If there was a way to vote 0 on a movie here, I wouldn't give it a 0. I'm not entirely sure if I could give it a negative score. This is a movie that seems to transcend a scale made for professional entertainment, mostly because it is NOT a professional film. It's a home movie stretched out to 85 minutes. 85 gay, gay minutes.
Sam Mraovich is a hairdresser and real estate salesman, but his big dream is to be a Hollywood star (living in the area will do that to you). In order to accomplish this dream, Mraovich has made Ben & Arthur his magnum opus. Not simply content to direct or act in his star-making role, he has chosen to be the director, producer, executive producer (don't ask how that works), writer, music director, editor, cinematographer, casting director, and lead actor in his film.
Mraovich is not the first man to make a film this way: El Mariachi by Robert Rodriguez was famously made without a crew, the actors and Rodriguez himself taking over the various duties in their effort to make a low budget film. But while El Mariachi was made by a man who had been making movies since childhood and had dedicated himself to the technical crafts that augmented his natural creativity (and thus became a brilliant success and turned him into a big name Hollywood player), Ben & Arthur is made out of ego. Sam Mraovich wanted fame. So he made.....this.
Ben & Arthur is the story of two gay men who want to get married, only to be stymied by Ben's marriage to a woman to hide his true sexual orientation and Arthur's psychotic Christian fundamentalist brother. The basics behind the plot are not awful, and could be made into a dramatic film. Ben & Arthur does not do this.
The Sony VX2000 video camera this was filmed on is not a bad camera, certainly not a bad camera for the home video market in 2002. But this was intended to be a direct-to-DVD film, not a home movie. Sam Mraovich was badly overextending himself in this choice of camera, as it doesn't even come close to reaching the level of the cheap cameras used for typical low budget films (mostly in that it's a camcorder, not film). It doesn't help that he uses what appears to be entirely ambient lighting (that there isn't even a section for the electrical department in the credits lends credence to this suggestion) and fails to properly focus his camera or adjust for lighting. It's not uncommon for a scene to have lighting of a completely different color and brightness every time it switches angles. One shot of Ben in bed as the film comes to its horrifying climax demonstrates why "Hollywood darkness" is meant to be used: the room is almost pitch black, and the full Youtube copy of the film (among many snarky annotations) makes sure to note what the scene is showing because it's otherwise nothing but a mess of various shades of gray.
The cinematography would be bad....if it was there. Many of the scenes seem as if Mraovich literally put the camera on the tripod and jumped in front of it to act. The actors who played Victor and the PI are both listed as cinematographers, which suggests that they simply handled the camera in place of Mraovich whenever they weren't in the shot and/or he didn't feel like doing it himself. The scenes are not set up with any respect to the camera, and it doesn't seem like Mraovich ever bothered to do more than one or two takes, let alone get masters and close-ups of the same scene to have plenty of footage to work with. At least one scene is shot with Ben & Arthur talking as the cameraman wanders around and between them with the camera on his shoulder. They had nothing but a tripod to steady the camera, so any shots that couldn't be done with it are shaky and nasty.
So that covers the look of the movie, and what drops it firmly into home movie category. Sound? Forget it. Everything was shot with the camera microphone (indeed, there likely wasn't any equipment used in the filming other than the Sony and the tripod), so while the dialogue and sound effects are understandable it all sounds terrible. The film opens with a cheery rendition of "The Entertainer" as Mraovich's name flashes almost a dozen times through the opening credits, which are placed in front of a background that resembles one of the acid trips that plays on Windows Media Player in time to the music. The music that plays in the actual movie (the few times any plays) is a generic keyboard tune out of a bad 80s action film.
The acting is handled woodenly and sloppily, with messed up takes being left in and actors obviously reading from off-screen (or in the case of the lawyer, on-screen) scripts. The plot is even worse; gays and Christians alike respond to their problems with murder and property damage, and the film is written from an extremely biased viewpoint that turns the religious into evil, bigoted monsters while inadvertently stereotyping gays as flouncy, sex-crazed psychos. Plot holes, continuity errors, and nonsensical events and plans abound (like making a plot to use holy water to cure Arthur of his gayness, and then just taping the bottle to his door and expecting something to happen). Other reviews mention the palm trees of Vermont and the FedEx plane, but they don't mention how the gun that Ben takes from his ex-wife turns into Victor's gun (a very obvious water pistol) while Victor still has it, the gun changing hands with each shot in the finale.
Speaking of the finale, it's horrible. Your mind will not make it out alive.
Watch this movie with friends. And carefully.
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