What a waste of my time!!!

Dreadfully Boring

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Comparing it to the other European heterosexual crap we get to see on TV, I would rate this gay one into the top league of good movies. As a gay man, I wonder why I like it. The message of this movie is that gays have ONLY bitchy sex, on public toilets and all of that in a violent way. To put this straight, gay life isn't that way! I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories but somehow, I hear all my alarm bells ringing. To make it short, the movie is good for people who are gay or who have at least experience with it. To all the newbies to that subject it's an anti gay movie. Please remember this story is fiction. 'Not a documentary!

Good performances. OK - now wev'e got the only positive comment about this TV film out of the way, let's have a look. What the hell was the point of this? Populated by a group of unpleasant, unlikeable stereotypes, it really looked like something that would have been made 20 years ago. Cliché ridden and unrelentingly grim throughout, the gay characters were either predatory, seedy individuals or had serious repression/hang up or psychological problems. The sex and violence scenes were sensationalist to say the least. This was meant to be part of C4's marking of 40 years of the liberation of gay men from the previous institutionalised repression they had suffered in this country throughout history. There are gay men like the ones in the film, I sometimes meet them, but they certainly do not represent the majority. Nobody wanted to see a positive propaganda exercise about gays, but neither did we want to see this parade of sad / damaged individuals. Whatever happened to balance? A piece of TV that was thoroughly depressing and ultimately, totally pointless.

This is the kind of drama that I suspect will be loved by straight television critics and loathed by gay men. It would be easy to say that it holds up a mirror to ourselves and that we simply don't like the reflection, but my reasons for disliking this drama run somewhat deeper than that.On the plus side, it's universally well performed and often well directed. London feels magical, but it's hardly authentic. The biggest problem is characterisation - or that lack of it. Characters are reduced to ciphers - they are stand-ins for a series of situations and issues. I don't need to love characters (and indeed, there's absolutely no one to love here), but I do want to engage in their lives and concerns. I want to get under their skin, to understand them more by the end than when I started watching two hours previously. The drama takes place over 24 or so hours in the life of 7 (or maybe 8) gay or bisexual men and youths. Different story lines are juggled and the various characters find their lives engaging with others - often by the most spurious and improbable of coincidences. It's as if writer Kevin Elyot wants to throw in every concern and thought he's ever had about gay life into a single drama. As a result, nothing seems satisfyingly explored and only the surface of some very big issues is scratched.Is Clapham Junction bad? No, but from this otherwise talented writer it's a very big disappointment. I can't help wondering who he and Channel 4 thought that they were making it for.

Over a two day period a series of interconnected events impact a disparate group of Londoners.Occasionally brilliant, often shocking and ultimately depressing exploration of contemporary urban gay sexuality and the resultant array of societal attitudes across age and class. In part influenced by the horrendously brutal murder of Jody Dobrowski on Clapham Common in 2005, Elyot creates a host of deeply unpleasant characters as the main focus of his exploration into homosexuality, its surface acceptance and ever-present homophobia across all social strata's today.Whilst astonishingly frank in its depiction of casual, anonymous sexual encounters in public toilets and open spaces (Clapham Common, Hamstead Heath) and the contrast between being 'out' versus being closeted and covert, Elyot falls back on the clichéd and contrived device of 'the dinner party' to enable a host of views to bubble up to the surface. Perhaps it's the environment Elyot knows best so finds it easiest to write about, but it's still hard to gauge what his intention is with his moneyed and privileged group of diners – are they intended as a representation of middle class views and behaviours? In addition, why is practically every character either unpleasantly selfish or irritatingly naïve? It may well be that the well-heeled dinner party set do have these views and opinions, but if they are so singularly unpleasant, how can we care? It's difficult to determine exactly what Elyot is trying to say with Clapham Junction – that homophobia is still real and in consequence very dangerous? That the general view is that gay men can be universally accepted but only if they behave like the wealthy, urban, heterosexual upper middle-classes? That heterosexual people don't have any kind of secretive, covert sex life? No, straight people don't go cruising for anonymous sex in toilets or parks, but that's only because they don't need to.Elyot paints a deeply depressing picture in Clapham Junction, which may in part reflect the truth, but he fails to find any counterpoint. All is bleak, all is dangerous - hatred, bigotry and prejudice prevail. The minor strand of the young black boy playing his violin in the face of intolerance and persecution only serves to crack the nut with a hammer - we've already learnt that it takes bravery to be who you are in the face of adversity (witness the deeply unsettling, painfully honest encounter between Theo and Tim), so why bludgeon the viewer with this message a second time? The closing scene is gratuitous in light of all we have witnessed before.Shergold and Elyot are well served by their actors, with Treadaway and Mawle in particular offering spectacularly honest, real and brave performances – their plot-strand is perhaps the most challenging, the most unsettling but ultimately the most truthful story, and this time the concluding lack of hope is in proportion and understandable.Moments of brilliance then, from all involved, but in the end Clapham Junction is deeply flawed and devoid of any shred of hope. Is that all there is?