SEX AND THE NOT-SO-SINGLE MALE

Thursday, Oct. 24, 9 p.m.
Lincoln Theatre, $9

You just know that a good-sized chunk of the Sex shorts audience is there for the wank potential, even though film festival fuck scenes usually just flounder sexlessly as art house porn. Last Supper () is like an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents directed by a gay German misanthrope on a budget of twelve Euros. The featured couple is sardonically mismatched, and the frigid faux orgy is about as erotic as an ACT-UP die-in. But the mild mannered boyfriend gone psychotic is creepy and believable, and the final scene -- despite its Mentos, The Freshmaker quality -- is funny and gross in a pleasingly B-flick way.

Not so with The Boyfriend (), which wrongly sacrifices passion and energy for the sake of hyperrealism. Here's the gist: Two men meet in a bookstore, Todd and The Stranger. The Stranger is from out of town. They have sex all weekend while Todd's boyfriend is also out of town. At the end, The Stranger leaves. The End. Aside from a somewhat clever cruising scene in the bookstore, The Boyfriend is just a soft-serve sex flick, unable to romanticize infidelity enough to distract from the depressing reality that this is just two guys cheating on an unsuspecting partner.

At least David and Goliath () gives its two main characters a detectable -- if misguided -- sense of depth. Naïve, young Nick plays doormat to his porn star “boyfriend,” Todd, who doesn't see their relationship as anything serious and proceeds to torment Nick by flirting and smooching other men. Nick is perfectly pitiful as the wounded newbie, coaxing glints of true emotion from beneath Todd's narcissistic exterior. The climax is a bit much, as both characters verbally hemorrhage in a bout of fuzzy wuzzy feel-good catharsis, but the performances are convincing and the film's cartoonish, super saturated color gives it a helpfully surreal tint.

Equally surreal is The Last Blow Job (), a bizarre short about ex-lovers diffusing a car bomb as they rehash details of their former relationship. Is it a suspense flick? Is it a parody? Either way, the slick stylizing doesn't save it. And Love's Resurrected (), a black and white slab of Fifties nostalgia, is likely to be too esoteric for gay D.C.

-- WD