Getting Go: The Go Doc Project
Written and Directed by Cory Krueckeberg
Premiered March 4, 2013, at the Miami International Film Festival
Drama (romance?)
91 min.
Review by Stephen O. Murray
September 23, 2014.
A few weeks short of graduation from Columbia University, “Doc” [Tanner Cohen, who played the lead in the 2008 Were The World Mine] concocts the idea of shooting a documentary in order to make contact with a NYC go-go dancer, called “Go” [Matthew Camp, a real-life go-go boy] in Getting Go: The Go Doc Project (2013).
Go is remarkably grounded not only for a go-go boy but for an aspiring artist. Doc, btw, is not a film student though it seems he is going off to the University of Iowa Writer’s Program the next fall.
Go becomes willing to co-operate after negotiating an agreement to get 5% of any royalties. (Doc had offered him 3%.) Though Go seems aware that making a documentary is just an excuse, he goes along and somewhat turns the tables—that is, he interviews and films Doc and makes Doc remove his shirt (Doc protests that Go does that for a living whereas Doc only removes his clothes to go to the shower or on physician demand) and eventually beds him. That is, Go takes on filming Doc, not just eliciting autobiographical information from him but actually filming him having sex. Go seizes agency, and Doc uncomfortably becomes an object for inquiry and a (kind of) sex performer.
Doc is more than a little neurotic about sex and his own body (though I find his more attractive than Go’s), and he is remarkably committed to gay assimilation with the mainstream (which apparently includes masturbating to on-line porn). Both young men get hurt in their budding but doomed (by the shortness of time Doc is to remain in the city) relationship.
Go knows a lot about Andy Warhol, and Doc takes an on-line crash course to be able to hold up an end of discussion about whether Warhol was a gay assimilationist. Having watched Sleep and The Kiss online, unfortunately, Doc replicates some of each (not at the length and boringness of the originals, fortunately)—in parts of the movie I liked least.
I was sort of surprised by the standard disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance blah blah blah…,” at the end, having felt a realness to the emotions that I was not sure had been scripted by Kruekeberg. Then I wondered what Tanner Cohen had done during the five years before Getting Go and after Were The World Mine (cowritten and coproduced by Kruekeberg). Moreover, Matthew Camp was an actual go-go boy, and sometimes artist, who agreed to appear in an ultra-low-budget “guerrilla” movie shot on his home turf (including his apartment, where much of the movie takes place as the young men explore each other’s ideas as well as bodies). And it seems that Cohen has been trying to write novels.
I question some editorial decisions but readily acknowledge that the soundtrack to Getting Go has some interesting and fitting songs.
©23 September 2014, Stephen O. Murray. First published by OutInJersey.
