Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

hjames-97822 As a gay man I find this thing to be insulting, patronizing and, worst of all, mostly boring. There is as much creativity going on here as you'll find in a jar of generic mayonnaise. Why is James Franco wasting his life and someone's money on this. Why is he wasting ours? I see basically 3 broad types of viewers who may find this interesting: 1. People who think James Franco is a great actor in or (mostly) out of his clothing. This only proves there's someone for everyone. If you are one of these people, you would probably watch a film about James Franco shoveling dirt. And you think Kristen Bell is an actress.2. People who have no real sex life of their own and live it vicariously through films like this. You also probably think Stranger By The Lake is art and that Shortbus is an Uber car.3. People who enjoy looking at train wrecks, horrible auto collisions and the remains of people who have taken their own life.This film is just a horrible, pornographic piece of junk trying to be taken seriously. It is unbelievable to me that there are viewers who will actually sit around counting the butt shots in this nonsense.A final note. Regardless of whether you are gay or straight or somewhere in between, this work is not representative of the gay community. You can always find some people stupid enough to participate. If Franco's name were not on it it might not even have been made.And now that Sundance has become the septic holding tank for a considerable number of garbage nudie sex films, there will be a place for them. But stop trying to con people and tell em it's "art." Do yourself a favor. Skip this waste and go to the internet and look up a link to Michael D. Akers' 2012 gay themed indie "Morgan." It's a knock out film. The stars Leo Minaya and Jack Kesy bring their very real gay men to life so beautifully you could weep. Yes, there is some nudity but it is tasteful and amazingly intimate. They all draw you into their lives and make you a real, living extension of this wonderful screenplay. Franco and so many others like him just relegate you to sitting in their peanut gallery to wait for the next moan or thrust. There is so much good work being done out there in gay cinema, you don't need this. If you want porn go get the real thing for free. Then come home to a really good movie.

raj_m_aryan13 After watching this video, I feel like I've been cheated. This is neither excellent nor awful. But a complete waste of time.Just like everybody, I thought this is a movie 'made' by James Franco and Travis Mathews. But this is not a movie. This is not even a documentary. Surprisingly this is not even 'behind the scenes' of a movie. This is just a video of a 'supposedly' behind the scenes of a movie never made by James Franco and Travis Mathews. The whole reference to Al Pacino's 1980 movie "Cruising" is completely irrelevant, misleading and a lie. This is just gay porn which does not include James Franco. He is just either filming it or watching it. Which is kind of funny. LOL. I think his involvement in this movie is to make this main stream and attract large number of audience.There are explicit gay sex scenes which are nice(wink). Which is the message of this Video. This is "Art Porn" as described by the cutest guy in the cast. About the cast, there are only four guys we see a few times in the movie, the rest are seen in the beginning introductions and again in the end during credits.The so-called lead 'Val' is fine, but what's disappointing is that he 'almost' looks into the camera, sometimes, during the so-called behind the scenes, when none of the supporting cast does that.During these behind the scenes conversations, James Franco and Val, always have a 'refraining smile' on their faces. Which is horrible.I don't recommend this, but this isn't even an hour long. So go ahead.

rgcustomer This film takes as inspiration the 1980 film Cruising, which I've only seen clips of (e.g. in documentaries about film), and the idea that there's 40 minutes or so that was destroyed in order to achieve a more favourable rating. (I'll assume you know all about Cruising because you can look it up here on IMDb).Yet this film is not a replacement of those supposed 40 minutes, nor is it a documentary about how Franco and Mathews attempted to re-imagine them. Instead, they play fictional versions of themselves, so doing. So they get two shots at re-imagining those 40 minutes.On the simplest level, there is the scene of actor Val playing Al Pacino's character Steve from the film Cruising, which to me seemed entirely believable, and could have fit into the original film. Then there are more sexual scenes, including scenes of oral sex between men. Together, these form a vivid re-imagining of what might have been shot and destroyed. Maybe.But the story is where the actual re-imagining is. Val (the character) is straight, like Steve in Cruising. Through his work, he is put into an in-your-face gay sexual environment, and overcomes initial hesitation, to become comfortable with the people in that environment. (I can't compare further with Cruising, not having seen it).I think there's a third layer, which is the audience who is also taken to a place cinema doesn't usually go to. The film doesn't interact back with us, but it's a sense of what Val and Steve experienced.In the film, James makes some interesting points regarding the explicit sex, and there's no doubt that's the big discussion topic for this film. I think he might be just a year too late to be correct about what audiences watch, but still his point that intimate love and sex should be shown without timidity in film, including same-sex, is correct.An earlier film that I really liked was 9 Songs (2004). A large portion of that film is the leading man and leading woman making love together. But it told a story about the course of that couple's relationship, and I don't think it could have been done any other way. There should be room for this kind of film in cinema, so these stories can be told without being dumped in with the porn, and then overlooked.But specifically regarding explicit gay sex in the telling of a story, it's already happened, via Shortbus (2006). Other audiences have seen I Want Your Love, a short and then a feature-length film by director Mathews (of this film) and including explicit sex between men. And the recent Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, I'm told, includes explicit sex between women. So this film is a bit late to break truly new ground.But more generally (and in stark contrast to television) cinema, and even this film oddly, has been afraid to show much in the way of male couples having the anal sex everyone thinks they're having. I don't think since Brokeback Mountain (2005) there has been a major male film star do this until this year's Kill Your Darlings. Hollywood ought to be able to do a lot better than that. Everyone is already thinking it, so just show something appropriate to the film.On the theme of missing same-sex film scenes, a (much, much tamer) scene from the film 54 (1998) was recently leaked online showing a kiss filmed between its stars Ryan Phillippe and Breckin Meyer. So apparently old footage does sometimes find its way to audiences.Part of the experience of seeing this film, I think, is the locale in which you see it. Much as I never expected to see a Bruce LaBruce film series at a mainstream festival in the middle of 1999 Dallas, I wouldn't have expected to see this in Windsor, Ontario. That's how it should be seen.

