meaninglessbark The plot summary of Almost Normal sounds like another campy throw away attempt at a comedy full of inside jokes for the queer crowd. But for it's genre (queer comedy) it's a really well constructed film that explores an amusing story idea and rarely tries for the broad and obvious laughs. Nor does it throw in gratuitous nudity and sex as a cheap audience appeal.* Almost Normal is a well shot, good looking film. The acting is unusually good for a queer comedy. The sets, costumes, and hair are convincingly late 70s without screaming it (the way That 70s Show did), and the hair/makeup person/s did a great job at making younger actors look convincingly 20 years older. The music has a Movie of the Week sound to it which I like to think was intentional.In general Almost Normal is a great choice if you're looking for a pleasant, amusing queer comedy that doesn't insult your intelligence.*I actually love gratuitous nudity and sex as much as the next guy but in queer films it often seems tacked on merely for the audience or because the director wanted a legit reason to see the actors naked.

anibal_pazos Right! I felt a bit angry half way through the movie. I admitted I forwarded and rewind a few scenes I thought there were funny. But the idea of a gay person going to a future where you can be gay and it is acceptable as "normal" and the same character decided that he is "straight" did not make any sense to me. However I think this movie is about being an "Outsider" rather than an "Insider" (as the main character says at the end "sometimes what I want it is not what I need"). I agreed with previous comments, you don't really know what audience this movie target, but I have to say it is an interesting concept the director brings to the screen, isn't perfect but a good effort.

MOSSBIE Writer/Director Moody had the germ of an idea which might have worked if not done so earnestly; therefore making this muddled and filled with holes script barely reasonable.Most of the high raters here, I suspect might be gay because the film impersonates cross sexuality being so black and white.Moody also refers to characters we never see except for a brother at the end.Things like a father wearing dark glasses after having eye dilation has no usefulness and takes up badly needed script time to help explain the missing plot.The mother and family are almost grotesque in their stupidity without any kind of humor and all of the work successful shows like "Queer As Folk" or "Will and Grace" did on TV to humanize gays, is lost in the meandering points which really do not show any ingenuity or even one memorable line or quote. Frankly,scenes like the professor's seduction of his sister-in-law is incestuous and weird and her curiosity about how good the sex was after he comes back to reality is obscene.The budget constraints probably had a lot to do with all the questions the viewers ask themselves while trying to figure out what the hell is happening on the screen.

camelwest The indie film, written, directed and produced by a couple of college film professors, is kind of a cross between "Back To The Future" and "It's A Wonderful Life" with a queer twist that can be appreciated by gay as well as non-gay audiences. The cast includes mostly first-time actors and lots of extras from the film school and a local high school, but the film comes off surprisingly polished despite the low budget.A 40 year old college professor laments entering middle age as a single gay man, and is further depressed by a blind-date-from-hell and an incident where he thinks one of his young students is coming on to him, only to find out he wants to fix him up with his gay father. Unloading his misery on his "fag hag" best friend, he wishes he could start over and just be "normal", and seems to get his wish when a car crash transports him back to his high school days, but into a parallel universe where being gay is the norm, and straights are considered perverts who must seek out each other in incognito "straight bars" downtown. He starts dating the high school jock of his dreams, but a complication develops when he finds he is also attracted sexually to his former fag hag, now a feisty transfer student, making him again not as "normal" as he thought he'd be in that world.The film has the expected role-reversal puns, including quasi-religious justifications for considering heterosexuals sinners ("If God had intended for men and women to be together, He would have made women to like football!"), but isn't really a comedy or a drama, but an intellectual satire on just how "normal" anyone's sexual orientation is to someone else. In a sense, it becomes a moral lesson about acceptance of anyone who is different than the seeming "norm", whether that be based on sexual orientation, race, religion, attitudes or physical limitations. Despite the gay theme, it would likely earn a PG-13 rating, and is appropriate for mature viewers of that age or higher, and would be a perfect segue for a classroom discussion of diversity.The one drawback of the film is the complexity which somewhat enables it to chart new grounds for gay cinema, and it must be judged in its entirety rather than take any scene out of context, as less patient viewers would be inclined to do. There seem to be a lot of extraneous details at times, and these are eventually resolved by the film's end, though an average viewer may not catch it all. Personally, I thought it was an ambitious, unique gem of a film, and recommend it highly.