I hate “Spun.” And one of the things that I hate about it is that I liked it so much. It looks horribly great, it has cool stars, and the vaguely indie-rock soundtrack is pretty good. The dizzying sensation of the movie is something like watching an hour and a half’s worth of music videos on fast forward. It’s a fun movie in a disorienting way, especially if you like hot clothes and can laugh at awful things.
But it’s really a low, low movie, the kind of thing that makes you feel bad for liking it. It’s moralistic about drug use, but at the same time weirdly glamorizes it by working so hard to make the movie itself so hip. (This is the kind of picture where even the buffoonish cops wear vintage Levi Sta-Prest jeans.) “Spun’s” meta-message — if there is such a thing — is that drugs are bad, but you probably want to do a lot of them for a while so you can make some cool art or something. In fact, just say “crystal” and the dopest actors in Hollywood will run toward you.
“Spun” is about speed — methamphetamine. The plot is fairly thin, happening over three days in one of those washed-out places in Southern California. Ross (Jason Schwartzman from “Rushmore,” who will always be from “Rushmore”) meets the Cook (Mickey Rourke, who apparently will never be Mickey Rourke again) through stripper Nikki (Brittany Murphy). In return for little bags of speed, Ross runs errands — picking up ephedrine, buying porn — and chauffeurs the Cook, who is mad-sciencing a new batch of meth out of a sweaty motel room.
There’s also Spider Mike (John Leguizamo), a low-level dealer, and his girlfriend Cookie (Mena Suvari). They live and deal out of a trashed ranch house where kids like Frisbee (Patrick Fugit) come over to buy drugs, get high, and play video games. (Which are — sound the hip alarm — homemade and totally retro; you’ll probably see a feature on them in Vice magazine next month.)
The story, inasmuch as there is one, wonders whether Ross will get back together with his girlfriend, who has left him and moved to Los Angeles, and whether Nikki will leave the Cook. There’s also a subplot involving two bumbling cops who are speed freaks themselves (like everyone else in the film), and a recurring bit involving a stripper whom Ross fucks — yes, fucks — until he hallucinates dirty cartoons (the hip alarm is still ringing, right? Look for the cartoonist in a Japanese fashion magazine) and ties naked to his bed before leaving the apartment.
All this is to say that “Spun” is one of those episodic pictures. It apparently derives from the exploits of one of its co-writers, Will De Los Santos, a speed freak from Eugene, Ore. (The beginning of the film, which is co-written by Creighton Vero, announces “based on the truth … and lies.”) And it is real life in the sense that it’s more of a vibe or a grind or something than a movie. The whole thing is stitched together with coherent production design and masterful editing.
In a way, “Spun” is editing. Its filmmaker, the Swedish music video and commercial director Jonas Akerlund, is known principally for Prodigy’s jittery “Smack My Bitch Up” and Madonna’s stop-start “Ray of Light.” According to the film’s production notes, the debut feature project started off with a 1,000-page storyboard comic book, every single shot of which was captured on high-speed 16-mm film once production started. The finished product includes 4,500 edits, or almost a cut every second.
And there certainly is some nice technique. One trick makes every object appear to us as the sum of its component parts. So when Schwartzman gets in his crappy-ass brown Volvo, we see the wheels turning, the pistons pumping, the fan belt whirring. The technique communicates that speedy sense of everythingallatonce. It’s a style that bites “Requiem for a Dream” — in particular the little impressionistic bits that recurred every time the characters shot up — and makes no particular improvement.
As there was in “Requiem for a Dream” — a vastly superior film — a fairly conventional morality is at work in “Spun.” Drug dealers get busted, rats get shot, and guys who fuck with women get beaten down. No bad deed goes unpunished. And in one sense, with all the brown teeth, groaning constipation, and Leguizamo jerking off in a sock, there’s nothing sexy about the loser pageant. In all its bleached-out shots and hyper-quick editing, “Spun” is an anti-drug film.
Sort of. Because these guys still get to wear Diesel and look like John Leguizamo in a pair of low-rider leather pants. Or be a bad-ass cowboy like Mickey Rourke (playing his best role in years), and fuck Brittany Murphy. (Yes, fuck. In one of the film’s most hilarious scenes Rourke delivers a “Patton”-like tribute to pussy, with an American flag waving in the background.)
The biggest problem with “Spun” is that it’s really just about speed (and editing). And speed, like most other drugs, is in and of itself boring. (Have you ever had one of those three-hour conversations about pot? Stoned? It feels like time dying.) Further, the young-and-beautiful drug movie is finished — at least until someone makes a genre tribute in 20 years. I can’t imagine a picture saying anything that hasn’t already been said better by “Drugstore Cowboy,” the abject “Kids” and even “Trainspotting.”
