Thursday, April 17, 2008

How I Spent My Vacation

Late last night I was bored. Not tired enough yet for bed and having already finished a book in the afternoon, I didn't feel like starting the one I had bought that night. I'm taking some time off and figured I deserved some late nights watching nothing much so I cruised through the cable guide, looking for something to kill my time for a couple of hours. I found a perfect candidate - 54, a movie about Studio 54 that came out in 1998 was showing on the Indie Plex channel. I had never had any hankering to see this movie before, but the guide said it was only ninety minutes long (meaning no commercial breaks) and Salma Hayek was in it.

The movie turned out to be a sub-Boogie Nights exercise in mediocrity. Working-class teenager (Ryan Phillipe) goes against his parent (this time the father) and moves to city and finds a surrogate family (the exact phrase used in the cable guide) when he becomes a bartender at the hottest disco in the country, a decadent scene filled with sex and drugs. The rest of the movie goes like this: The bartender does coke, the disco owner is piling money away tax-free but taunts the IRS on a talk show, bartender returns home for Christmas but is rejected by his father, he meets the girl of his dreams (a soap star) and they hit it off, a few days later at the disco's New Year's Eve party the bartender is rejected by the actress in the prescence of her boyfriend, same night this elderly lady who is a regular at the club dies on the dance floor from a coke OD - this of course symbolizes the end of the club and the era. The owner has the body removed from the dance floor and immediately fires up the party again, the bartender thinks that they should take time to grieve the old chick and refuses to go take care of VIP guest Princess Grace which is a big deal as his understanding sister back home is named after her, the IRS shows up this same night also (time is running short in the movie) and busts the owner for tax evasion. As the bartender leaves the disco the soap star pulls up in her limo and apologizes for snubbing him. Postscript: The disco owner does time and returns for a party at the club where we find that the bartender and his friends have cleaned up and lead straight lives.

Ryan Phillipe is a total blank, boredom personified. Nobody else in this movie can act except Hayek and Mike Myers as the club owner, whose role is wasted (pun intended): Is he the bad guy or the meanie with a heart of gold, or a Do What I Gotta Do Burt Reynolds-in-Boogie-Nights-type? He gives a little speech at the end of the movie that I think was supposed to sum up the movie and What It Taught Us, but I was bored by then and doing physical therapy stretches and not paying the best of attention.

Despite having that era's prime time family soap hottie (Neve Campbell), that era's prime time MILF hottie (Sela Ward), and a slamming hottie in ANY era (Salma Hayek); none of them get naked. Sela Ward comes closest with a reverse cowgirl scene with Ryan Phillipe. Salma Hayek wears some awesomely sexy outfits - the best one is when she is giving disco dance lessons - and always does something different and great with her hair, so there is a little compensation.

And if I've learned anything from Boogie Nights, Behind the Music, and every bio-pic of a musician made in the past few years (which are pretty much Behind the Music anyway); Ryan Phillipe should have acquired a crippling drug habit and he should have had sex with Salma Hayek, thereby betraying his friendship with Breckin Meyer. After checking the web this morning, I see that scenario #2 did happen in the director's cut version of the movie and this scene took place in a bathroom. Of course.