An R-rated flick about a bunch of friends having an orgy gets hailed in today's Weekend Arts section as a "friendly, ramshackle comedy" albeit "somewhat laugh-deficient" while a G-rated drama about a young golfer being mentored by a retired pro is panned as a "stultifying hybrid of instruction film and Christian sermon" that "swoons into its own solemn sanctimony."
That's how New York Times film critic Stephen Holden treated "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy" [1] and "Seven Days in Utopia," [2] respectively, in the September 2 paper. Both movies debut in theaters today.
"When it finally gets under way, the orgy is tame, even by soft-core standards," Holden insists. "It's all very sweet and lightly comedic."
By contrast, "Seven Days" is a "humorless, mystically fortified golfing movie" which Holden snarks is "a kind of Southern-fried, Christian 'Tuesdays with Morrie.'"
At the conclusion of "Old Fashioned Orgy," "you half expect a statement to appear on the screen promising, 'No humans were traumatized during the making of this film," Holden quipped.
Apparently to Holden, Robert Duvall's "folksy homilies" and the "chaste romance" subplot of "Utopia" are far more offensive to the average movie-going New York Times reader than "paying homage" to "lost youth" with "group sex."