Mark S.
Allen - he's the best in the business, a new Paul Wunder
Hey whore,
how's the whoring?
Freddy Got Fingered
is "The Hannibal
of comedies."
Driven is "Gear-shattering, ground-pounding
action!"
Is gear-shattering
good? Well, t least it won't "knock your eyes out!"
|
Graham Greene - Our
Man in Havana
Jonathan Richman - Having
a Party with Jonathan Richman
All
About Eve
It's slow to start, it's long, and it's stagey, but God damn
did Joseph Mankiewicz know how to write women characters. Imagine,
if you will, women who are fully realized, with real ambitions
and who act for themselves, not in the service of a plot or to
help a man. Jesus, the rest of the world has progressed, but
this flick reminds us that Hollywood has regressed since the
40s. If you like to watch women verballly catfight as much as
me, then check it out.
|
©2001 by
Randy Shandis Enterprises. All rights fucking reserved.
|
|
This week:
Driven
|
Filthy says:
"Gay gentlemen, start your engines." |
 |
Driven is very gay. It's a movie about sweaty gay men
who are afraid to say "I love you," so instead walk
around with their shirts off, scowling a lot and racing cars.
It's as gay as Harvey Fierstein and gayer than hosting an Ally
McBeal party.
It's about time that Hollywood made a gay mainstream movie.
I'm really fucking sick of gays being the bitchy friends of supermodels
with love problems. They always seem to have lost their dicks
and any interest in getting some tail for themselves. And the
independent movies show gays as white-ass, skinny and awkward
European teenagers who "come of age" with a best friend
in what is supposed to be a trembly revelation. Those fucking
independents are so God damn pleased with themselves for showing
gay people kissing they don't even bother making their stories
or their characters worth a piss in a Squirt bottle.
But Driven is gay, as gay as Top Gun or Male
Gangbang Orgy 8. It celebrates manliness, it celebrates not
being afraid to be so manly that only other men could love you.
It's about wanting to be around other sweaty, gay men and stroking
each other's glistening cocks. Of course, since this is Hollywood,
they don't actually show cocks; they use glistening, throbbing
racecars. And instead of showing these sweaty gay men fucking
and sucking, Driven uses the track as an allusion. It's
fast, it's pounding, it's slippery and sometimes sloppy, but
these men love it and they keep coming back for more. Why? Because
they're gay.
I say hats off to Sylvester Stallone for having the guts to
make this movie. I didn't think he'd be the one to finally make
a mainstream gay flick, but he is. And the only problem is that
it sucks. Hard. It sucks dredge, piss, shit and that black sludge
you find in old drain pipes. After all that, Driven still
has the sucking power to gulp down your pets asses and the shit
behind your sofa, and finally, it sucks wind. This is shit so
mindless that you have to keep doubling back and asking yourself,
was that as obvious and stupid as I thought it was? The answer
is yes.
Some bad gay actor named Kip Pardue is a hotshot young racecar
driver who loves current racing champion, and very gay German,
Til Schweiger. But, because they compete against each other,
he can't profess his love, throw him down and roll around on
the asphalt. Instead, he pour his passion onto the street, racing
hard against Schweiger in order to prove himself worthy. Pardue
races for a handicapped, gay Svengali-like owner played by Burt
Reynolds. Reynolds is fully content to chew scenery when he can't
suck young men's dicks. He doesn't care that Pardue's in love;
he just wants to win and see more sweaty gay men, to hell with
the rookie's heart!
As the story goes, Kip loses his edge, and his hope for being
champ is slipping away. He fears that not winning will ruin his
dream of being with Schweiger. And Reynolds won't get the big
phallic trophy he so badly wants to sodomize himself with. So,
Reynolds brings back his old gay lover, Sylvester Stallone, supposedly
washed up, to help Kip win it all. Being terrifically gay, Stallone
understands Pardue's love for the German and he wants to show
him how to get on top, both figuratively and literally.
