russelzj Awful movie......just awful. Please don't waste your life watching it.

meaninglessbark The drama in Henry Gamble's Birthday Party is mostly low key and lurks under the surface of the carefully honed smiling faces of a family and group of friends all tied to a conservative megachurch.The Wise Kids, a previous film by the same director, looked at the lives of a trio of friends associated with a small conservative church. Henry Gamble addresses similar issues but with the glossy smoothness of the mega church devotees. This film will probably be most interesting to people who grew up on the church. You'll recognize the pleasant platitudes, the various types of characters, the awkwardness of dealing with situations people would rather not address, the underlying tensions of feelings that can't be expressed.The film is incredibly well acted and a looks good. The family's house, the perfection of the pool, and the whiteness of most of the characters are all important elements of the film. The only flaw was a bit of melodrama near the end which seemed more like a we-have-to-put-something-major-here decision. But even with that bump Henry Gamble's Birthday Party is masterful examination of an aspect of American culture.

vallejo-39149 I saw "The Wise Kids" a while back and liked it very much, so when I began HGBP, I found myself thinking, "Hmm, reminds me of TWK." No kidding. I think this is a step up in sophistication, though, and with perhaps a harsher look at evangelical subculture, which is apparently Cone's world, like Faulkner's southern county whose name I won't try to spell right now. His metier. Cone likes to describe a whole world in his films. Can't wait for the day he actually gets money to do a BIG picture! By "harsher" I just mean that the damages of a rigid approach to piety are delineated rather sharply and, perhaps, even a bit melodramatically in one scene, though maybe not. I feel like I'd like to see the film again to really understand the family and friend relationships in the film. All in all, I found myself much more involved than I thought I would be. If you want a film that feels like a slice of life, with affection for its characters (except maybe, for the more narrow minded of the Christians in the film, young and old) though maybe not your life, I would recommend this.

ilustra-neuropixel It seems that Mr. Cone has seen too many movies he liked because he is trying to use camera angles that seem to make no sense what so ever. I mean... interesting they are but that is all about them. To start a movie with the conversation about the size of the d**k without having anything to start from in the first place, to me is porn. 'Wannabe' art but ends up being porn. And that's bad enough. But when you involve actors or 'wannabe' actors in it then I can only think the director has a hidden message that the only person to have access to... might be just himself. I truly hope this is not true! I truly hope the actors or the team, at least, know about this message. If this is not the case then Mr. Cone does movies to be paid for. And my questions is: what happened with Mr. Cone we know from 'Wise kids'? Was that a mistaken-art-success? Because we see there as well the 'Mr. Cone wannabe director' but he shows love for the script and for the characters and building of the characters. He shows love for the plots and pure courage in creating them! Where did all that go?The story of the movie: the birthday of a Christian teenage. The rest of the story is so incoherent that only Mr. Cone might be able to put it here but I am not sure about that either, now that the movie is out. I have a special sensibility for the collaboration between gay-Christian themes. And of course, there is a certain conservative respect that has to come with this collaboration. Which existed in the aforementioned 'Wise kids' movie. I have no clue what happened with this here either. The respect for the conservative Christianism disappeared. There is a feeling that covers the movie and is very exaggerated in some small parts of it: that feeling is 'the bad is coming'! And indeed, it comes!