director
James Cox
screenwriter
Scott Rosenberg
producers
Guy Riedel
Scott Rosenberg
cinematographers
Michel Amathieu
Mauro Fiore
music
some guy from the Black Crowes
editor
Craig Wood
cast
Jared Leto (Jack Hayes)
Jake Gyllenhaal (Pilot Kelson)
Selma Blair (Cassie)
John C. McGinley (Johnny the Fox)
Jeremy Piven (Scawldy)
Kimberley Kates (Jilly Miranda)
Mark Rolston (Burt Miranda)
Arden Myrin (Lucy)
Elenore Hendricks (Amy Barnes)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 97m
u.s.
release: 3/26/02
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
q&a home
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A pretty awful Tarantino-esque
road movie about seven years too late.
Let's hear
the plot, assuming there is one.
Not a safe assumption. It's
April 1994, for no particular reason except that a Seattle vigil
for the recently-deceased Kurt Cobain figures in the journey.
Pool cleaner Jared Leto gets caught boinking a married woman.
Said woman's husband sends goons after Leto to break his feet.
Leto takes off with lifelong stoner buddy Jake Gyllenhaal for,
yep, Seattle. Along the way they pick up drifter Selma Blair.
So did your
admiration for Gyllenhaal and Blair compensate for your knee-jerk
aversion to Jared Leto?
Not really. All three of them
are ill-served here, though Leto plays on the level of the material
and doesn't come off too horribly. For the most part, I just
wished I were watching Jake and Selma in a better film.
What's wrong
with the movie?
What isn't? It's aggressively
overdirected, with lots of "Look how cool this angle is"
and "See how tricky my editing is." Scripter Scott
Rosenberg, also credited as a producer, has seen better days.
It's his dialogue that keeps the proceedings marginally amusing,
but the movie is fundamentally aimless, and the actors embody
quirks, not characters. For instance, the notion of giving a
character a goofy name with a backstory (Gyllenhaal's character
is named Pilot because his mom boffed a pilot but never learned
his name) was lame when they did it in another wannabe-Quentin
road movie, Feeling
Minnesota.
Any other
reason to sit through this aside from Blair and Gyllenhaal?
John C. McGinley has a couple
of decent moments as Johnny the Fox, a dreadlocked drug dealer
the guys befriend. Jeremy Piven, as usual, rocks the house as
another dealer; he barges into the movie, trashes the place,
and exits shrieking with laughter. (He has a later, brief scene,
but Piven fans will fixate on his longer scene.) Yet even Piven
is sabotaged by fancy editing (jump-cuts, etc.) that draws your
attention to the "directing" and away from his frenzied
performance -- his is the sort of scenery-chewing turn that needs
to play out in long takes, so that he can set his own gonzo rhythm.
Frances Sternhagen, always welcome, appears in the movie's most
pointless passage, in which the trio go to see "The Boy"
-- a congenitally deformed guy Gyllenhaal becomes obsessed with.
Is there
really any justification for setting this in the days after Cobain's
suicide?
Not especially. I think it's
still a bit early for 1994 nostalgia movies, and when you think
of what other
movies
came out that same year that just kick this film's ass and take
its bike...
Did the
movie suffer in comparison with the three Tarantino movies that
happened to come out on DVD around the same time you rented this?
Drastically. And it even sucks
compared to the ones he didn't direct; look at True
Romance, which is pretty much as aimless as this movie
yet has no shortage of great scenes and juicy confrontations
for actors to dig into and for viewers to talk about for years.
Nobody will be talking about Highway for years, of that
I'm quite sure. The difference between real Tarantino and faux-Tarantino
like this is the difference between genuine, balls-out, sharply
written fun and a pallid, soulless imitation of same.
Toss this one in the same shitcan as 2
Days in the Valley and The
Big Hit.
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