rien
de nouveau:
killing zoe
clerks |
director/screenwriter
Roger Avary
producer
Samuel Hadida
cinematographer
Tom Richmond
music
tomandandy
editor
Kathryn Himoff
cast
Eric Stoltz (Zed)
Julie Delpy (Zoe)
Jean-Hugues Anglade (Eric)
Tai Thai (Francois)
Gary Kemp (Oliver)
Kario Salem (Jean)
Bruce Ramsay (Ricardo)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 98m
u.s.
release: September
1994
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other roger
avary films
reviewed on this website:
- the
rules of attraction
other kevin
smith films
reviewed on this website:
- chasing
amy
- dogma
- jay
& silent bob strike back
- jersey
girl
- mallrats
|
You have to feel sorry for
Roger Avary. He started out as a clerk at the now-famous Video
Archives in California, working with (and befriending) the now-famous
Quentin Tarantino. The two film geeks talked movies and watched
cheesy videos until dawn. And when they weren't renting or arguing
about movies, they wrote their own: Avary, it's been reported,
made uncredited contributions to Tarantino's scripts for Reservoir
Dogs, True
Romance, and Natural
Born Killers, and he has a co-story credit on Pulp Fiction.
This has undeniably been the year of Quentin; roughly 5,000 magazine
articles have made the same points about how omnivorously film-literate
Tarantino is, how fond he is of movie board games, ad nauseum.
Quentinmania has eclipsed Avary's directorial debut, Killing
Zoe, which has been noticed, if at all, in terms of its being
"a movie by Quentin's pal." (Tarantino served as an
executive producer on the film.) Avary must fear that no matter
what he does, he'll forever work under Quentin's long, lanky
shadow. Well, if he goes on making stupidly violent clinkers
like Killing Zoe, he'll deserve no better fate.
Let me be clear: I am not slamming this Roger Avary film for
not being a Quentin Tarantino film. I am slamming it for not
being a good Roger Avary film. Killing Zoe has some tense,
funny moments, but overall this is -- sorry -- the sort of nihilistic
bloodfest Tarantino satirizes so suavely. Sitting through the
moribund Boxing Helena (another bad gerund film!), the
directorial debut of Jennifer Chambers Lynch, I asked myself
whether I was being unfair to her by holding her movie to the
high standards set by her father, David. But then I thought:
Nah, the movie sucks by any standard. Same with Killing Zoe.
The characters have no intrinsic interest, no life, nothing to
set them apart except a few clumsy pop-culture references. The
plot -- a pack of internationally mixed thieves pull a bank heist
-- is just a gory hipster rewrite of Dog Day Afternoon
(whatever can go wrong does); it's Reservoir Dog Day Afternoon.
The star, Eric Stoltz (as a jaded safecracker), should really
come up with a new look; he's had the same grunge-Christ hairdo
and goatee for several movies now. And he's been giving pretty
much the same nasal, neurotic performance, making me forget how
appealing he was in The Waterdance and Mask and
(I'm not kidding) The Fly II. Stoltz is Zed (wasn't that
the name of one of the hillbilly rapists in Pulp Fiction?
Where's Maynard?), a slacker who lived in Paris as a child. His
boyhood pal Eric (Jean-Hugues Anglade) has been planning a bank
heist, and he wants Zed in on it. The night before the heist,
Eric and his cretinous buddies treat Zed to a heroin-fueled paint-Paris-red
session. Then the heavily armed thieves descend on the bank,
and it's Roger Avary's turn to paint Paris, or at least every
available surface, blood-red. Killing Zoe is big on giggly
sadism disguised as a moralistic comment on amorality; it's everything
Reservoir Dogs was unfairly accused of being. We're meant
to experience the violence through Zed's dazed, passive eyes,
but since we feel superior to Zed early on -- we judge him by
the idiotic company he keeps -- the movie's viewpoint is thrown
out of whack.
The movie is also, not coincidentally, boring. Killing Zoe
grinds forward to its predetermined splattery conclusion. We
don't care about anyone in the movie, not even the titular Zoe
(Julie Delpy), a student/prostitute who services Zed in the first
reel and then, improbably, turns up later as a teller in the
bank. (I'm always bumping into students/prostitutes/bank tellers.)
I trust I will ruin nobody's experience of the film by revealing
that Zoe is not killed. Just about everyone else is, though.
The title isn't just misleading, it's dumb: It looks as if the
title was originally Killing Zone and someone left off
the 'n'. (The meaning of Zoe as a name is "life," so,
like, the movie is about killing life, y'know? Heavy,
man. Very French.)
Is there nothing enjoyable in this ugly, scattershot movie? Jean-Hugues
Anglade puts a mean, witty spin on his lines, but in no time
flat I got sick of looking at him and his gang of scuzzy bohemians.
Avary stages a long, woozy Paris-nightlife sequence, with Zed
reacting badly to various drugs (it's like an outtake from Sprockets),
and you can't tell what Avary is doing; on some level, he seems
to appreciate these drugged-out jerks. They do come to a bad
end, but it's a movie-ish bad end, a Pacino-Scarface bad
end -- a blaze-of-glory bad end, in which Eric, the lead sociopath,
takes dozens of explosive bullet hits and then slithers to the
floor in romantic slow-mo. Killing Zoe is a pointless,
derivative exercise in mayhem for its own sake. I have a friend
who hates movie violence, who told me, shuddering, that an old
boyfriend of hers had raved about Reservoir Dogs. Based
on his description of it, she's immovably convinced (without
having seen it) of its thuggish, unredeemed brutality. And what
I wonder now is whether her ex was actually talking about Killing
Zoe.
 The disaffected
generation that Avary is so eagerly courting is much more likely
to respond to Clerks, a $27,000 first effort by the 24-year-old
New Jersey filmmaker Kevin Smith. "Write what you know,"
they say, and Smith paid his dues working in a convenience store
while making this movie set mostly in a convenience store. Dante
(Brian O'Halloran) toils at the Quik-Mart; his buddy Randal (Jeff
Anderson) semi-works nearby at a chintzy video store. The movie
isn't really about anything but these two slackers passing the
time on a particularly bad day, but Smith has a remarkable ear
for stylized, articulate dialogue -- it's the grunge version
of staircase wit, and Smith gives his characters the profane,
vicious comebacks we wish we had the presence of mind (and freedom)
to come up with. (Sometimes the comebacks are very profane:
the movie, which has no sex or violence, narrowly avoided an
NC-17 rating for its language alone.) Dante, who's kind of an
Everyslacker, is a decent guy afraid to make a decisive move
in his life; he's also torn between his duplicitous ex-girlfriend
Caitlin (Lisa Spoonauer) and his current girlfriend Veronica
(Marilyn Ghighliotti), who appalls Dante when he asks her to
be honest about her sexual past -- and she is. (Asking about
a girlfriend's past bedmates is the guy equivalent of a woman's
asking "Do you think I'm fat?") Randal, a cheerfully
nihilistic slacker, tells Dante to "shit or get off the
pot," which is the movie's closest thing to a message --
and what lifts it out of the usual self-coddling whininess of
Gen-X pop. Clerks doesn't feel as if it's trying too hard,
and that's its major charm.
|
