Dreck ruined by crappy casting mistakes and awful cinematography

Rating: 1/10 (15 March 2018)

It must be terribly disappointing for André Aciman to see his novel CALL ME BY YOUR NAME so thoroughly ruined by Luca Guadagnino's horrible direction, and by the totally dreadful failed casting of Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet in the lead roles of Elio and Oliver. How could everyone on this film fail to notice that these two straight actors have absolutely no interest in each other whatever? And that, except when they are (mercifully) saying goodbye to each other forever, they're not even able to PRETEND they like each other? I haven't seen casting this awful since Streisand & Matthau!
In case you haven't already seen this dog turd, here's the gist: For one solid hour we are bored stiff by watching a bunch of unpleasant and irrelevant people doing pretty much nothing at all in a dreary and run down little country place "Somewhere in Northern Italy", as the titles tell us. (Barf.) Thirty-year old Oliver (hideously miscast Archer) is stuck here for six weeks to do... something. We never find out what. Elio, played with alternating whining and petulant pouts by twenty-three year old Timothée Chalamet, is supposed to be seventeen, and does nothing but play the piano quite poorly, pout, and whine.
When Oliver shows up, the script says Elio is interested, but Chalamet is completely incapable of displaying interest or attraction or lust or any emotion other than petulant boredom. So, for an hour, the two men antagonize each other while spending a lot of time together.
Then, hideously and for NO reason, these two straight men start having sex with each other, and the film goes from boring to horror. Far from chemistry, these two men have physics: that is, magnetic REPULSION. You can actually see their bodies thrashing and twisting, trying not to touch each other. Director Guadagnino keeps the camera on them until Hammer grimly removes his pants, and then wisely pans away from the men and focuses on a tree in the garden outside the window. It's the last act of mercy in the film.
Special blame must go to Worst Cinematographer nominee Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who manages to make even rural Italy look like the inside of a porta-potty. I mean seriously: how can you mess up a sun-sparkling-on-the-water shot? Mukdeeprom knows how! You focus on the detritus floating on the surface, so it looks like a sewer. Total vomit.