Red Meat (film)

In December 1998, Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called it "fat on dialogue" but "slim on insight into relationships." Thomas states, "much of the film is set in a restaurant where Chris encounters his friend Victor (James Frain), who suddenly disappeared some time ago. Once Victor sits down with Chris and Stefan they regale him with their interminable, dreary encounters with women, which are shown in flashback. Then Victor tells them what’s been going on with him, involving a radically different experience with a dying woman (Lara Flynn Boyle)." He further adds, "Red Meat is the kind of overly theatrical first film that threatens to talk itself to death with dialogue that is frequently too literary, and above all, betrays its maker’s fervent conviction that he has something profound to express about the human condition and is, by golly, going to hammer it home no matter what. Yet Burnett offers no fresh take on the horrors of the contemporary mating game, and invoking a sense of mortality to throw into perspective all the petty, rotten ways in which men can treat women is somehow less staggering in its impact than obviously intended."^[4]

In his March 2002 review of the DVD release, A.V. Club writer Nathan Rabin called it, "yet another darkly comic drama about men behaving badly and the weak-willed, masochistic women they hurt in the process."^[5] He further adds, "the director (a man, despite his first name) saves most of his venom for his two male antiheroes, but women don't fare a whole lot better: Each is either a ditsy, bubble-headed tramp or a prim, disapproving moralist. Burnett directs with a fair amount of visual style, but all the stylistic flair in the world wouldn't make Red Meat's ham-fisted voyage into the male psyche any less familiar or unpleasant."^[5]

• Red Meat at IMDb
• Red Meat at Rotten Tomatoes
• Red Meat at the TCM Movie Database (archived version)