Leo’s S.F. guide is fellow Brazilian Donnie (the other screenwriter, Izzy Palazzini). Donnie, who looks like the estranged cousin Alvin doesn’t want the other chipmunks to know about, may be an expert on the Castro’s nightlife, but he’s also hot mess. He’s more about scoring drugs n’ dick than helping his friend, a fact that Leo is surprisingly slow to pick up on. Except, no, Leo already knows this. He says as much.
“I should’ve known this was gonna happen because every time I go out with Donnie some crazy, stupid shit happens,” Leo moans after Donnie gets them kicked out of a bar when caught blowing his “straight” friend Hunter (Oscar Mansky, the answer to the unasked question: What if Jon Heder was fuckable?) in one of the titular bathroom stalls. And this is a mere 15-minutes into the movie.
Clearly, it’s going to be a long night, and I began to fear Bathroom Stalls & Parking Lots was going to make me feel every goddamn minute of it. I don’t have a lot of patience for people like Donnie in real life, yet the movie was presenting him as just a comic foil, mistaking his obnoxiousness for hilariousness. I was seriously considering giving up on the movie before it hit the 30-minute mark.
But the movie is barely 80 minutes long, so I stuck with it, and though Bathroom Stalls & Parking Lots didn’t become a great film, it did become a more meaningful one. After what has got to be the saddest underwear party ever, Leo realizes that he is looking for love in all the wrong places, and those are the only places on Donnie’s itinerary. He decides to focus more on quality than quantity, though not before one more sleazy (mis)adventure.
Given its minuscule budget, Bathroom Stalls & Parking Lots is better made than one would expect, with passable acting and production values (the cinematography is a bit spotty, however). Its main drawback is its script. Though billed as a comedy, it’s only intermittently amusing at best, fucking irritating at worst. It’s only when it stops trying to so hard to make Donnie the life of the party that the movie starts to rise above viewers’ lowest expectations, though by that time many of them may have already decided, as Leo ultimately does, to cut ties.
