Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Here’s one of the real bummers about being locked up tight in the Labs, working without respite: everybody is seeing everything before me. I’m dying to see this one, and I don’t think it’s gonna happen until the actual release this fall. No early screenings for me. I just have to content myself reading everything you guys send in about it after it shows. In this case, it's like e.e. cummings went to a test screening:
hey harry,
i don't know if anyone has already written in on terry zwigoff's 'bad santa' but i went to a preview screening on monday night at the Bridge in culver city and wanted to give a quick review.
the version was a workprint with some minor editing inconsitencies and an audio temp track. besides that though, i think it was a pretty good indication of what the film is going to be like.
i was really looking forward to it since i liked both ghost world and crumb, and cause i had read that the coens wrote the original story (although in the credits for the film they are just executive producers). what i anticipated was a dark comedy that would have a very unique tone and great character development ala ghost world, but it really didn't deliver on either account. instead, it kind of just hovered in the realm of a shallow dark comedy striving to be more.
the story focuses on billy bob thornton's character, who is an alcoholic, mean-spirited, self-hating department store santa. along with his helper elf, once a year they pull off a department store heist (on christmas eve) and then spend the remainder of the year living off the spoils. without giving away too much, the bulk of the film takes place during one of these holiday seasons as billy bob and his elf plan to rip off another department store (where both john ritter and bernie mac happen to work). along the way, billy bob meets a little boy who is a social outcast, as well as a girl with a wicked santa claus fetish.
zwigoff wants to get a some kind of redemption for the billy bob character, but the humor and tone of is totall inconsistent, going from sentamentality to cruelty in so many places that it's really difficult to ever feel or sympathize for that character. to me this was the reason the film really fell apart....the characters and relationships felt tacked on around a series of crude and offensive jokes (which i usually like) and even the ending was just a forced resolution.
it felt like they might have shot more scenes that could have helped to develop the characters and relationships, and i hope that the responses to the screening gets them to put those back in. or they better hope that people are willing to watch billy bob act like an asshole for 90 minutes.
you can call me rickshaw boy
Wow. He’s about 180 degrees away from Beaks and Knowles on this one. Still, who’s to say they’re right until we all get a peek. Thanks for writing in, man.
"Moriarty" out.