At this point, the only interesting drug movies are the ones that start with drugs and work outward, like, again, “Requiem” (about addiction and the death of the American dream), or “Jesus’ Son” (about redemption and Billy Crudup). (It’s worth noting that both evolved from novels.)
“Spun” is ultimately a nasty movie. It’s the kind of film that mocks overweight people who work at gas stations and makes parody out of people who live in trailers. It tries desperately for its edge, achieving it occasionally (maybe with former Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford working the counter at the porn store), but never really gets past the same kind of one-dimensional jokes about speed freaks that Jay Leno makes in “Tonight Show” monologues. I laughed, but I didn’t feel good about it.
No actress can take a punch like Brittany Murphy. In “Just Married,” she gets zonked in the nose at least twice and thumps her head on the edge of a doorway as her young husband, played by Ashton Kutcher, carries her bumptiously over the threshold on their wedding night. Those are decidedly tired, unfunny gags — and yet Murphy, who understands that slapstick is an art, plays them so brightly that she makes you feel you’ve never seen them before. When she’s accidentally zapped with a football (thrown, of course, by Kutcher), she doesn’t pull the old “Oh! My nose!” Marcia Brady routine. Instead she pops back up with a dizzy, radiant smile, as if it were all in a day’s work. She’s got a knack for playing ditzy lightness with some intelligence behind it. In a Hollywood universe where virtually no one knows how to either direct or play screwball comedy, she’s the closest thing to a Carole Lombard that we’ve got.
It’s too bad that the movie around her, Shawn Levy’s “Just Married,” is so disappointing. Its premise is workable, and its script (by Sam Harper) manages to toss off a few good lines, but it takes a number of awkward running steps at the beginning and then founders irrevocably midway through. Murphy is a rich girl (her parents are David Rasche and Veronica Cartwright, the latter of whom has absolutely nothing to do but does get one of the movie’s funniest lines, a gag about her character’s ridiculous nickname) who falls for average-joe Kutcher.
The two fall in love immediately after that football incident, move in together shortly thereafter, and decide to marry, much to Murphy’s father’s dismay. Then they set off on a European honeymoon that drives them further and further apart. Part of the problem is that while Murphy understands certain rules of politeness and good behavior while traveling in a foreign country, Kutcher, a sports-loving dude who has no qualms about wearing a knit cap with an American flag on it, doesn’t make many friends on the Continent. Within hours of his arrival, he’s blown the wiring in a swanky French resort hotel by trying to plug a cheap vibrator into the wall.
“Just Married” seems potentially promising at the beginning: It starts out at the end of the newlyweds’ journey, and we see the warring couple scowling and simmering as they make their way through the airport. The sequence is an echo of the opening of “The Philadelphia Story,” in which Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn go at each other with warrior animosity that’s barely playful. No longer united in wedded bliss, they’re as separate as can be, and they go at each other physically and psychically, nudging and jostling one another as if each felt the universe was too tiny to hold the both of them.
But by the middle of the movie, the memory of that opening sequence has lost its charge, simply because you wonder what on earth Murphy is doing with a dodo like Kutcher. For one thing, he causes an accident that results in the death of her pet French bulldog. It’s played lightly, and for laughs (even though the dog-lover in me still flinched), but the problem is that it’s the sort of joke that a doofus like Kutcher’s character would find hilarious. (And it doesn’t have the looped-out absurdity of, say, the dog-in-a-cast routine in “There’s Something About Mary.”) One of the movie’s central plot points is that he lies to Murphy about how the dog died. But he wasn’t all that nice to the poor critter while it was still alive. And who would feel good about marrying Murphy off to a guy like that?
Kutcher (who’s best known for his work on “That ’70s Show”) is good-looking in that now-generic ’70s hipster way. (He looks like he’s on the verge of getting arrested for impersonating a Stroke.) But he thinks simply acting like a regular guy is the same as playing one — he doesn’t know how to give his character any extra zing, and he hurls his jokes at us like an athletic beach bum engrossed in a killer game of jai alai.
He’s leagues behind Murphy, whose half-out-of-it charm also has a peculiar razor sharpness. In “Just Married,” there’s no doubt about which character, and which actor, has the chops. Murphy, with her runny nose and even runnier mascara, certainly knows how to work her innocent, girly-girl looks. But a football in the nose isn’t nearly enough to get her down. She could kick the ass of any guy any day; she deserves a worthy ass to kick.
While the rest of us were honoring fallen firemen (and policemen and workaday folks) with a moment of silence this week, Angelina Jolie was apparently taking her firefighter tribute to the next level: She’s having a fireman’s pole installed in her bedroom.
“I want to slide down a fireman’s pole from my bedroom. So it’s being put in!” the actress tells Marie Claire magazine.
Sliding down a fire pole, it turns out, is one of the top 10 things Jolie wants to do before she dies.
