Harry here, with the latest report from John Robie, that cat burgalar with the cinematic heart of gold. You'll be hearing a lot from this spy in the future, he's pretty darn astute (I think that's spelt correctly... duh gee George which way did he go?) ANYWAY, here's John's exploits and review...

Treasure comes in many forms. Silver chalices from the layer of Smaug, jewelled scarabs from the tomb of Imhotep, Gold nuggets from the mines of Solomon, stag movies from the stash of a Persian king. Ah, the latter, my booty from so many a nights work. This night the object of my desire was the rarest of rare stag films, The Casting Couch, featuring a young Joan Crawford. How I creped ever so lightly into the king's mansion, how I moved ever so cat-like through his hallways, how I snuck ever so quietly into his room, how I lifted his mattress ever so gently, sure not to wake him, and ever so stealthily pilfered the reel of film, how I got the hell out of there, put the film on the projector. Oh Joyous Joy, the flicker of the film, oh wonder of wonders, here we go AHHH...aw hell...this is just a copy of 200 Cigarettes. Damn

Movies about young people often suffer the same fate. Instead of offering complex, endearing characters who happen to be young they often go for one or two passions of youth and forget all the little stuff that makes people people. That's the problem with about half the characters in 200 Cigarettes, and it brings down what could have been a really good film. It's not that the movie attests to being a serious tome of the twenty-something. It's just that the goofy, light hearted tone that underscores the best parts of the film is entirely devastated by some bad performances and trite dialogue in other parts. There's some good stuff here. Unfortunately you gotta wade through garbage to get to it.

A bunch of young people in the city on New Years Eve, 1981. There's the plot. Nice and simple.

If you're going to have a main character spend the entire movie bitching at least establish him as somewhat of an endearing guy in the beginning. Paul Rudd's character, whose storyline starts off the movie and ends it, is completely annoying. Why is it so difficult for script writers to understand that if you have a character you want the audience to like then you have to do something to establish him or her as somewhat of a good person early in the movie? Hell you can have the biggest jerk in the world, just throw in a little something that lets the audience in on the fact that somewhere in this guy there's a spark of goodness and they'll gladly bop along for the ride. Paul Rudd plays his character as a whiny loser from the first frame on. There's nothing charming about this guy. I hated his character, just wanted to scream "For the love of God, stop talking about yourself!" Courtney Love, who plays Paul's friend, really deserves some credit; at first I hated her, though she was giving a terrible performance, but then I realized the only reason I couldn't stand her was that she was exactly like a girl I used to know. So good acting kudos there to Courtney, but listen, the Rudd/Love relationship acts as the center piece to the movie. It opens and closes it. It's boring and, at times, annoying.

That's what the worst parts of 200 cigarettes are; completely banal characters who just love and love and love to talk about themselves. You want to know see young people talking about themselves that's interesting? Watch Kevin Smith's flicks. Anyone who reads this site knows that. You want to know how to make a person on screen explore who they are, really spend the whole movie looking into themselves, and make it beautiful? Go rent Bergman's Wild Strawberries (come on, it won't hurt you). You want to see how to make whining young people that are utterly boring? Go see 200 cigarettes. Some of the dialogue here is just so boring, so slow. This isn't nothing-going-on-but-we're-learning-about-the-characters type stuff. This is nothing-going-on-there-ain't-NOTHING-going on stuff.

Yet I hate saying that because, beneath the bad storylines, this really is a halfway decent movie. The worst storylines--Rudd and Courtney Love, the two amazingly annoying model types--drag down the halfway decent ones. Almost a third of the movie ticks away before anything interesting happens. Jay Mohr's storyline is the best in the film. He's good here and there's a wonderful little scene between him and the girl he goes out with for the night where he realizes that he might be a bit more to her than he had previously thought. The girl he is with in his storyline...I can't remember her name, all I know is that she's Goldie Hawn's daughter and that she's the real find of this flick. I'm going to fly with the intangibles now, but she gives a real sense of heart to the proceedings. She's funny and vulnerable, putting forth a dopey weakness that she turns on its head near the end of the movie. Martha Plimpton is also real good here. Christina Ricci, who I really like, has a storyline that's halfway interesting and sometimes funny, but something weird is going on with her performance. She just doesn't look comfortable up there. Casey Affleck, her companion in much of her storyline, is enjoyable.

SKIP THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HEAR A TRITE RANT If there's one thing I hate, that I vehemently detest with every molecule of my being, is "You talk, I talk" dialogue. One actor will say dialogue, there will be a miniscule yet entirely obvious and completely fabricated actor's pause (i.e. "I don't want (pause) your life"...shiver...oh Lord stop me from smashing my television) and then the other actor will chime in with his line. It's so unnatural. Why can't someone go back to Hawks and look at how he had the dialogue overlay? Perish the thought that people would actually speak over each other. In 200 Cigarettes there's about the best example I have ever had the displeasure of seeing of this abysmal banter. It's between Christinna Ricci's character and her friend. Now granted they're two New Yawk Long Islandas and New Yawkas kind of talk like that, but it's about the closest I've come to beating myself up in the theater just to dull the pain coming from the screen. It is excruciating.

SKIP THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER TRITE RANT These ramblings are coming from one of the biggest Ramones fans in the world (the nuts down in South America give me a run for my money) so I'll ask a question here of the director that 99% of you all ain't gonna give two shits about: it's new york city man, NEW YORK CITY, home of the RAMONES, so why in the hell did you pick one of their worst songs for the flick? Maybe they were a little past their first heyday in 81 but man, this was still THEIR city. As for the music on the whole, it would have been nice for this thing to dredge up some forgotten stuff from the early eighties. No, though, this in an MTV film, the stiff suits had soundtrack sales up front in their heads, so there's nothing here you won't hear in the KTEL catalogue. A bunch of rappers walk by, what are they listening to? Of course, Rappers Delight. You had the Phil Spector produced Ramones End of the Century come out in 1980, some great songs on that thing, you couldn't come up with one good one? Pathetic, just pathetic. And the punk band they have playing in the pseudo punk scene? Oh boy. So bad. If you're gonna get a famous old punk band for coolness sake, at least get one that still rocks a little bit. And yes, the slam dance scenes follow in the grand STUDIO movie tradition of slam dance scenes and are painfully bad, with the Ricci, Affleck and most of the rest doing this brain-damaged weird pogo shit, all the while wearing moronic grins. This could have been such a good soundtrack. Instead it sounds like soundtrack by exceedingly lame committee vote.

I have heard that this was the pet project of Risa Garcia, the director, for a long time. I wish I could chime in with an overly positive review of the movie, but I can't. This might be a case of someone getting too close to the material, not being able to step back and say, as objectively as possible, what does work and what does not. If the rest of the storylines had the strength of the Jay Mohr, Christina Ricci and Martha Plimpton narratives this would have been a genuinely fun film. Unfortunately the other characters here are a painful mish mash of grinding neurosis and agonizing banality. I just saw the thing a few hours ago and I can't remember a lot of the characters. The bad ones are just...blah. Fifty percent of the film is good, fifty percent is bad. Since these stories leisurely filter in and out, it leaves for an agonizingly up and down movie experience. Give credit to the director for stretching Ben Affleck's four minutes of screen time over an entire movie, though. Pray that the bad characters here, in the parallel dimension they must live in somewhere in time, get a bit of a life. I'm sure their friends are bored to tears.