Because they can't embrace each other, the racers pass their
fiery passion through a somewhat retarded girl played by somewhat
retarded actress, Estella Warren. When Pardue can't kiss Schweiger,
he kisses Warren, then Schweiger kisses her. This poor simple-minded
girl is passed between them, unaware that she's just the carrier
pigeon for their love notes (and cold sores). For the benefit
of the audience, though, the movie finds an improbable way to
get the two lovers to cavort in their leathers in a pond.
After much preening and strutting like peacocks, Pardue and
Schweiger end up where sports movies always do, with one big
contest deciding it all. I won't spoil it for you by telling
you that Pardue wins the race and Schweiger's heart, all with
Stallone's help. But the real climax is a surprisingly subtle
one. Rather than show the boys hug, the movie has them shake
huge, phallic bottles of champagne and ejaculate all over each
other. Ahh, young love.
While the gay content is refreshingly blunt and straightforward,
it just doesn't make Driven worth seeing. The script was
mauled by Stallone. Not a scene goes by where everything isn't
explained to us three times. First we see it, then the characters
explain it, and then the track announcers explain it in terms
that would insult a three-year-old. "Welcome to Germany,
home of beer and the Autobahn!" "Joe Tanto is having
car trouble! Car trouble is bad! You can't win a race if your
car blows up! You, the audience, should be worried about Joe
Tanto!" You know a movie's gonna be shit when the track
announcer has the most lines. At the very least, give the guy
some personality. Well, fuck, give anyone some personality.
These are cardboard cutouts and the gay community deserves
better. They deserve to be represented by men who have more depth
than the cum pool on the floor of the triple-X arcade. I can't
think of one reason to give a fuck about Pardue. He's got the
charisma of a dental drill, and the slow, sleepy delivery of
a man whose mom drank way too much while she was pregnant. Stallone
is coasting, slurring his words and just sort of hanging around.
He has a subplot about wanting to prove he can still race, but
fuck if I can remember why we're supposed to care. I think his
presence is supposed to be classy. Note to Hollywood executives:
If you're a producer and your movie is so shitty that Stallone's
presence makes it classier, you should be making Whoppers, not
movies.
And while this movie is by gay men, about gay men, and for
gay men to jerk off to, they could have at least tried to make
the women interesting. Warren has pouty lips and swooshy hips,
but there's a garage sale in her head and everything must go!
The lone stab at making her more than a sack of flesh is by showing
her doing water ballet in a hotel swimming pool. Stallone's ex-wife,
played with sobering shittiness by Gina Gershon, is a wholly
fabricated ballbreaker. She's nothing but bitchy whining and
sour digs and in real life anyone this sour would have puckered
herself to death long ago. Come on guys, surely the gay community
thinks more of women than to make them either retarded or vicious.
The dialog is stiffer than the hot dicks the actors want to
suck. There's something called "on the nose" and I'm
not talking about where actors want to shoot their wads in porno
movies. I'm talking about when a writer is so fucking stupid
that he makes his characters come right out and say everything.
Rather than show it through what isn't said, or through how a
lie is told, Stallone has his characters spell out the plot like
they're Wal-Mart greeters telling you how to get to the automotive
department. "Go to this plot point, turn right next to the
obligatory confrontation, then make a left at the big race."
Because Hollywood can't show dicks and asses, the money shots
are of the race cars, thrusting, bumping, and ramming each other
from behind. They've made a pretty big deal out of the special
effects and racing scenes. They suck. I've seen better editing
and action in Ukrainian amateur porn. There is lots of racing,
all jump-cutted and narrated into tedium. And the transitions
from real racing to computer-generated scenes are obvious and
tacky. It's like switching between racing on ESPN and your Nintendo.
Two Fingers for Driven. One finger for the shitty
movie, and a bonus finger for the courage to make something so
gay.
Want
to tell Filthy something?
|