film Home > Movie Reviews

Imagine that you’re a film editor with a neurological disorder similar to Tourette’s. A producer--hypothetical, of course--drops a DVD of footage on your desktop. You load it into the AVID and there’s this jittery-but-slick handheld stuff that looks like a Lexus commercial shot by Tony Scott in the Cayman Islands but was really shot by some guy named Frank E. Flowers. There are some scenes about a bad businessman (Bill Paxton) getting ratted on by whomever and being forced to hit the Caymans with his nubile daughter (Agnes Bruckner) in tow. There’s this whole other thing about some white fisherman’s son (Orlando Bloom) who’s in love with some black girl (Zoë Saldana), some generic gangsta scenes, plus some shots of Paxton screwing a seriously fine black girl (Joy Bryant) whose deal you do not know, but hey--lookee there--that guy from The Wire (Robert Wisdom) is yelling in an island patios. The whole thing seems to be about how money corrupts all sorts of folks, but then your hypothetical producer laughs and says, "Just cut this shit together any old way as long as it’s fast and has a mess of those jump-cut things--dumb-ass art-house audiences love that shit."