a man and his moofies

saw another couple of moofies on the weekend. here goes.

1. Shopgirl ("ergh, chick flick" *click* "Gasp! FOOTBALL LEGENDS!")
Firstly, I was surprised to find this one in the comedy section. Any unwitting patron of Videobusters Croydon who hires it in the hope of seeing a wacky Steve Martin laughfest will be disappointed. It's definitely more of a quirky drama. Sure, Jason Schwatzmann provides some moments of humour, but he's not in it as much as Claire and Steve (Danes and Martin, duh). Huge props to Schwartamann for Rushmore, btw. Another reason to hire this film.

OK, well, the disclaimer goes that my beloved is a huge Steve Martin fan (EARLY Steve Martin obviously, things headed south after !Three Amigos!), and as a result, I've read his short stories, and the novella on which this film is based. They're very good - he is a very clever, funny man, despite those awful, awful movies he's been making over the past ten years (Father of the Bride?....families, jesus). Knowing that he had also written the screenplay for the movie, I was curious to see it, because it is by no means a conventional story. It's kinda fucked up really.

I liked the character of Mirabelle (Danes) in the book, but in the film, not so much. However, I liked Jeremy (Schwartzmann) in the film, but not so much in the book. And I don't like Ray (Martin) in either..hehe - Ray Martin. Steve Martin looks WEIRD these days, like he is slowly expanding or something. Face looks all puffy. Utterly unconvincing as a love interest for the 20-something Mirabelle, even though she's meant to be all depressed and lost.

Actually, now that I think about it, this is a really sad movie. There's no way it should be in the comedy section by any stretch of the imagination. Basically it goes that the lovely, kinda messed up and very lonely Mirabelle goes out first with slacker-loser Jeremy, then with rich sugar-daddy Martin, both relationships are fucked up for one reason or another. Then Bruce Willis rescues her from certain machete death at the hands of a savage African tribe. Oh sorry, that was Tears of the Shopgirl.
She ends up back with Jeremy, who, despite being stupid and geeky, is a better choice as he is sincere. That sounds really crap, but it really is a good book.

I was impressed by how closely the film followed the novella, given its unconventional nature. In the past when my favourite books have been made into movies - ew (see LA Confidential, Rules of Attraction, etc). Even when writers convert their own books into films, it rarely works, though Pet Sematery is cool.

I got confused - where was I? Oh yeh. Yeh, look, I don't know. It was OK, but it will be all but forgotten in a week or so.


2. The Last Horror Movie
Okies, well, I hired this one without reading the blurb, mainly coz it was rated R and I needed something to temper Shopgirl with. Even now, as I recall this movie, my head is slowly, involuntarily, shaking "no".

You know those movies that try to be good? Pulp Fiction is one, but that actually has something going for it. This movie just tries SO hard to be original, the whole thing smacks of effort. If you're a film-maker, you shouldn't need to try so hard, originality should just come naturally. Sadly, this is rarely the case.

The gimmick of this one (stolen from the brilliant Danish mockumentary Man Bites God, best video cover ever), is that it starts as a standard horror movie for the first five minutes, then jumps to static and bang - we see a man talking to camera. He tells us how he's taped over the horror movie with his own "intelligent" horror movie. He goes around with a cameraman, killing people and talking shit about the nature of murder, violence, horror movies. His monologues are supposed to raise serious questions about human nature, but unfortunately, such a feat requires an intelligent script-writer.

And so it goes, he kills all these people and tries to confront all our little pre-conceptions blah blah blah, but no-one is hip to what he's trying to say, man. At the end, it turns out that there is only one copy of this film, and he waits at the video-store for someone to hire it. When they do, he follows them home, waits for them to finish watching it, then breaks in, tries to have a frickin' dialogue with them about all the importart issues that were raised in the film, and kills them. This is meant to frighten us, because, gosh, we just hired it!

I wasn't worried that he was going to kill me, though. For starters, the whole thing was set in England - I doubt this movie made enough money for him to afford a flight over. And also - it would have been worth being killed for the chance to let him know what I thought of his pissant movie.