Hey folks, Harry here with a look (or warning) at WIREY SPINDELL by Particle Man. Now I must warn ya that... well... From the sound of the material, it seems like the type of film that often times everyone loathes or has wildly divergent opinions and feelings towards. Be your own judge, but this is the word of PARTICLE MAN!!!
by Particle Man
I'm not going to spend too much time on this, because I suspect the only way people are going to see it is if the distributors somehow con IFC or the Sundance Channel into running it. Wirey Spindell is an unfortunate bit of "transgressive" cinema in which we follow in flashback the hilarious exploits of a combo sex/drug-addict from toddlerhood (when he gets blown across the room for performing "cunnilingus on an electric socket") to adulthood, where he expresses his ambivalence over an upcoming marriage by acting like a complete and utter asshole towards his fiancee (one of the most embarrasing scenes requires actress Callie Thorne to do a complete 180 degree turn from convincing anger to the forced "oh-ya-nut" attitude that will allow the story to continue). In between we get extended glimpses of Wirey's bisexual childhood (complete with golden showers!), and his similarly obsessed adolescence (see the hypocrisy of adults as Wirey eats up all of Dad's stash and is punished for his sin!).
If you're saying to yourself, "This sounds like bad John Irving," well, surprise! It's actually based on writer/producer/director Eric Schaeffer's novel, which to date has gone unpublished (gee, wonder why?). What makes Wirey Spindell so contemptible is not the fact that by age eight its young protagonist has had so much ass and ingested so many controlled substances that even Marilyn Manson would cry, "Holy shit!" It's that everybody surrounding Wirey is drawn in such flat, colorless tones that it makes our anti-hero seem even more shallow. It's that Wirey goes from the hunky Eric Mabius in the flashback scenes to the dorky Eric Schaeffer in the present-day sequences (pray, could that be a whiff of directorial ego on the wind?). It's that author Schaeffer cowers from his own "outrageous" themes by making sure we see that Wirey rarely has any fun in what he's doing, and by forcing the character into an unconvincing redemption by the end (Warren Zevon's Excitable Boy traces the same sort of history -- albeit with a more serious range of vices -- with more believable verve and at a shorter running time).
Eric Schaeffer is probably best known for his team-up with Donal Lardner Ward, which resulted in the entertaining My Life's in Turnaround. Ward's mediocre The Suburbans was released last year; now, with Wirey Spindell, I'm beginning to fear that we've got two guys here with only one good idea between them. If it counts for anything, Schaeffer appears to have a better grasp of filmmaking. Maybe if he decides to stay true to whatever theme he's exploring (and maybe if he lets somebody else write the script), Wirey Spindell might not necessarily be the career dead-end it seems at the moment.
