Confessions of a Womanizer

I don’t want to oversell Miguel Ali’s Confessions of a Womanizer — this year’s feature film winner at the Twin Rivers Media Festival. It is exactly the sort of little movie that wins prizes at smaller film festivals, gets a little exposure, with luck gets picked up by a fledgling distributor, and is never seen again. That doesn’t make them bad movies.  It just makes them little movies that lack that certain hook to put them over the top. And I don’t want to undersell it either. This is a likable movie — with a somewhat sleazy premise — that has much to recommend it, starting with Andrew Lawrence as the womanizer doing the confessing. He’s such an appealing screen presence — with kind of sad, puppy dog looks — that he overcomes most of the film’s sketchier material. The fact that Ali managed to recruit a couple of marginal names — Gary Busey (he’s actually pretty good here) and C. Thomas Howell — doesn’t hurt the film, but apart from name value, they aren’t really what gives the film its better qualities. That mostly comes from its energetic young cast, the sense that there’s a good heart beneath it all, and the surprisingly good technical credits. Few festival films look as good as Confessions of a Womanizer with its bright pop art colors and generally strong eye for composition.

Content-wise, the film is fairly predictable. Despite the inherent sleaze factor in the film cataloguing our hero’s sexual conquests and defeats, you just know that the film is really going to be about the importance of relationships — and it does. You can also see who he’s going to end up with in the first 15 minutes. (In its favor, the film ends before this is a done deal.) But there are surprises along the way — and what starts out as a cheap joke involving a transgendered hooker (Kelly Mantle — nephew of Mickey Mantle, no less) turns into a charming and even touching (without getting soupy) plot point. Perhaps the film’s biggest drawback is the tendency of writer-director Miguel Ali to paint things in very broad strokes, but it’s not fatal and actually kind of fits the look of the film. Worth checking out.

Classic World Cinema by Courtyard Gallery will present Confessions of a Womanizer Friday, July 11, at 8 p.m. at Phil Mechanic Studios, 109 Roberts St., River Arts District (upstairs in the Railroad Library).  Info: 273-3332, www.ashevillecourtyard.com