David Massey In 2013, James Franco sets the gold standard for self-indulgent Auteur and on a scale that rivals even Andy Warhol. 'Interior. Leather Bar.' (Co-Directed with Travis Mathews) is just one of many Franco-projects that I've found myself viewing this past year (see also: 'Child of God', 'This is the End', 'Oz The Great and Powerful', 'Lovelace', 'Maladies', 'Tar', 'Spring Breakers', 'The Iceman' - and those are just the ones I managed to catch at various festivals). Looking forward to 2014, the man has an entire lifetime of projects (for some actor/directors) in varying stages of production. My take on his absolutely madding and eclectic trajectory; Franco has found a new type of celebrity excess and, be it a creative excess or not, I can't really purport its value to anyone except Franco himself. The films vary from insightful to entertaining, slow & introspective to over-the-top and self-aware. There is not a solid through-line to this career but there is no denying that Franco has an unquenchable thirst for experience and you gotta love him just a bit for sharing it with us. Experience has to have been the impetus for the documentary 'Interior. Leather Bar.' which followings a film crew (Franco included) as they attempt to reimagine the 40 minutes of footage censored by the MPAA from William Friedkin's 1980 film 'Cruising'. The film stared Al Pacino as an undercover cop and follows his investigation of a series of murders in New York City's gay underground. 'Cruising' explores the darkest corners of gay culture: anonymous cruising for sex in public parks and notorious S&M clubs with names like the Eagle's Nest, the Ramrod, and the Cock Pit. It's unclear what footage was actually cut from the original film as it has never been viewed publicly but the general assumption is that it consisted of actual gay sex shot in explicit detail as was true to life in these pre-AIDS-era clubs. The set up for 'Interior. Leather Bar.' is a desire by Franco to expose this suppression and to face what it is that's considered subversive in our culture and explore why it is taboo. After speaking to a number of different people at the Polari Film Festival after party (at Austin's best attempt at a leather bar), I gather that few people actually believed that the film achieved this; I, myself, being one of the skeptics. Instead of placing himself in the Al Pacino role – the straight man posing as gay in the most salacious environment imaginable – Franco recruits long-time friend and acting colleague Val Lauren ('The Salton Sea' / 'Live from Baghdad'). Lauren struggles with the content (which his agent outright refers to as pornography and begs him to decline involvement for the sake of his career), he is given no script, and only the slightest direction as he is plunged into a darkly lit set, surrounded by men in the throes of passion, punishment, and partying. Franco makes appearances, gets up close with his camera, and we get a few asides with him and Lauren as they step away from set and try to come to terms with what they are doing and why; there is a genuine sense that both are disturbed by what they've accomplished and, for Lauren, this single-day shoot might be a life-changing event. Here lies the crux of this film - Franco seems to have a legion of pseudo-sycophants at his disposal who are willing to indulge his every whim. 'Interior. Leather Bar.' seems to be nothing more than one such whim with Lauren as his proxy, playing out the experiences that Franco is too frightened to touch. Alternately, this could be a truly elaborate practical joke directed toward Lauren for reasons unknown – or, perhaps, for no reason but as a salve for Franco's boredom with his own normality. Regardless of its intention the film is an exciting experiment in documentary filmmaking and as mixed as my feelings are concerning the filmmaker, he has accomplished something truly intriguing. -David Massey (www.popculturebeast.com)