Beefcake (Thom Fitzgerald, 1998)

3/10
Part-movie, part-documentary about the nude male modelling scene and Bob Mizer's Athletic Modelling Guild in the 50's...the content is interesting and there's definitely a good story to be told here but this movie fails spectacularly. The interviews with the models (including Jack LaLanne), now mostly in their 60's, are revealing and at turns heart-warming and heartbreaking...but they're too few in between as most of the movie is made up of dramatic recreations of events that occured with terrible actors and laughably cheap looking sets. The movie messily splices actual footage shot by Mizer in the 50's with black-and-white recreations (sometimes featuring actors bearing very little resemblance to their real-life counterparts) which occasionally turn to full-color for no apparent reason. The film also makes the grave mistake of talking down to the viewer and pleading for acceptance at the end instead of letting the audience come to its own conclusions. It seems way too geared to people who already had an interest in this sort of thing, and makes a pretty lousy attempt to engage outsiders (like myself).