Adored

A vanity project so preposterous it deserves to become an instant camp hit.

It can make for entertainingly silly viewing, but it should come as no surprise that the film's plea for tolerance and unexpectedly tragic ending -- an unfortunate throwback to the Dark Ages of gays in films -- rings equally hollow.

Tries to be too many things, none very convincingly: plea for tolerance, docu-style character study, old-fashioned weepie.

This feeble comedy-tragedy has Sirkian aspirations but never misses an opportunity to settle for being flesh-friendly gay-film-festival fodder. This is a vanity project, not so much acted as posed.

This clumsy, self-indulgent film veers from comedy to tragedy and is told in flashbacks, with treacly diary entries and unconvincing "testimonies" from friends providing a window into the past.

Not only is Adored amateurish and mawkish even by the standards of American "gaysploitation" cinema, it's weirdly shy about showing nudity and sex.

The film's witlessness keeps any satirical potential submerged well below soap opera levels. Filiberti's self-casting exacerbates this already shoddy melodrama: Frequent come-hither stares beaming from his patently sub-marquee mug provide one too many non-ironic "Zoolander" moments.