“Nothing is as sexy as the fire pole will be,” she says, though she has no concrete plans for the shiny metal contraption. “I’m sure I’ll experiment with it. The bedroom is directly above the kitchen, so if I had a pole … I just like the idea of going from one room to the other that way.”
Stairs are so five minutes ago.
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So is Dick a brad?
“Send the word … Brad is a dick.”
– Crew members from the film “The Fountain” on Brad Pitt, who deprived them of gainful employment when he backed out of his agreement to make the film two weeks ago, in an open letter to Ain’t It Cool News.
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Aerowitness
Guess who’s got a thing for the Amish: Steven Tyler.
The Aerosmith front man tells the upcoming issue of Details magazine that he’s psyched to appear in Danny Provenzano’s film, “Sinking Springs.” The film, which is about to go into production and focuses on the seamy underworld of Amish drug trafficking, will feature Tyler in a buggy-riding role.
“I’m there. I’m there,” Tyler says. “I love the Amish. They’ve got it all together.”
Dude looks like a lady … with a beard?
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Worse than a boy named Sue
File this one under “What were they thinking?”
George Stephanopoulos and Alexandra Wentworth, have named their brand-new baby daughter, born Monday, Elliott Anastasia.
Let’s hope they call her Ellie for short.
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Maybe that’s why he’s a bad tipper …
“I hate rich people who complain about being rich. They are insane. I pay, like, 50 percent taxes and I am very proud of that.”
– Sean “Puffy/P. Diddy” Combs on the joy of paying Uncle Sam, in the New Yorker.
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Move over, Linda Blair
She may be cute now, but when Brittany Murphy, who stars opposite Eminem in “8 Mile,” was 6 months old, she went through a decidedly uncute phase.
“I suddenly stopped making baby noises and started talking in isolated adult sentences in this deep bass voice, saying things like ‘Where is my food now?’” the actress tells celebrity researcher Baird Jones. “For years I had a lower voice than I do now. My family was so embarrassed, they were begging me to shut up when the neighbors were around and to speak higher so it did not sound so demonically possessed. I was like some alien being.”
But Murphy thinks talent — not demonic possession — is to blame.
“I must have been imitating my father because then it stopped, and by age 3 I spoke like every normal 3-year-old girl,” she says. “That low voice never came back, thank God, and I couldn’t even fake it later when I tried. But from that point on my family knew acting was in my blood.”
How she explains the projectile green vomit is a matter for another day, I suppose.
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Miss something? Read yesterday’s Nothing Personal.
Series
Rachel and Ross reveal what happened that night on Friends (8 p.m., NBC). The reality series Popstars 2 (8 p.m., WB) re-applies the “Popstars” formula, this time to a coed singing group. The thrill is gone, but Survivor: Africa (8 p.m., CBS) remains. CSI (9 p.m., CBS) has a case about the shooting death of a high school jock, seemingly by a tormented classmate. Will takes an acting class on Will & Grace (9 p.m., NBC). Sherry Stringfield rejoins the cast of ER (10 p.m., NBC) as Dr. Susan Lewis, Mark Greene’s ex-girlfriend. Frontline (10 p.m., PBS, check local listings) presents “Dangerous Straits,” a look at the United States’ precarious relationship with China.
Sports
Baseball:
ALCS, Game 2, Yankees at Mariners (8 p.m., Fox)
Hockey:
Flyers at Red Wings (7:30 p.m., ESPN2)
Mighty Ducks at Kings (10:30 p.m., ESPN2)
Talk
Rosie O’Donnell (syndicated) Martin Short, Deborah Norville (rerun)
David Letterman (CBS) Brittany Murphy, Macy Gray
Jay Leno (NBC) Heather Graham, Daryl Hannah
Politically Incorrect (ABC) Dick Clark, Rebecca Hagelin
Conan O’Brien (NBC) Quincy Jones, Diana Krall
Craig Kilborn (CBS) Ben Folds
All times Eastern unless noted.
James Mangold’s “Girl, Interrupted” would like us to believe that the mentally unstable are different from you and me. They’re deeper, wiser and brimming with great truths — they’ve just run a little off the rails. Because of their ability to see the truth, they often make excellent writers, and it’s their job to reveal never-before-seen angles of reality through their diary entries and trenchant remarks.
That’s exactly what Winona Ryder, as 17-year-old Susanna, does in “Girl, Interrupted,” a movie about the blurry fringe of insanity that has it all: a hyper-perceptive heroine who probably isn’t crazy, just misunderstood; a righteous, knowing and long-suffering nurse with the ability to knock sense into her charges; and a wardful of assorted troubled souls, each with her own special brand of maladjustment. From the first frame, it’s easy to see where “Girl, Interrupted” is headed: Someone flew over the cuckoo’s nest — and phoned a movie in somewhere along the way.
