The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Gigli. This might need no introduction, but, fuck it, I'm going to give this one anyway. So, imagine it's 2003 and you're a young boy with a frustrating life: you're being bullied by your classmates and the teachers don't give a shit. So, as a result, you find yourself vacillating between hating yourself and the other kids in your life. And maybe you're starting to become aware of politics, and you've noticed that the Bush administration has used 9/11 as an excuse to stop giving a shit about the constututional rights that they were supposed to uphold, so you find yourself hating your country. And maybe you've started to discover music and found that, while, unbeknownst to you, artists like Wilco, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flaming Lips, Radiohead, The White Stripes, Avalanches, System of a Down, and Sigur Ros are reaching artistic peaks, your usual channels ignore them entirely and spoon-feed you Britney, Christina, NSYNC, the Backstreet Boys, and whatever artists happen to have even less substance than them that the powers that be decide kids should listen to, so you hate modern music. And then, something happens that makes you say "I fucking hate the human race."

The media lionises idiots, from the President to Paris Hilton, and in between all this, you keep hearing about Bennifer: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez are dating, and for whatever reason, the media decides that they want to tell you about EVERYTHING they've been doing together, even though, for the life of you, 17 years later, you cannot remember anything they actually did together. But nonetheless, it's inescapable, people keep talking about it, and eventually, it takes almost half a decade before you can hear either of their names without wanting to destroy the human race, and it only takes until about August 2003 for you to figure out that people are getting sick of it. How? Well, it turns out that they started dating on the set of a movie, called Gigli. The studio highers-up noticed that the two stars have been getting a lot of publicity, and decide to recut it to focus on the romance. By the time it gets released, people start to stay away from the film in droves, due at least to all the publicity the two have been getting, and the fact that the reviews have been horrible leads to it being branded one of the worst films of all time. So, hindsight being 20/20, in the year 2020, is there more to the hype beyond "Boy Meets Girl, Boy and Girl fall in love, get a shitton of tabloid publicity, make stinkbomb movie, and eventually have their relationship implode under all the pressure?" (Just as a refresher, I checked the Wikipedia pages for both Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. This is pretty much all there was to it.)

The movie itself:

• So, Jennifer Lopez plays a lesbian assassin for the Mafia. Problem: the Mafia is a very ethnocentric organisation. It's more inclusive than it had been, but that only means you have to have a mother who's full-blooded Italian and an Italian last name to actually be in the Mafia. And, apparently, while the Italian Mafia only started to accept gay people LAST MONTH, I can't be sure that that's going to apply to the American version, especially not in 2003. And I'm not even sure that they'd accept female assassins. This MIGHT be more acceptable if they made clear that she was a freelancer, like Richard Kuklinski, but they don't. 
  
• Ben Affleck's performance is basically his trying to act like he's auditioning for The Sopranos and he looks like he's clearly out of his element, although it appears he's trying, at least. His opening scene has him philosophising about fuck if I know to a laundromat owner he's got stuck in a dryer to torture him. This can't be an efficient means of torture.
  
• And, in addition, we've got a Justin Bartha playing a mentally retarded guy, named Brian, whose disability seems ludicrously inconsistent. One minute he's acting like Rain Man, the next, he's spouting off long strings of obscenities, and then, he's more what Robert Downey Jr. would call:
  
  
  At least Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man was consistent.
  
• I legitimately did not expect Jennifer Lopez' character to just pop into the film with ZERO explanation whatsoever. He just takes Brian to his apartment and she just shows up on his doorstep and starts trying to act like she's supposed to take care of him. Apparently, it becomes clear that they decided he's not fit to take on the job alone (of taking care of Brian) and they decide to let her into the act after the deed is done. The fuck didn't they let him know about this later?
  
• So, Ben Affleck is such a philistine that he doesn't read. And apparently, when Brian tells him to read, he has to resort to reading the label of a tabasco sauce bottle. This is supposed to be touching somehow.
  
• And, this could just be me, but somehow, I think Jennifer Lopez is very bad at pretending to be a lesbian. Even after she explains to Gigli that she's a lesbian, she still finds the time to cocktease him.
  
• Holy Shit, I haven't thought about Sheep in the Big City in YEARS.
  
• Not since that flower-vomiting kid in the wifebeater in Kiara the Brave has a character just showed up for no reason to create such a hilariously pointless scene in a movie. Christopher Walken plays a detective trying to ferret out the truth about what happened with Brian (since he's apparently a Federal Prosecutor's brother and a bargaining chip.) He shows up to the apartment and, you'd think he'd try to slowly wheedle out the information he needs to know, maybe in a couple scenes throughout the film. Instead, he does this, leaves, and never appears again;
  
  
  
  It's just so out of nowhere that many who've seen it suggest that it wasn't even in the script; Walken just decided he craves pie and decides to ramble on about it on the spot. And then he left the set, never to be seen again until this is .
• So, you don't want to draw attention to yourself, so you yell at a gang to turn their  music down and have J-Lo expain about how to use martial arts to gouge out people's eyeballs so hard you can forget everything they've ever seen. I'm not sure if that's even possible, especially since Kai Toi Mai doesn't seem to exist outside of the movie, but that seems highly counter-productive.
  
