Mooooovies _

 

 

Doom Generation, another self-styled Gen X film flails.

Something about bestiality? A film with too much flocking raaa-aates ewe poor cinema-aaa.

by Peter T. Chattaway

Posers, the lot of them.

From the film’s title to its closing
credits (“photographed on location in hell,”)
The Doom Generation smells of pretentious,
apocalyptic, pop-junk, art-fucking. This in
itself needn’t be a bad thing, but somehow I
was hoping Gregg Araki (The Living End,
Totally F***ed Up) would give us a little

more than just “Doom doom doom, let’s go
~ back to our room.”

Sex and junk, sex and junk. Oh, and
some death, too. Give Freud a slurpee and
he’d have a blast. Jordan White (James
Duval) is having a hard time getting it up in
Amy Blue (Rose McGowan)’s car when
rumbling drifter Xavier Red (Johnathan
Schaech) jumps in the back and tells them, .
ever so rudely, to drive him outta there. With
surnames like that, you know there’s an all-
American threesome just waiting to happen
(at least it’s less obvious than naming them
Strawberry, Chocolate and Vanilla). And
where sex and politics mix, religion is sure
to follow.

Religion rears its tacky

 

Sex itself becomes just another form of junk
food consumption. (Film pioneers must have had
Araki’s libido in mind when they invented the
horizontal screen.) Xavier masturbates while Amy
and Jordan go for a jiggly tumble in the tub, then
sucks the semen off the back of his hand; later on,
Amy discovers the finger-licking properties of
Xavier’s Kentucky-fried rectal residue (yee-hah!).
By the time Schaech steers the dialogue onto the
topic of sex with animals, it’s apparent that the farm
boy from How to Make an American Quilt must
have spent a little too much time wrapping his buns
‘round the 100% beef back home.

Duval injects what soul he can into the film,
though it’s hard to tell whether his existential
musings are seriously intended or just a sly form of
Keanu-spoofing. It’s not until his final scene that
he dispels his goofiness and projects something a
little more visceral. McGowan, with her California
accent and black mop, comes across like Alicia
Silverstone’s foul-mouthed evil twin, her bobbed
hair dipped in a can of shoe polish, sneering at
everything in sight. If she could bottle contempt,
she’d make a mint.

Where the film really fails to deliver is in its
overall structure. Every fast-food joint houses
someone who mistakes Amy for an ex-lover. Every
jilted Romeo loses a limb or two trying to snag Amy

eschatological head in the Jesus tattoo Xavier keeps on his dick (“so _ that “shoplifters will be executed.” Seeing Perry Farrell behind the and swears revenge. But not every oath is followed up. Loose ends
that when I fuck someone, they can say they have Jesus inside them”) _ till does have its own hallucinogenic charm, but you know the world’s are strewn about the script like so many spilled french fries, but they
and in the corner stores frequented by our hapless pseudo-symbolic going to hell in a handbag when a high-class Hollywood madam never get picked up. In the end there’s no doom, just a half-empty
trio, where every purchase adds up to $6.66 and ominous white-on- _ like Heidi Fleiss (in her first movie ‘role’) has to find work peddling gas tank and a bag of stale Doritos.

black signs foretell the end of the world, warning would-be thieves _ the wares of that other sugar-coated Hostess.

Casino poor gamble for Scorsese.

De Niro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone pad
the deck in his latest epic.

: by Peter T. Chattaway

Casino opens with a bang - literally. Sam
Rothstein (Robert De Niro) steps into a car framed
so perfectly on the screen you just know it’s going
to explode. But oh, what an explosion it is.
“ Catapulted in his driver’s seat, Rothstein
soars on the cusp of the mushrooming flames
as a tenor’s aria bursts onto the soundtrack.

That pretty much sets the pace for
the film as a whole. Casino frequently flirts
with cliches - it’s especially familiar if you’ve
seen GoodFellas, Martin Scorsese’s last
collaboration with De Niro, Joe Pesci, and
co-writer Nicholas Pileggi - but Scorsese
invests so much energy in this venture that you can’t
help but be transfixed by it all.

This is all the more remarkable because
Rothstein remains quite opaque throughout his
flashbacked narrative. A casino manager who’s got
the art of gambling down to a science, he’s a
professional businessman who never lets on
whether he actually enjoys his line of work, the
sort of anally retentive
boss who, in the midst of
all that is garish, tawdry,
and indulgent about Las
Vegas, badgers the chef
for not putting enough
blueberries in his muffin.
But the soul of this
character stays hidden
behind all the details.

This is
particularly problematic
when Rothstein meets
Ginger McKenna
(Sharon Stone), a chip-pinching hustler he falls in
love with when he ought to be ejecting her from
. the premises. Instead, he marries her and gives her
the only key to a safety deposit box worth a few
million bucks. The script never explains why an
abnormally careful gambler would let his guard
down and put such blind trust in this emotionally
insecure stranger. Apparently De Niro couldn’t
figure out his motivation either; when Rothstein
proposes to Ginger, he delivers his lines so formally
it’s left to Stone to be the scene’s emotional center

 

 

(thankfully, she pulls it off.)

The script is similarly laconic when it
comes to the Rothsteins’ home life. We see their
baby, but only after a narrator tells us about the kid
(perhaps the thought of Sharon Stone pregnant was
too much for the Image Control department.) Much
later, we see their daughter at the
age of eight, but only after the
parents’ custody battle begins.
Nothing we see of the Rothstein
family comes close to the textured
irony of Nicky Santoro (Pesci)
brushing smuggled diamonds out of
his wife’s hair or making breakfast
for his son after a late-night hit. It’s a shame, really,
since De Niro does prove, in other scenes, that he
can display the sort of vulnerability most roles
never offer him.

Pesci, for his part, is as wickedly delightful
as ever - he dominates Casino so assuredly that
even a stalwart psycho like James Woods (who
plays Ginger’s pimp Lester Diamond) capitulates
with a surprisingly reticent performance.
Pesci has to be one of the few actors who
could slap an ex-girlfriend, toss her down
the stairs and out the door, and stil/ get an
audience’s sympathetic laughter with a
terse “Be careful.” One minute he’s the
most violent, irrational prick you ever saw;
the next he’s actually trying to talk some
sense into his fellow wiseguys.

If it seems like Casino has no
greater aim than to plagiarize our memory
of GoodFellas, well, perhaps that is the
case. But the ol’ moral ambivalence is
buoyed along by a grab bag of nifty film
tricks -funny subtitles, X-ray close-ups, irises and
tints - that keep the film interesting, you barely
notice its three-hour length. (At most, it feels like
two and a half.)

Like the institution for which it is named,
Casino may be excessive and redundant, but it’s
so alluring - even addicting - that you forgive
Scorsese for rolling the dice just one more time.

Photos of two of the films stars. But, from two different totally
unrelated films. Can you guess which ones?

 

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