Are”, from TLA Releasing (and TYA), is
certainly flippant. The title reminds one of a tweet that might accompany an
unauthorized photo. Actually, it’s the
title of the wonderful lead song, which sounds very familiar, coming from an
obscure movie. The campy film concerns a
gay furniture store (“River Street”) owner Ray Dalton (Roy Kirkland, composer of the song) whose whole trip in
life is to make it with straight men. The co-stars are Harrison Simon, Danielle Lalk, and Davey Sheffield.
The film punctuates itself with Ray laying on a couch talking
to his shrink. The shrink calls him “heterosexually challenged”. The film also gets paced by a dream, in BW,
where Ray imagines his parents telling him it’s wrong to chase straight men.
The movie at first seems to do very little but make fun of
an issue that was big for me during my “second coming”. But about a third the
way through, it gets going when Ray meets Brian (Harrison Simon), who looks at
him as “fun” whereas his girl friend Anastasia (Danelle Lalk) is his “future”. (In their initial meeting, Ray writes a phone number on a tip dollar bill and uses the word "beef" as a metaphor.) There is a particularly embarrassing “accident”
involving male “protein” in a restaurant; and then the girl friend starts getting
jealous, and she stirs things up on social media. Ray and Brian are both “inconsistent”
in their behavior, cursing each other and then making up instantly. When Brian
goes away on vacation, Ray is a little depressed, until he meets a bartender
T.C. (Jonathan Dangler) who seems to be a much better person (he won’t let Ray
drive home drunk), but looks a lot like Brian.
(He could lose the head scarf before the last scene.) And it turns out that T.C. isn’t
straight. The end credits say, “No
straight me were converted in making this film, that we know of.” There’s also a scene where a “I want you for
US Army” sign appears, in mirror image, a bit of irony inasmuch as the film was
made about four years before DADT repeal.
The film was shot in Valdosta, Georgia (with a scene
supposedly in Atlanta). Curiously, while
available from Netflix, I couldn’t find
it on imdb. That's really odd because the song is well known and I know I've heard it on my car radio (maybe on Sirius).
I couldn’t find a YouTube video trailer for this movie, but
here’s a rogue Black Friday video from Valdosta in 2011 at a Wal-Mart. Call that "today's short film".
Related review, TLA’s “Bear City”, Oct. 16, 2010.
A more famous LGBT-themed film shot in Georgia takes place
in Savannah (“New York is boring”). That’s the lengthy “Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil” (1997, Warner Brothers), by Clint Eastwood, based on the book
by John Berendt, with John Cusack and Kevin Spacey.
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