Cynical Cinema

The Go-Getter is a lot like other road movies.  The recent movie I thought of when I watched this film was Into The Wild.  And while The Go-Getter doesn’t quite reach the lyrical heights and literary feel of Into The Wild, it is similar in many ways.  First of all, they both star Jena Malone.  Only in this film, she plays a much different character.  A wild, mean-spirited seductress who wraps young Lou Taylor Pucci in a web of deceit and pain.  However, that is merely a small part of this terrific movie, and I should probably start at the beginning.

Pucci plays Mercer, a young man whose reaction to his mother’s death is to steal a car and try to find his brother to break the news.  Basically a good kid, he has never done anything like this before.  While making his getaway in the stolen car, a cell phone rings.  On the other end of the line is Kate (Zooey Deschanel), the owner of the car.  Bizarrely, they strike up a friendship over the phone as he drives around America in search of a brother he knows nothing about.  As in other movies, like Into The Wild, he meets up with a strange assortment of characters, among them the smoking hot Jena Malone.  After they hook up, he finally sees her true colours, and so begins his coming-of-age story.

Traveling throughout the country, searching for his brother, he gets older and wiser each time he meets a new group of people.  And he develops more and more of a bond with the girl on the other end of the cell phone.  At a certain point, the abundance of quirky characters and strange dialogue becomes almost overwhelming and cheesy, but that doesn’t really slow down the momentum of the movie.  While we might get tired of the strange people and the odd situations piling up one on top of the other, we never get tired of the bittersweet conversations between Pucci and Deschanel. 

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this movie is that while the quirkiness reaches a point where it verges on cheesy, other elements do not.  Is there anything cheesier in a movie than a dream sequence?  I would suggest not.  And yet, in The Go-Getter, there are multiple dream sequences.  Dreams at night while Mercer is asleep, daydreams while he talks to Kate while he’s awake, and strange sequences abound.  But they actually move the movie along, and each one individually is a wonderful little set-piece. 

The Go-Getter is a lovely, romantic, bittersweet indie movie that is more effective than any Hollywood big-budget romance in recent years.  It came out September 16th, from Peace Arch Entertainment.  Pick it up.

I tried. I really, truly tried to like Southland Tales. I liked The Rock in it. That’s right - The Rock, the wrestler, I liked him. I liked Seann William Scott - Stiffler from American Pie, the guy who has only ever played a drunken frat boy, I liked him. I liked Bai Ling -the Chinese actress who was recently busted for shoplifting. I also liked Jon Lovitz (Newsradio), Cheri O’Teri (irritating name), Christopher (there can be only one) Lambert, Justin (my music is obnoxious) Timberlake, Mandy (look how big my eyes are) Moore, Sarah Michelle (I have two first names) Gellar and John (remember me) Laroquette. I liked them all! I liked the camera work, I loved the layout of the scenes, I enjoyed seeing what was coming up next. I was desperate to like Southland Tales. The movie begged me to like it, and I said OK movie, I will try my very best to do so, just don’t let me down. And the movie did not let me down. But I can’t recommend it because it is awful.

Here is a plot synopsis, as best I can make out. Perhaps once you have read this you will understand. World War 3 has begun. There have been nuclear bombs set off in Texas, so the Americans have responded by bombing Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Korea, Afghanistan, and possibly Belgium. The US army is running out of oil. It is the near future, but George Bush is still preisdent. (In fact, at one point they use actual file footage of Bush speaking.) As the oil runs out, a mad scientist invents a way to get energy directly from the ocean. He is either bent on world domination, or he’s crazy, or he’s just a nice old man with evil advisors. Still don’t know. The Rock shows up on a beach. He has amnesia. He is a famous actor, but he doesn’t know that, and he hooks up with Sarah Michelle Gellar, who is a porn star. He has a wife that he has forgotten, however, and she is Mandy Moore, who is the daughter of the man who is running for vice-president of the US in the elections on the Republican ticket. There are cameras everywhere, and one of the major election issues is bill 69, which would restrict the ability of the government to invade the privacy of people. Take a breath for a moment.

We continue: Seann William Scott is a cop who has a twin brother who is a left-wing extremist, and he has kidnapped his twin in order to pose as him in a large conspiracy that will see him, posing as his brother, commit a double murder with racist overtones, that will be filmed by The Rock before he finds out who he really is, and this will be released to the media to discredit both the cops and the Republicans all at once. There is musical montage, a music video, a song-and-dance number, a soap-opera going on in Mandy Moore’s family where some people are sleeping with some other people, there is a world domination theme, there is drug trafficking, somehow related to this machine in the ocean that produces energy and also perhaps some variation on Soylent Green. Everything in the country is sponsored by either Hustler or Budweiser, and the grand finale of the movie involves a giant Zeppelin, a riot, a fireworks display, a rift in the space-time continuum, and a flying ice cream truck.

So…yeah. Southland Tales is about all of this, and none of this. The movie is two and a half hours long, and to cram all this stuff in and make us care, or understand, it would have to be eleven hours plus. There is just way too much going on. And yet the movie seems to have a rather laguid pace, like it isn’t hurrying anywhere. It feels good to watch it. It is visually impressive. The writing is very good. There are some great lines, and great moments. The little old lady from Poltergeist is in the movie, and she has a great moment at the bottom of a staircase straight out of that movie. The little old smart guy from The Princess Bride is in it a lot too, and he throws it to that film with the word “preposterous”. Kiss Me Deadly, the classic 1955 film noir, is playing on the TV in the porn star’s room. The porn stars have their own TV shows and energy drinks. There are so many cool actors doing cool things. Justin Timberlake is awesome. And yet - there really is no movie here. You can sit there for two and a half hours. You might be entertained, you will be mildly stimulated, and you may even think you are enjoying yourself. But when the movie ends, you won’t know what it was about, you won’t care, and six minutes later you will have forgotten everything about the film. It’s heavy on style, but the substance is almost non-existent.