A Static Film About Transience (and Self-Involvement, and Blowjobs)

brown-bunny-0.jpgThe Brown Bunny gave Roger Ebert cancer, and it features a real blowjob. And the girlfriend is dead. In 18 words, I’ve summarized the hullabaloo surrounding (and the post-climactic revelation of) Vincent Gallo’s shockingly vain vanity project from 2003. I can even spare you from the “boring” parts of the movie – basically the first 80 of its 93 minutes – and help you indulge whatever prurient curiosity you might have by pointing to an in-depth description/analysis and video of the oral-sex scene. But the film as a whole is actually oddly fascinating, especially in the context of its initial critical drubbing and the filmmaker’s reaction to that reception.

Canon Fodder

pulp-ficiton.jpgThis week saw the debut of “The 50 Greatest Films,” with the One-Line Review’s Iain Stott compiling responses from 187 movie buffs, including me. The list made me wonder: Has the “film canon” become too ossified? I was frankly shocked that the results were so … ordinary. A top 10 of Citizen Kane, Vertigo, 2001, The Godfather, Casablanca, The Third Man, Taxi Driver, Seven Samurai, Psycho, and Dr. Strangelove is perfectly reasonable and respectable, but it’s also merely reasonable and respectable. Given Stott’s admirable democracy (“[I]gnoring thoughts of position or pedigree … ,” he wrote, “professionals and amateurs sit side by side”), I expected a tension between the canonical and the contemporary and the popular. Nope.

The Slow Dawn of Surprise

lovely-1.jpgIt is a car salesman that carries writer/director Kirt Gunn’s Lovely by Surprise on his shoulders until the movie blossoms. To his credit, Bob doesn’t actually sell cars. In the automobile-sales process, he dispenses hackneyed life advice, admonishing his customers that they need to spend more time with their families, and do they really want to part with that old clunker, filled as it is with memories? He is played with sincerity by Reg Rogers, in the sense that Bob means everything he says. But there’s a fakeness, a performance, about Bob – a smiling, cheery devil-may-care mask that makes him both inscrutable and intensely compelling. A genuinely independent movie, Lovely by Surprise hit DVD this week after playing the festival circuit, and what’s surprising is that it’s as successful as it is.

Box Office Power Rankings: May 29-July 5, 2009

hangover.jpgYou have to feel a little sorry for the poor bastards of The Hangover. With all the trials they endured, in our Box Office Power Rankings they end up sniffing the ass of an old man. For a month. And when they finally get their shot at Culture Snob glory, Public Enemies sneaks in with numbers that are only across-the-board good – third place in each of our four categories.