Spooooky Hallowe'en Movie!

This is scary stuff. Read on, if you DARE...

Well, I'd heard that it was slow, boring, and hilariously self-indulgent, and included an actual blow job by a celebrity. I was not disappointed! The Brown Bunny is, at 90 minutes, about 83 minutes too long. It's actually an excessively long AADAC ad, which could have been easily trimmed to 3 minutes, plus the extra four for Chloe Sevigny's Oscar calibre blowjob. In fact, the size of Vincent Gallo's, um, talent, is the most surprising and interesting thing in the whole movie. Too bad you have to wade through the rest of it to get there. Although now that we are living in the DVD age, I recommend just going to scene selections and watching "Fidelity" (where V.G. proves he is the Cock of the Walk) and then "Resolutions" (the 3 minute denuouement which explains the rest of the movie).

You really don't need to see anything else. It's mostly just shot-through-the-dusty-windshield-road-trip-while-Gordon-Lightfoot-sings stuff. If anyone has actually been on a road trip to oh, say, Grand Prairie, or Fort McMurray, you've already been through this movie. And the magic of film means that it feels JUST as long.

Beyond that, Vincent Gallo is like some kind of K-Fed prototype, with his greasy hair and dead-eyed stare throughout. As he drives across the country, you can actually smell the stale, salty goat-like aroma of a guy who's been in his van in the same clothes for too long, and hasn't brushed his teeth since two gas fill-ups ago. The movie is blessedly short on dialogue though, and what remains is almost chokingly funny, in a "I can't believe this dialogue sucks harder than Chloe Sevigny in the last scene" way. There are also plenty of jumbo-Pinter sized pauses, mostly because Gallo/Gallo's character, in a display typical self-indulgent twenty-something guy behaviour, almost never asks anyone a question. He just stares dead-eyed at them until they shift their posture, glance uncomfortably away, and finally have to say something to him, presumably to make sure he's still breathing. In a few scenes where he approaches one woman or another, the gals stick around to wait for a response much longer than I would expect. In fact, I'm watching them squirm under his watery-glazed glance and thinking, "Don't go in the truck! He's going to kill you!" Surprisingly, they are not as alarmed as I am, and have lives terrible enough that the preferred alternative is spending more time talking to this guy.

As Chloe shows up in the hotel suite at the end, and talks to her unresponsive ex, she runs to the bathroom every so often to take a hit off something. Hey, I don't blame her. I would get cranked up too if I had to keep talking to Vince. And probably made the blowjob scene easier to shoot. Oh sorry, of course, Chloe's "character" was getting super high, not Chloe herself... It's so easy to get the two confused (not a slag at Chloe, more a slag at the film and its context. I'm serious. You wouldn't see me doing that stuff on film no matter how famous I thought it might make me, unless I was good and ready for it. In other words, fully loaded. In other words, cranked to the gills. In other words... ah there are so many other words.)

At any rate, that's my movie review. Not a good movie, but am glad to have experienced it, only so that I can now legitimately participate in the "Vincent Gallo! What the fuh? Who does this guy think he is?" debate. Although you have to give props to this whining, pseudo-art-house megalomaniac - he did manage to get a hot B-list star to let him film her, in excruciatingly close-up classic porno shot detail, giving him the "respect" he so desperately wants from the rest of the film community.

Two woofs out of five,
- Falcon

My Identical Twin

Wow. It's been a while since I posted. Either nothing interesting has happened in the past two months, or I have been hibernating. Both are true, actually.

I have no idea how to become a more productive individual. I am so consistently a) lazy b) paralyzed by fear c) trapped under the weight of my own self-loathing :-)

If I could get out from under that, I would be Jonathan Safran Foer by now. Who is my identical double by the way. Well, except for the nine year age difference, and the fact that he's a dark haired dark eyed Jewish man, and I'm a blond, blue-eyed dutch girl. And he has the life I covet - a successful New York writer, while I am a little-known Canadian playwright living on a prairie for some reason. How did I wind up on the prairie? (note to self: Must do something about that one day. Like my plan to move to Halifax for no apparent reason other than the fact that I've never been there, which seems like as good a reason as any...)

But I swear, we have the same brain. And we're both sort of neutrally attractive and kind of androgynous.

I love him. No, seriously. If he wasn't already married to another writer - coincidentally named NICOLE - I would totally hunt him down and love him. You know, in the nicest most non-threatening way.

- Falcon