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My Big Fat Independent Movie

2005, Movie, R, 80 mins

My Big Fat Independent Movie: Review

MY BIG FAT INDEPENDENT MOVIE
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Director Philip Zlotorynski and writers Adam Schwartz and Chris Gore take aim at some of the most successful nonmainstream movies of the last 15 years in this scattershot parody, appropriating and ridiculing images, characters, styles of dialogue and narrative devices from films as disparate as RUN LOLA RUN (1998), MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING (2002), LOST HIGHWAY (1997), SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE (1989), AMELIE (2001), THE HOURS (2002) and EL MARIACHI (1992). It also pokes fun at Spike Lee's signature gliding camera movement, Christopher Walken's uniquely off-kilter persona, the swan dress Bjork wore to the Academy Awards the year she was nominated for DANCER IN THE DARK (2000) and subtitles. The sum is considerably less than the total of its purloined parts. En route to a botched robbery at a Las Vegas warehouse, PULP FICTION-style tough guys Sam (Neil Barton) and Harvey (Eric Hoffman) pick up Johnny Vince (Darren Reiher) — a brokenhearted hipster a la SWINGERS (1996) — thinking he's their accomplice; they later kidnap a promiscuous checkout girl Julianne (Paget Brewster) modeled on Jennifer Aniston's discontented housewife in THE GOOD GIRL (2002). Meanwhile, plotlines inspired by MEMENTO (2000) and PI (1998) unfold as a vigilante with no short-term memory (Brian Krow) searches for the man who killed his wife, and a half-mad genius (Rob Schrab) who possesses the formula for the perfect pastrami sandwich runs from a mob of covetous rabbis. There's a musical sequence, a slew of not particularly clever jokes about sexual acts banned in many states, a snippet of WAKING LIFE-inspired animation and digs at the Dogma 95 manifesto, all strung together with enough pop-cultural banter to prompt one character to wail, "Please, no more pop cultural banter!" What, you may ask, does a low-budget sitcom of American cultural stereotypes like MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING have in common with the exhilaratingly fractured narrative of, say, the German RUN LOLA RUN? Well, there's the problem in a nutshell: The films Gore — editor of Film Threat magazine, which exists to exploit interest in nonmainstream filmmaking — and Co. attempt to lampoon have nothing in common except that they're not calculated, focus group-tested, big-budget American studio films. And the juvenile gags seem aimed at moviegoers who hate the whole idea of independent/art/foreign-language films and the stuck-up eggheads who like them — so what's the point? leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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