Dear Pillow

Any guy out there knows of the so called "true stories" sections of porno mags. How many of you, as kids, read these insane stories and believed them to be true? Well, I can honestly say that The Gator was never fooled, but anyone growing up expecting all women to be sex mad lesbians, who will do it with complete strangers, is kind of detached from reality. Dear Pillow takes a blurred look at this logic.

Wes is a 17-year-old boy, staying at his dad's seedy apartment complex. His parents are divorced (apparently mommy couldn't handle dad's sexual demands) and with not much to do outside of masturbation, which causes him to lose his job at the supermarket, he spends most of his time patching in to other peoples phone calls with a special radio.

He eavesdrops some guy calling Lorna, the sexy complex manager, for awkward phone sex. It seems that fornication is everywhere around him, even though he's not getting any himself, regardless of how desperate he is. It worsens when he makes pals with Dusty, a middle-aged gay pornmaker, who also writes the "real life" sex stories for a sleazy magazine, called Dear Pillow.

Dusty becomes a weird kind of mentor for the increasingly frustrated Wes. But things go awry when they try to bring Lorna into their little clique. After some confusing plot developments things don't end so well and the film seems rather untied by the fade out.

The main problem is that this is an entirely character based movie, but we never really get inside the characters' heads and figure out what their motives are outside of sex. Plus the film is almost completely set inside the apartment complex, with many scenes looking the same, and little creativity with camera angles, digitally shot, or not. For a film that has sex mentioned all the way through, would it have been asking too much for Lorna to get naked just once? For my benefit?

Darkly, grimly funny in places, as a character study, it is completely lost.