Gigly - The Filthy Critic

This week:
Gigli

Filthy says:
"I'd rather get hit by a car."

Gigli is a very special movie. It deals sensitively with the hot-button topic on everyone's minds: should retards be kidnapped and held hostage for personal gain?

Larry: No!

Filthy: That's my retard cousin Larry. I got him out of the home to give my review a uniquely mentally-disabled perspective. What'd you think, Larry?

Larry: It's a bad movie. It made me cry.

Filthy: Larry, don't cry. You know that when you cry-

Larry: I know, you told me. When I cry an angel loses its wings and falls from the sky and hits a big sharp rock and dies.

Filthy: Exactly. And then God is mad at you.

Larry: But it was bad.

Filthy: Very bad. Unbelievably bad, and disturbing. Like finding blood in your stool.

Larry: Or your beanbag.

Filthy: Right. But, I thought since one of the main characters was retarded you might enjoy it.

Larry: He wasn't really retarded. He was only pretending.

Filthy: How can you tell?

Larry: I've got my retar-dar on.

Filthy: Gigli is an indigestible mess, like metal filings in spaghetti. Its gut-wrenchingly bad scenes and dialog stagger under inappropriate new-agey guitar noodling soundtrack shit. At every moment I asked myself "Why don't I leave?" I wanted to leave. Watching it was unpleasant and uncomfortable. Ben Affleck, in full-tilt pretty-boy mode, wearing lots of makeup, tries to play the superficial and smug Larry Gigli (pronounced bad fuk-eeng moo-vee), a Brooklyn-accented, pompadoured, leather-jacketed street thug who has a smirk for every situation and not much more. Despite the Brooklyn accent, the movie reveals that Affleck's character was born and raised in California. One of the movie's many mysteries that isn't worth exploring. Maybe Affleck really wanted to play a Jersey guy and nobody had the balls to say no.

Larry: He might be special.

Filthy: No, Affleck doesn't play the retarded character.

Larry: But he might be.

Filthy: I think you mean gay. Anyway, writer/director/hack/jackass/ninny Martin Brest kicks the movie off by inadequately showing us that Affleck is a fuckup mob strongman now assigned the job of kidnapping a federal prosecutor's retarded brother and holding him hostage until the prosecutor drops the charges against a mafia muckity-muck.

Larry: Don't forget the part where Mr. Affleck shoots himself in the nuts.

Filthy: He never did.

Larry: Okay, don't forget the part where I said I wished he did.

Filthy: That was every five minutes.

Larry: I wish he did... for reals.

Filthy: Affleck absconds from the retard home with the brother, played by newcomer Justin Bartha who will next be seen playing Screech in dramatic re-enactments of Saved by the Bell" on E!, in one of the movie's endless, pointless, tiresome scenes. Affleck brings Bartha home, where the kid livens things up with the classic "I've got Tourette's so I shout dirty words at random" brand of comedy.

Larry: Just like you.

Filthy: Larry? If you can't say anything nice, shut your stinking trap. So, when Bartha ain't acting retarded for laughs, or Affleck isn't reacting like he's about to slap the kid for a giggle, the kid shouts out "Fuck." Now that's movie magic. Into the story comes Jennifer Lopez, a lesbian mob contractor. Since Affleck is such a fuckup, his boss hires Lopez to oversee him and make sure he doesn't lose the kid.

Larry: And then the movie ends.

Filthy: Well, almost. The movie doesn't end, but it stops making any sense and becomes about how the two "lovable" thugs Affleck and Lopez neglect the retard. He overwhelms her lesbian urges with, holy shit, I have no idea how he did that, and they fall in love. They talk a lot. Using language simultaneously vulgar and trite. The scenes drag on forever and have the cutesy feel of someone talking loudly on a cell phone because she thinks everyone around her will be jealous.

Larry: I like when she's lying on that mat and whispers "pussy."

Filthy: That's the scene where Lopez gives the most squirm-inducing soliloquy since the Harelip told me how to trim corpse's nails. She dribbles purple prose about how vaginas look like lips and people kiss lips, ergo, lesbians are cool, all while doing stretching exercises. It's a couple scenes before she asks Affleck to go down on her by spreading her legs and saying "It's turkey time. Gobble, gobble."

Larry: And before he shoots himself in the nuts.

Filthy: Correct.

Larry: They talk too much.

Filthy: And they are too way pleased with themselves. Gigli took place in an airtight bubble. It's a hermetically-sealed lovefest by these people for themselves. Besides being the acting equivalent of a tw-by-four, Affleck never wipes that smirk off his face.

Larry: Until he's shot in the nuts.

Filthy: He isn't compelled to do more than act like a girl at the mall who sits by herself all day near Wetzel's Pretzels, flipping her hair without a single thought except, "I'm really pretty." Lopez matches him smirk for smirk. What they are is not America's sweethearts. They're the modern Dom Deluise and Burt Reynolds, circa the eighth Cannonball Run movie (Lopez is Deluise), so amused by their own cleverness and charm that they fail to realize they have neither. Lopez is the brains of the operation, but she's weighted down like a donkey carrying sandbags by the overwritten, cornball monologues she spouts that suggests writer Brest could be hoodwinked by a monkey in a red vest. Also, as the movie progresses, Affleck gets prettier and prettier. By the end, he's a drag queen with thin lips, overplucked eyebrows and caked in makeup.

Larry: Like a clown.

Filthy: Exactly. The movie is littered with lazy plot contrivances. The plot turns on the importance of this retarded kid. The job is to keep him under wraps. But Affleck takes him from his home in broad daylight with plenty of witnesses. The kid wants to go back home, yet Affleck puts him to bed unguarded in the front room of his apartment while he sleeps in the back. And when a cop (an obnoxious cameo by Christopher Walken) comes by looking for the retard, it startles Affleck into realizing he must be extra careful. So what does he immediately do? He takes the kid outside, drives around in a god damn convertible, then eats in an outdoor restaurant? What the fuck? Oh yeah, and if Affleck is such a screwup and Lopez is so reliable, why not just have her watch the kid? Why use Affleck at all? And again, why does he have a Brooklyn accent, hair and style.

Larry: Because he's a stone-cold fox.

Filthy: No he's not.

Larry: You tell People magazine that.

Filthy: There's also a running "gag" about how the retard likes being read to at bedtime. This is a character who knows how to dial Australian Weather Information but he can't read. Anyway, the supposed joke is that Affleck is such a lunkhead that he has no books in his entire apartment, so he resorts to reading product labels. Lopez is appalled, and yet, the movie shows her sitting in the other room reading a... book. Yep, she has a book and she won't share? What the fuck was writer/director Brest thinking? Probably not, "I'm lazy and sloppy."

Larry: I don't like kidnappers.

Filthy: Who does? And who roots for people who kidnap retards to fall in love? Their main heroic act is not cutting off Bartha's thumb. Wow! I think most of us would chop off a thumb at the first opportunity.

Larry: No, don't, okay?

Filthy: I won't. My point is that if unlikable people are going to do unlikable things, they better be entertaining about it, not just think they're being entertaining. This is bad, fucking cinema. I can't believe there isn't a single in Hollywood without the balls to tell shallow dullards Affleck and Lopez they aren't cute enough to float a turd. One Finger for the awful Gigli. It's the kind of movie that should embarrass its makers, but I'm sure they're too busy patting themselves on the back to bother.

Larry: Shoot the stone-cold fox in the nuts.

Filthy: Did you really find blood in your beanbag?

Larry: Not my beanbag.

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