Trois (2000)

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This was a pretty good movie. Of course I'm mainly into indepentant black film makers movie products like these. Intersting story line, and the end of movie put me in the middle. One part of me was like "whoooa" and took me by surpise, but the result of the storyline was kind of cookie cutter. The music score plus the acting at the end of the movie made up for any other part that you may not like in the movie. March 2, 2008

ENTERTAINING AFTER SEVERAL YEARS...

Bought this one a while back and found that I still enjoyed watching it today.

A couple of my girlfriends where over this weekend and we decided to watch movies. Since I can watch what I want, when I want...I decided to let them select the movies. When they saw that I had all three "Trois" films, they opted to watch them back to back.

Once we had watched them all, we sat around discussing quality and content of each. We all agreed that the acting in all of them wasn't the best, but that we enjoyed the storylines, plots and suprises in each.

Having been the only one to have seen them prior, I have to admit that they held my attention this time around as well.

I recommend this (and the other "Trois" films) to other avid movies watchers. February 27, 2007

Don't Waste Your Money"

This was a awful movie. Bad acting. Very misleading. I saw The Escort and Pandora's Box, and that's why I purchased this one......Big mistake!!!
I wish I could rate it a zero. September 27, 2006

A sexual thriller that fails on both parts of the equation

"Trois" aspires to the feel of soft-core porn, albeit without the sort of explicit nudity that devotes of the genre would hope to see. It also wants to be something of a thriller, which is another major regard in which this 2000 film fails, because I pretty much saw everything coming and it is hard to be shocked when you are not surprised. But you know how it is; you see an interesting trailer, check out a movie, and wish you had stopped with the trailer.

Jermaine Davis (Gary Dourdan) has a promising career as a lawyer and his wife Jasmine (Kenya Moore) has a great body. But is Jermaine happy? No he is not and because he is also stupid it is a dangerous combination. Jermaine dreams of a ménage-a-trois with his wife and another woman. He does not have a specific woman in mind, but one of his co-workers (Soloman K. Smith), knows of a woman who will fit the bill named Jade (Gretchen Palmer). Apparently she fits the bill because her name begins with a "J" as well. However, first Jermaine has to get Jasmine to agree. His argument to persuade his wife to let another woman into their bed? That there is nothing they should not be able to experience and that he is only trying to take their relationship to the next level.

Now, think about this particular line of argument without all the blood rushing to certain parts of the body and if you were Jasmine you would have to be very afraid. How many levels does her husband want to take her to and how long does it take you to come up with a long list of things that she would not want to experience? When Jasmine confides to a friend that this is what her husband wants to do, her friend admits that she did something similar once upon a time and now has to fight off her husband's desire to do something "worse." Not long afterwards, Jasmine agrees to do what Jermaine wants. There are many possible reasons why she agrees, but the most important one is clearly that the movie has to fulfill the promise of its title.

So it happens. "Trois" does not dwell on the big moment; you have a sense for what they are doing and it appears the experience is not solely for Jermaine's benefit, so the ambiguity of the moment is preserved. But then the three of them have to live with it, and that proves to be more difficult than any of them would have thought. Both Jermaine and Jasmine are worried that the other one is still seeing Jade, but that is before weird things start happening and we get to the "Fatal Attraction" part of the proceedings.

That development is going to be unexpected by many viewers and it certainly raises some interesting questions about the moral lesson to be drawn from the story. The filmmakers here are only working with a budget of $200,000 and while the production values reflect the skimpy budget they are trying for something more complicated in terms of the story. But the script, direction, and acting are all barely competent and despite the lurid subject matter the whole thing is just way too tame. You can get some good laughs out of this film, but you know that was not the intent of this film, which does try to deal with some serious subjects.

If the characters are not stereotypical, which is certainly a debatable point, the relationships certainly are. The most sympathetic character is Jade, but the fact that she demands $1000 from Jermaine so that she can pay for her lawyer in a custody fight over her son pretty much shows how twisted things get in this film. Jasmine does things she knows are wrong and then wonders why it is destroying her marriage while Jermaine is just too stupid to see that he is destroying his marriage before, during, or after it happens. In the end I just wish that in addition to this being a better movie that the moral of "Trois" was something more proscriptive. August 23, 2004

KEE

This movie is worth watching.
It show how good independent
films can be. It has a good
plot and few flaws (Key's acting
and her not showing more skin).
Just don't expect motion picture
quality, big companys don't pay
for acurrat black caricatures. August 16, 2004

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