The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green
Some fans of Eric Orner's comic strip, ``The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green," will be pleased to know that the characters have made it to the movies with their one dimension firmly intact. The strip is now a cartoonish sitcom pretending to be a romantic comedy about a drama queen and his adventures in lust. The movie might have gotten away with it, were it interested in romance or comedy. But the filmmakers don't appear to have any interests aside from celebrating the shallow sexual whims of the titular Ethan Green.
Ethan (Daniel Letterle) is involved in what is best described as a love rhombus -- four sides, not all of them equally appealing. The trystees include his current, an ex-baseball-player soon to be his ex-boyfriend (Diego Serrano ); his level-headed ex-ex (David Monahan) , who's selling the house Ethan and his roommate (Shanola Hampton ) are living in; and the prissy young real estate agent (Dean Shelton ) who's helping get the house sold as slowly as possible.
Amid the fresh faces, the sight of more seasoned ones, like Meredith Baxter as Ethan's with-it mom, is a kind of relief, though having a TV vet like Joel Brooks show up in muumuus and tacky hats feels like a cruel comment on gay middle age. But Brooks, who is teamed with Richard Riehle , another screen veteran, is a professional. Otherwise, you could trip on the amateurism. Lord knows the other actors do. This feels like a school play that someone has dragged to film school and turned into a final project.
That gay do-it-yourself-and-do-it-badly sensibility has produced genius (John Waters) and some recent minor camp pleasures, among them Charles Busch's ``Die, Mommie, Die!" and Richard Day's brazen ``Girls Will Be Girls." The cockeyed director Q. Allan Brocka (``Eating Out" and the upcoming ``Boy Culture") seems determined to make a decent career with that approach. ``Ethan Green" is sane and comparatively innocent, which, ultimately, is too bad since the banal material is screaming for salacious insight.
The movie's writer, David Vernon, and its director, George Bamber, do manage to wrangle most of the cast into the house for the finale. But that turns into a non-event, too. An episode of ``Golden Girls" is naughtier, funnier, and better made.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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