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| Directed by Anne Wheeler; Starring Karyn Dwyer, Christina Cox, Anne-Marie MacDonald, Peter Outerbridge, Wendy Crewson, and Kevin Mundy |
Just a week after evenly panning the gay comedy trick, I’m brought into a near remake, just with lesbians this time around. Better Than Chocolate is earnest and trying, but never picks up anywhere. I thought that the performers were putting forth a bit of an effort, but just were unable to perfectly find their mark.
The film is mainly about Maggie, a young Canadian 19 year old that has just quit college only to become a worker at a gay-oriented shop called 10 Percent Books. She is actually happy with her life, falling in love with an artist (Cox) that goes around in her van painting passerby’s for twenty dollars and sleeping her nights on the couch in the shop. But everything changes when her mother (Crewson) leaves her father and decides that she and her son (Mundy) should move in with Maggie. Maggie must find a place to live that will conform to her lesbian lifestyle, allow the inclusion of her brother and mother, and meets the grand scale description Maggie had given to her unsuspecting mother. The house she finds is the pad of a fellow lesbian that has her apartment filled with dildos of all types. From there she must keep her sexual preference a secret from her mother, while joining the shop’s owner (MacDonald) in fighting the Canadian customs over holding some books at the border due to excessive sexuality.
The film seems at times to be a late night romp on Cinemax, other times to be a lesbianized Simply Irresistible. The actors seem to try (with the exception of the unbelievably over playing MacDonald), but always fail. The direction is by the book and the writing is simply terrible. The thing that I thought was the worst part was actually the musical choices. It sounded like a mix of Lilith Fair artists, all of whose lyrics coincide with what was happening in the present scene (a character leaves town, so does the song). Though the film is more watchable than trick, it is not that much more engaging. I guess that I shall never see a lesbian comedy work like what Bound did for lesbian thrillers.
