Latter Days
All team (20)
Short description
Latter Days centers on Christian Markelli, a young gay man in Los Angeles who works at a restaurant and fills his nights with casual encounters. When a group of Mormon missionaries moves into his apartment complex, his coworkers push him into a bet: he claims he can seduce one of them. The target becomes Elder Aaron Davis, a missionary unsure of his own desires, and what begins as a game turns into something neither man expected, forcing both to confront who they are and what they believe.
The film was written and directed by C. Jay Cox, for whom it was the first feature as director, and produced by Kirkland Tibbels and Jennifer Schaefer through Funny Boy Films. Steve Sandvoss and Wes Ramsey lead the cast, with Jacqueline Bisset as Lila Montagne, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Elder Paul Ryder, Rebekah Johnson as Julie Taylor and Mary Kay Place as Sister Gladys Davis. It runs 108 minutes and blends comedy, drama and romance.
Released in 2004, the film drew a modest audience that has stayed with it: on IMDb it holds 7.1 out of 10 from around 19,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.9 from roughly 281 votes. A critics' score of 5.3 from 45 reviews is noticeably lower than those viewer ratings, placing it among films that viewers have embraced more warmly than reviewers did.
What's left behind the scenes
- Preparing for the role of a person with AIDS, Eric Palladino learned that the medication his character takes causes hair loss. He used ordinary scissors to shave his own head. All scenes with his character were filmed in one day.
- This was the first film to openly depict the conflict between The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and homosexuality, and its screenings in some states were accompanied by scandal. Various religious groups demanded the film be pulled from distribution and removed from store shelves, threatening to boycott cinemas and stores if it wasn't.
- S. Jay Cox wrote the screenplay and directed the project. The success of his previous film, 'Wonderland' (2002), gave Cox enough financial and creative freedom to show a more personal love story on screen. Both main characters – Aaron and Christian – were based on Cox himself. He was raised among Mormons, and subsequently, when he openly came out as gay, often wondered what the two halves (or sides of his personality) would say to each other if they were different people.
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