brainwagon

I’m a huge fan of what reasonably called "bad cinema". I go to see the terrible comedies, the action films, horror movies, what most serious students of film would call the bottom of the barrel. I prefer movies with guns, and hookers and firetrucks (can anyone name that movie) or scantilly clad Kung Fu fighting lady vampires (or this TV show?).

My wife, bless her heart, is mostly patient with me. I know I get to pick a lot of the films we go see, and after seeing Terminator 3, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and The Hulk, she was certainly long
overdue for picking a movie. Like most women on the planet, she seems to
think that Ben Affleck is easy on the eyes, so she selected Gigli for
our Saturday movie extravaganza. Costar Jennifer Lopez is pretty easy on the eyes, and the overall plot (if trailers are to be believed) was a sort of "two
thugs meet each other and fall in love comedy&quot. Off we went.

I remember seeing Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise together in a truly forgettable movie Far and Away.and later the unforgettably bad Eyes
Wide Shut. I should have known that actors who are romantically linked
seemingly have a knack for selecting very bad vehicles to star in together.

This movie will not be the counterexample that proves the rule.

It’s bad. Really bad. I’m going to give away spoilers, but frankly it’s the poor
writing and direction that are the real spoilers of this movie. It is as if the
" writers" and "directors" simply didn’t know what kind
of a movie they wanted to make. The resulting mish-mash is 90 minutes of painfully paced drek which seems more like 900 minutes.

Gigli is the story of New Jersy Gangster Larry Gigli, played by Mr. Affleck. He’s asked by mobster boss Louis to kidnap Brian, the retarded younger brother of a federal prosecutor, to keep the prosecutor from filing charges against a New York mob boss. Because of the monumental importance of this task, Louis also retains the services of Ricki, played by Ms. Lopez. She’s in a similar line of work, and while displays a bit more intelligent than the rather dull Gigli, seems to be without any qualifications for her rather brutal career. She’s also a lesbian. Bless those mobsters for not sexually dsiscriminating when granting contracts.

Let’s recap: New Jersey gangster, lesbian thug, and retarded young man. Woohoo! Let the hilarity ensue.

It tries to be funny. It has some sexy dialogue, which occasionally actually titillates. It’s got some faintly amusing bits. But it also taks some startlingly bad turns.

Turn number one: Ricki’s lesbian lover shows up at Gigli’s apartment, looking for her. She’s obviously brash and unpleasant, and wonders why Ricki has gone over to the other side and is now sampling men. When Ricki tells her it’s over, but has nothing to do with him, she then offers to have a threesome to help Ricki "get it out of her system&quot. When rebuffed again, she wanders into the kitchen, slits her wrists, and is treated to a quick trip to the emergency room.

Never to be seen again during the movie. Total screen time, maybe three minutes.

I’m sure it’s a great break for Missy Crider to star in a movie with Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Al Pacino and Christopher Walken: but it absolutely baffles me what
this particular sequence is supposed to reveal to us. Up until then, Ricki is portrayed as a cool, unflappable, mentally tough woman. With this scene, we are instead treated to the view of a woman who picks her sexual partners very badly, and is completely out of control. Besides taking the story off the rails, it just isn’t very much fun to watch. It isn’t exciting, even in a morbid way. It’s just another stereotypical portrayal of lesbians-who-can’t-find-happiness-without-men. Bleh.

Actors Christopher Walken and Al Pacino make almost cameo-like appearances, Walken as a slightly insane cop and Pacino as a gangster. Boy. I never saw
that coming. Who would have thought: casting Walken as a crazy cop, or Pacino as a mobster. Such bold innovation.

This movie isn’t romantic. It isn’t very funny. It doesn’t have a lot of action. It does have some pretty graphic sexual dialog (although no nudity). It does have some rather nasty violence. Ultimately, there is just not very much interesting at all, and when the plot of a movie is so bad that it makes you forget about J-Lo’s body, you know that something has gone seriously off track.

A word of advice to Ms. Lopez: stick to well written scripts, like Anaconda, otherwise you’ll have to rely on your music to stay in the public eye, and well, that doesn’t seem like a good bet either.

Update: Gigli opened in the number eight position, just below finding Nemo (now in its 10th week). Gigli made $3.8 million dollars in its opening weekend, only half as much as the underperforming Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. That movie only spend four weeks in theaters before they pulled the plug. Bets for Gigli?