DAMN YOU EBERT! I DON’T WANT ANY OF THE GALLO KOOL-AID

Does anyone know how Greencine Daily does it? Seriously. I mean, it would take me a month to read all the stuff editor David Hudson links to in half-a-week. Does he have a whole room set-up, A Clockwork Orange-style, with little slaves forced to read all these articles projected onto big monitors? Their eyelids propped open, forced to stare at free weeklies from around the country and dry film journals with few, if any, actual pictures? The Greencine scientist hydrating their eyes with little droppers?

Whatever the case, if you don’t check out Greencine daily (see what I did there? Oh yeah!), you should. Just today, it brought to my attention Roger Ebert’s article from this past Sunday’s Sun Times regarding his meeting Vincent Gallo and they’re conversation about The Brown Bunny. (And I realize, Ebert isn’t exactly obscure.)

Now I’ve made no secret for my dislike of Gallo’s work nor my annoyance with this film. But it would also be wrong to characterize my critique of The Brown Bunny as a complete pan. In fact, as I said in my original comments, I think there’s a very interesting short film tucked away at the end, but the subtext of what I saw in Gallo’s overall movie was quite disturbing, and annoying, to me.

I’ve been waiting to hear from Gallo fans (especially those who loved his first film) how they felt about this one. I was particularly interested in reading Ebert’s take on the final shorter edit of The Brown Bunny since he was a huge fan of Buffalo ’66 before notoriously saying that a video of his colonoscopy would be more entertaining than the Cannes screening he saw of Gallo’s latest.

Meanwhile, Uncle Grambo and Karen Cinecultist actually paid money to hear the man speak at two different venues and both came away from their individual experience in awe of his sincerity and personality. Well, I didn’t buy it, but I also didn’t get a chance to hear him. However, I was really happy to see Ebert transcribe much of his dialogue with Gallo, because I’ll admit that even cynical little me could read in his words that very quality which must come across when he speaks to an audience. It doesn’t make me like his films any better, but it does help me understand where he (at least thinks) he’s coming from.

While Ebert’s actual review doesn’t pop-up until this Friday, he indicates in the story that he at least enjoys this version of the film, certainly much more than the one he saw at Cannes. It makes me wonder if I would have appreciated it more had I been subjected to the extra 26 minutes of boredom seen at the 2003 film festival. I’ve been reading various reviews, and as expected, they’ve run the gamut from biting criticism to reverential praise. But to my mind, the overly positive reviews have still lacked any commentary that explains what about this movie works; or, more importantly to my personal viewpoint, why my reading of his self-aggrandizing isn’t as annoying to others as it is to me. I’m not sure how I feel about the venerated J. Hoberman’s review in the Village Voice. It’s almost as if Hoberman is so struck by what works in the movie (such as the early scene with Daisy’s parents) that the rest of the filler doesn’t matter. He calls Gallo’s “mysterious appeal for women” a curse on “the Vincent” character – the persona at the center of both of Gallo’s films. But Hoberman, like Ebert, is also seeing the film for a second time, in a newer, cleaner, shorter version. You cut 26 minutes out of any rough cut, and you’re going to have a dramatically different, and 8-out-of-10 times probably better, film. (Of course, I’m generalizing here so back off.) Is the movie really that much better, or is it just that much easier to watch, with an ending that actually works as opposed to one that was tacked on and, according to those who saw it, simply painful.

So Hoberman didn’t convince me of much, but Ebert has a comment in his story that intrigued me. Near the end of the article while discussing how Gallo is actually insecure and unhappy about his looks, Ebert writes near the end of his article, “His comment provided me with an insight into his character in The Brown Bunny, a lonely wanderer whose life traverses a great emptiness punctuated by unsuccessful, incomplete or imaginary respites with women.” (Emphasis is mine.)

Those three words present a slightly more interesting read of both of Gallo’s films, especially this new one. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not suddenly jumping on the bandwagon, but taking the entirety, or at least the first hour’s journey, of The Brown Bunny as one long daydream, especially when combining it with the film’s third act, at least makes a little bit of sense. Looking at his meetings with the three women on the road as “incomplete” rather than conquests that don’t match-up with his ideal is also an interesting perspective and one that actually might even justify some of the road scenes, although still not to the overly long degree to which they currently exist.

I still stand behind my original reaction to the film, but I also look forward to reading Ebert’s more detailed critique because for the first time in any discussion about the films of Vincent Gallo, he said something that actually makes sense and potentially carries some weight … even if I disagree with it.