• And all of a sudden, she's obsessed with Chinese philosophy.
  
• So, we have a romance movie where the most explicit ass shots involve Ben Affleck giving his mother insulin shots on her whale-tailed ass. And you swear she's trying to come on to J-Lo. 
  
  
• It's kinda fucking cringeworthy hearing Gigli talk about lesbians about how they need cock, but I'm willing to give it a bit of benefit of the doubt. When this movie was being filmed, and until just over a month before its release, 14 out of America's 50 states still had laws criminalising homosexuality. And Ben Affleck's character is a Mafiosi still given to traditional ideals of what sexuality should mean, so it's still consistent with his deeply flawed character. I'm willing to put this down to an understandable, if cringey and depressing, Values Dissonance.
  
• So, why does it take over half the movie before they have any idea of what they're supposed to do with Brian?
  
• Good Buttery God, So, J-Lo's Ex-GF comes into the apartment, demands Ben Affleck leave his own apartment so she can stalk her on her own terms, and even attempts to slit her own wrists. I thought I was DONE with stupid lesbian drama involving horrible people when I stopped watching The L Word... which is... of COURSE it's being rebooted. Of COURSE.
  
• "[The Girls on Baywatch] Make My Penis Sneeze." Oh, my fucking god, this is pure cringe. And he says "God Bless You" when he jizzes his pants. And the background music implies this is supposed to be a touching scene. You know, the sad thing is this isn't even the worst sex talk in the movie. That comes when she decides to take a walk on the straight side and says this:
  
  
  Maybe if it was set up so it isn't totally ridiculous, like if he compared the pussy to a turkey dinner somehow, this might be less dumb, and also, if the Sopranos is right about this, I think there's a taboo on Cunnilingus in the Mafia. And the sex scene afterward is boring as shit. I still stand by my remark that it was steamier when Ben Affleck shot insulin into his mother's ass.
• Also, it turns out that there was some talk of an earlier cut (which may or may not have been 160 minutes long if IMDB is accurate). Here's what someone who actually saw an earlier version said about it.
  
  