“Girl, Interrupted” is based on the bestselling memoir by Susanna Kaysen about her own institutionalization in the late ’60s, but it’s so jazzed up and so ornately embroidered that the book’s rather delicate tale is completely muffled. Kaysen’s book may have been marketed as a Sylvia Plath-style meditation on the tenuous connection between creativity and madness, but it’s really more modest than that: If nothing else, it works simply as an intriguing chronicle of two years that somehow dropped out of one young girl’s life, for reasons that she accepts but doesn’t fully understand, not even some 25 years after the fact.
But Mangold’s movie — its script written by Lisa Loomer, Anna Hamilton Phelan and Mangold — turns its main character’s instability into an Event. It doesn’t simply chronicle Susanna’s journey of self-discovery; it’s also a confused jumble of social commentary, inspirational dribble and occasional forced raucousness.
Susanna is committed to a rather benign-looking New England psychiatric hospital — called Claymoore here, but actually the Massachusetts hospital McLean — after downing a whole jar of aspirin and chasing it with a bottle of vodka. “Maybe I was crazy. Or maybe it was just the ’60s. Or maybe I was just a girl — interrupted,” she intones in voice-over as we see a tube being shoved down her throat after the halfhearted suicide attempt. Of course, she comes from a repressed household where respect for propriety seems to rule the day. She’s had a sexual encounter with an older married man and slept with a sensitive young stud (Jared Leto) who, if you squint, looks like Mark Lindsay from Paul Revere and the Raiders. Somehow her mix of symptoms — among them “promiscuity” — have caused her to be diagnosed with a “borderline personality disorder.”
When Susanna arrives at Claymoore, a beaming nurse (Whoopi Goldberg) in an Angela Davis hairdo and crocheted poncho stands by, waiting to greet her warmly. Inside, she meets a whole stable of unstable girls: Polly (Elisabeth Moss), who’s been forever scarred by self-inflicted burns; Daisy (the beguiling and unsettling Brittany Murphy), with her weird penchant for roast chickens and laxatives; Georgina (Clea Duvall, in a performance that cuts across the movie’s sodden conventionality with its openness), a pathological liar who adores L. Frank Baum’s Oz books; and most memorable of all, Lisa (the astonishing Angelina Jolie), a foxy sociopath who just can’t find her way in the real world.
Together the girls go out for supervised ice-cream outings (where they giggle hysterically when the clerk asks them if they want nuts on their sundaes) and wander the hospital’s mysterious underground tunnels, which just happen to harbor a hidden bowling alley. Occasionally, unpleasantness rears its ugly head: Cruel words are spoken; suicides are attempted and completed. And through it all, the perceptive Susanna scribbles and draws in her journal. She’s going to be a writer, she announces to anyone who asks, and by golly the little minx just might make it.
But you can almost feel Mangold’s panic when he feels the story might be losing steam: It wouldn’t have been enough just to have the girls interacting with each other during their commitment; they have to have adventures, too. And Ryder, whose performance consists almost solely of turning on that wide-eyed, bewildered-doe look, gets her big moment in an embarrassingly overplayed scene where she confronts Nurse Whoopi with a flurry of heartless, nasty insults. (You can be sure this righteous black woman sets the snippy white girl straight — but with excessively quiet dignity of course, just in case we’re not hip to the concepts of irony and contrast.)
But “Girl, Interrupted” is always worth watching when Angelina Jolie steps to the fore. Somehow, she takes a thuddingly ill-conceived role and turns it into gold: Lisa is the bruised and beautiful troubled doll who’s unfailingly charismatic (when she lifts a cigarette to her lips, a nurse stands at the ready with a lighter), the restless girl who’s always trying to escape from the confines of the hospital, who blurts out the blunt observations no one wants to hear. The movie tries to set her up as the sacrificial lamb — the battered innocent who’s saner than anyone, but who just has no concept of what’s appropriate or acceptable in this sad society of ours — but Jolie squirms out of those restrictive bonds at every turn. Just the way she prowls the hospital hallways, insectlike, with impossibly long legs, speaks of a kind of confidence that none of the other girls, even on their sanest days, could ever approach.
She’s funny and sly in the way she doles out the girl’s personal folders after they’ve staged a nighttime break-in of their shrink’s office, flirting with them, putting them down, keeping them eternally in her power with the sheer beauty of her swollen lips and sooty eyes. Jolie is exactly what “Girl, Interrupted” sorely needs: She substantially ups the glamour quotient of mental instability, which is why, for Susanna’s story to resolve itself, she must be smitten down. As Jolie plays her, Lisa is the great fierce center of “Girl, Interrupted.” Ryder’s Susanna is just the mouse that roared. Unfortunately, though, she’s the one who’s holding the notebook.
