Moonwalking (5/2/01)
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One Night At McCool’s. [Harald Zwart, 2001. Written by Stan Seidel.]
A study of lower-middle-class accessorization that might be called
Beyond The Pink Flamingo: sweet but hypermanipulative young thing Liv Tyler, a babe gifted with a strange power to cloud men’s minds, stages a thoroughly-scripted falling-out with her hoodlum-lowlife boyfriend Andrew Dice Clay after closing time for the benefit of hapless-goof bartender Matt Dillon [put charitably, a chronic underachiever]; who, predictably, seizes the bait and takes her back to his rundown and bricabracencumbered St. Louis home. Her potent instincts for interior decoration aroused by even this shabby scene of domesticity, Tyler adlibs a decision to move in, hoses Dillon senseless to ensure his allegiance, and summarily executes Clay when [still sticking to the script] he shows up to plunder the household. Fluttering her eyelashes, she convinces the already mortally-smitten Dillon to take the fall, and in short order he finds himself unemployed, under police surveillance, and unwilling accessory to the crime wave she commences to acquire the furnishings and accessories [and the DVD player essential to any home entertainment center] on the wishlist she has catalogued in a scrapbook clipped from the glossy magazines which formalize the canon of yuppie status symbols — a predicament from which, presently, even our mentally deficient [and, it goes without saying, terminally pussywhipped] hero realizes he can only escape by hiring somebody to whack her. — Which is how most of the story ends up being narrated by Dillon to exquisitely sleazy hitman Michael Douglas [the dyejob on his hair is in itself worth the price of admission] in a bingo parlor, and annotated by dissenting opinions [the pronounced subjectivity of the flashbacks is meant to suggest that each of the protagonists is, in effect, screening his own movie about Ms. Tyler; though of course in each instance she is the sole auteur] addressed by obnoxiously selfconfident slimeball attorney Paul Reiser to incredulous shrink Reba McIntire and hangdog police detective John Goodman [the only guy living who can actually make himself look like a cartoon bloodhound] to a drunken horny priest. All of them, in due course, converge upon Dillon’s living room for the grand finale: a beautifully-choreographed John Woo gunfight [and a Rosebud gag, but why spoil it] that reads the judgment of the Fates against the race of lawyers.
Wonderfully clever and frequently hilarious; probably the most amusing study of the relationship between the bourgeois nesting instinct and the criminal impulse since
Raising Arizona. And I didn’t even mention the
Cool Hand Luke carwash scene. Check it out.
____________Sun, surf, serial slaughter (4/24/01)