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  "...Gigli plays in theatres a much different film than it once was. Since it looks increasingly unlikely Martin Brest's original Gigli will ever see the light of day again, I feel a need to describe the differences in this original version to the best of my admittedly foggy memory (after all, it has been nearly a year since I saw this original version) to prove that, if nothing else, the film originally added up to something. That said, there isn't too much in the way of concrete differences for most of either version's run time. Although some scenes (such as the detour to Larry's mother's house) originally lasted longer, the film plays more or less the same up to Al Pacino's cameo as mob boss Starkman, with the core trio of Larry, Ricki and Brian coming together in the exact same way, and Larry and Ricki sparring until she boldly declares "it's turkey time." One subtle adjustment, however, makes a difference. In the release version, the first real indication that Larry has any inclination toward leaving the criminal life behind comes late in the film, in a scene where he and Ricki talk in his car the morning after they consummate and right before the meeting with Starkman. Larry tells Ricki about his dream of finding "a clean place," and this revelation seems to come a bit out of nowhere, almost as a last-minute twist to send Larry on the road to Hollywoodized redemption. In the original cut, however, Larry's desire to leave the mob grind is established far earlier and much clearly, mere moments after the opening scene in the laundromat; we see Larry close his eyes and visualize this "clean place"--shown on screen as a pristine tropical beach overlooking an impossibly clear ocean. So when he finally makes mention of the "clean place" to Ricki, the audience knows exactly what he's talking about. Also, this once-recurring thread gives Larry a stronger link to Brian, as they are both--though Larry fails to recognize it--in a sense searching for "The Baywatch," thus turning what may seem like a cheap TV/pop culture reference into something a little more meaningful. Not long after the scene with Starkman comes the scene with Larry, Ricki and Brian driving by the Baywatch, which, much to Brian's delight, is "open"--and after this point the two Giglis veer in wildly different directions. In the release version, the three then stop at the beach; Larry makes arrangements to return Brian home; Brian joins some sort of music video shoot on the beach and meets the Aussie girl of his dreams; Larry lets Ricki take his car to escape to parts unknown--only to have her return and pick him up, and the two leave Los Angeles and a life of crime. Fade out; credits. While a beach-set scene also capped off the first version of Gigli, there was still a good deal of movie left to go at this point, during which a number of the plot and character points left dangling in the release cut are resolved. A number of points are resolved in a scene immediately after this first pass by the Baywatch. Larry pulls the car over by the side of a road, and Ricki finally comes clean to Larry, no doubt due to the violent scene at Starkman's place. She reveals that her real name is Rochelle, and she actually isn't a contractor--which then follows through on a number of points made earlier in the film: (1) during their first meet, Larry tells her that he hadn't seen her around before and didn't look like a contractor; and (2) Ricki's insistence on talking her way out of sticky situations, namely the confrontation with thugs at the fast food stand and the meeting at Starkman's. Ricki goes on to reveal that the actual hitwoman was her girlfriend Robin, whose single-scene appearance barging into Larry's apartment and slashing her wrists is rather bewildering without this payoff. She and Robin had some relationship problems, and as an as escape Rochelle tried to taste what Robin's life was like, and hence her showing up on Larry's doorstep. Since she was role playing, Ricki's "fence-jumping" with Larry makes more sense, as perhaps she did it because it was something she thought Robin would do; even "turkey time" makes more sense, as it was perhaps Rochelle's misbegotten idea of "tough" speak. But now having had her taste and then some after seeing Starkman kill Larry's higher-up Louis right in front of them, Rochelle tries to get Larry to pick up and leave with her. He declines, and so Rochelle takes her things and leaves him and Brian in the car. Rochelle is never again seen or heard from for the rest of the film; at the end there's no friendly reunion, let alone a lovey-dovey one. Not only does the loss of this scene harm the film from a basic story perspective, it also does a disservice to Lopez's performance. The entire crux of the character is in this scene, and, indeed, it is Lopez's finest moment in the film. With its deletion, what's left is a performance that can understandably be criticized as being an overly soft, less-than-convincing portrayal of a mob enforcer--because, after all, Ricki was originally conceived and performed as never being an actual one. With Ricki/Rochelle gone, Larry decides to do the right thing and turn Brian in to Christopher Walken's cop character, Jacobellis, whose role was substantially larger than the cameo that now remains. The two meet up in a warehouse, where Jacobellis, in another showy Walken speech, reveals that he has been working for Starkman all along--thus showing to Larry that even the apparent good guys in this world are also corrupt. There's gunplay, and Larry ends up shooting Jacobellis dead. However, Larry catches a bullet himself, square in the gut. A visibly shaken Brian sees his wound--"You're bleeding, Larry," he matter-of-factly states in a noticeably more somber tone--but Larry insists that he's fine. Slowly bleeding to death, Larry drives Brian all the way back to the Baywatch; there's a certain bittersweetness as Brian's excitement contrasts against Larry's dying selflessness, and the rough cut's temp score (Hans Zimmer's familiar Gladiator music) effectively enhanced the mood. Much of what follows then progresses as seen in the release version: Larry urges Brian on to join the dancers on the beach; Brian meets the Australian girl. However, Larry's reaction shots are completely different; instead of being alive and upright, nodding along, Larry is lying on the sand, bleeding, dying, which then makes Brian's shyness and uncertain looks all the more understandable. The music (in the rough cut, the song was "Let's Get Loud," a track from Lopez's first album) and dancing starts and, as in the release version, the action eventually goes into slow motion. But then we end on Larry's face, as he looks to the ocean, which we see is the spitting image of his fantasy "clean place"--he's finally found it, and what led him there was, ironically, the life path he was hoping to escape."

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  I'm intrigued by the movie described here, and, while I'm fairly certain it would still be a crappy movie, it would still be a far more cohesive one. Christ, the revelation that Ricki isn't actually a Mafia hitwoman actually goes a little way in justifying her shitty performance and even that "turkey time" shit gets explained as a piss-poor attempt at tough-guy talk. Christ, as a result, there's at least two characters who get a single scene in the theatrical cut who turn out to actually have importance to the plot. Then again, I'm not sure I could handle a 160-minute version of Gigli.
  
• So Al Pacino's in this movie, he kills a guy for reacting when he reacts to his asking if he'd like to go to Medical School. and what the fuck is going on, anymore? To be fair, eventually, he eventually reveals why he was even in the movie: to explain how, well, retarded the whole plan was: extorting a federal prosecutor to try and get them quiet is a really idiotic idea.
  
• And after that, it all ends pointless as shit, and they all decide to go to the beach (which Brian's been calling "The Baywatch" all movie and Ben Affleck only now figures out what he was talking about), where they're filming a music video (you'd think this would actually be the point where he says "that's why the Baywatch was closed; they need their privacy") and he even meets the Australian girl (apparently) he racked up the phone bill calling so he could hear her speak about the weather (don't ask.)
  

Well, there were occasional elements of a good film in here, and it played a good role in popping the Bennifer bubble and making it less inescapable. And, remarkably, in an interview with Playboy, Ben Affleck said he learned to direct on the set of Gigli (surprisingly, not on Good Will Hunting, or Mallrats, or even [i]I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney[/i], a short film he actually directed over a decade before Gigli). So, if you liked Argo, you apparently have Gigli to thank for that.