100 Words (More or Less) about Shortbus

Wednesday, November 01, 2006  | 

I've long been a fan of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in spite of my lingering suspicion that the play/film offers little genuine insight into "the origins of love" (or anything else for that matter). Hedwig is a remarkable creation, John Cameron Mitchell is charismatic in the role, and Stephen Trask's music is pretty damn great. Shortbus, however, fails so miserably and on so many levels that my suspicions about Mitchell's previous work have become magnified ten-fold. What an ugly, banal, and manipulative mess of a film.