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Particle Man takes a peek at WIREY SPINDELL
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Schaeffer's novel, which to date has gone unpublished (gee, wonder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.
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+ Expand All
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Just putting this on my 'avoid like the plague' list.
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A few years ago, when the rest of the multiplex was sold out, I was forced to see Eric Shaeffer's "brilliant" follow up to My Life's in Turnaround-IF LUCY FELL, wherein he proved his love to Sarah Jessica Parker by drinking her spit. How do people like this convince others to give them money to make movies that just HAVE TO lose money, when others with actual talent and skill have to wait tables in order to pay the rent? This sounds like another one of those horrible "independent" films where the director's "vision" is more important than unimportant things like plot, character, and entertainment value. The only bad thing about the recent popularity of the independent film movement is that for every "Pulp Fiction," we get ten "Slums of Beverly Hills."
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Along with the very cute, very watchable, above mentioned _If Lucy Fell_, Schaffer has given us _Fall_, an incredibly moving film about an average Joe in love with a Supermodel that really suprised me....it had some very sexy sex scenes (a rarity these days), and combined them with a poignancy almost rivaling that of Richard Linklater's _Before Sunrise_, a film I hold in very high regard. _Fall_ was never theatrically shown except at fests to my knowledge, but is available on tape, and is well worth the $3.50 or so. As for this new film, I'll probably check it out just because I know the guy has talent and so far hasn't turned out a remotely sucky film.
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Scab-eating, that is, in the 1970 film Even Dwarfs Started Small by Werner Herzog. The strangest film I think I've ever seen.
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...to see Wirey Spindell since, perhaps, May of 1999. I wondered onto this site hoping to read that the film had been picked up for distribution so I'd know the release date. Obviously, to no avail!
I've enjoyed Eric's body of work since "My Life's In A Turnaround". I don't, however, think that it will be his best body of work in the long run. I thouroughly enjoyed "Fall" and have managed to watch it more than once (not something I do very often).
I think, as a whole, men don't care for his films because he has this uncanny ability to write a supermodel (as his lover) into each of his films. Perhaps they must be a tad jealous that they didn't think of such a brilliant idea first.
...Alas, I still sit here waiting....
Sioux :) -
To anyone that cares, the film will be out on video and DVD at the end of September. As you can probably imagine from the posted reviews, the film went nowhere theatrically.
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