The following comes from Quint, who while snorkling for an old snuff can that he swore he last saw aboard the INDIANAPOLIS, all those years ago, managed to surface long enough to check out the screening of THE BLACKOUT at the Austin Film Festival. Man that was one heck of a swim Quint!!!! Anyway here is his review, beware of Spoilers.
Dennis Hopper kicks ass. It's that simple. The movie itself didn't do much for me, but Dennis Hopper's very underused character in The Blackout was a bright light in a sea of pitch-black weirdness.
The Blackout was intro'd by Hopper, but I didn't see him during or afterwards, so he probably skimped out. Anyway, Hopper pretty much said that this was the U.S. Premier of the movie and that the whole movie was improvised. I felt the hint of the overly-weird starting to tug at my sleep-deprived mind. (I've been attending the Austin Film Festival, as you well know, and have had a total of about 11 hours of sleep since Wednesday (It is currently 1:45 a.m. Sunday). I almost fell asleep. I don't know exactly what it was that had such a calming effect on me, but I know the movie wasn't apealing enough for me to be completely attentive. I attended Beavis and Butt-Head Do America last night, at the same place, with less sleep and a later showing and I didn't doze for one minute because the B&B movie is cool and fun.
The Blackout, starring Mathew Modine, Dennis Hopper, and Claudia Schiffer, follows the sad plight of Mathew Modine's drug addicted movie star character and the effects of the drug addiction. He is especially fond of cocaine and alcohol, which when taken simultaniously cause him to......Blackout which means he does stuff, but doesn't remember them in the morning (Sound familiar Harry?) :)
Just to get it out of the way, I generally like weird movies. American Perfekt, at AFF, was weird as hell, but I loved it. I loved Natural Born Killers, The Wall, A Clockwork Orange, the list goes on. So, I didn't like this movie a whole lot not just because it was weird, but because the weirdness wasn't all that attention grabbing (excluding the first quarter which is pretty much just soft, late-night Cinemax porn).
Hopper plays the owner of a titty bar/nightclub/video club/whorehouse thingy where he leads a group of people who believe that video camera movie making (Pornography in this case) is the wave of the future. His character is a slimy, greedy, arrogant, foul-mouthed dickhead. I related to him immediatly. But, like I said earlier, he's the brightest point of the movie.
I won't give too much of the plot away, but the jist of the movie is that Modine's character goes through a rough, tramatic ordeal while he was snorting coke and drinking obsessivelly, so he couldn't remember the experience. It involves his fiance revieling that she had an abortion after a previous argument which he forgot (Blackout). He gets pissed and throws her around a little, but she in turn got to slap him some 20 times. There's Improv. for you!
Hopper's slime-ball character in essence tricks Modine into getting drunk and coked up so he can have a big movie star in his sleazy porn stuff, which he is modeling after a French movie called "Nana" or something like that. Anyway, Modine does something bad that isn't reveiled at that point.
It now jumps 18 months ahead where Modine recieves his little coin from AA for being sober for one year. He is now married to Claudia Schiffer and trying to get his career back on track.
He's having nightmares about strangling babies and the such, so goes back to Miami (and off the wagon for that matter) to try and find his ex-fiance, whom he is growing sure he killed. The ending was fairly predictable.
This movie is the defining characteristic of the term mediocre. It is weird for the sake of being weird and is saved from falling into piece-of-shit-movie by strong acting and Dennis Hopper. He just kicks so much ass in this movie.
I talked to a respectable screenwriter before the movie who didn't want to see it (He was exiting from seeing Easy Rider Man there were a lot of bikers there!). He didn't want to see it based soley on the fact that Abel Ferrara directed it. I see what he meant.
I hope this makes some sort of sense. If it doesn't and you still enjoy it, then you'll probably like The Blackout because some of it didn't make a damn bit of sense either. The audience was very quiet throughout the show, about 10 people that I saw got up and left, but most applauded at the end. I really wanted to like this movie, but it was just way too over the top for me.
Anyway, see you tomorrow at the fest!
