Body Shots

by D.K. Holm
11/99

ome movies slip through the cracks. And in this commercial era of superwide releases followed by the quick retraction of films that fail to "perform," the chances of later catching up with a difficult or oddball film in an actual movie theater become slimmer.

Such a film is BodyShots. I'm not even sure that I would recommend it to very many people, as ultimately it's not a very good movie. It's indecision about what to name itself—variously it's been called Last Night, The Night Before, and most disastrously of all Jello Shots, this last one inspiring an injunction from the Jello corporation, according to JoBlo's Movie Emporium, even though it accurately describes an important element of the movie —is a measure of a certain indecisiveness about what the film wants to say about society and the two Los Angeles quartets of young professionals whose intersections create the humor and the drama.

Director Michael Cristofer ( the writer of Gia, and Falling in Love, among others), and credited screenwriter David McKenna ( American History X), have taken two halves of a deck of cards and shuffled them together. The male half of this deck consists of four young men, including two lawyers and a football player, who are meeting up with four young women in a big disco somewhere in Los Angeles. The relationships are fairly complicated, and, though meant to form the foundation for their reactions to what happens later, really only serve to distract the first-time viewer from what the film is really about. One of the girls (Emily Procter) works in the club, where she and about 20 other girls in a similar costume of military caps and red patent leather boots, march through the crowd and, enabling an excess of boozing, pass out shots of alcohol suffused into clumps of Jello. Meanwhile, the athlete (Jerry O'Connell) picks up one of the other girls (Tara Reed), essentially stealing her away from the lonely, yearning loser nice guy fellow who has fallen in love with her. He slakes his frustration by have sex with the most mousy (Sybil Temchen) of the four girls (deflowering her, according to some reviews) in the parking lot outside. There is a lot of sex in this film. The most alternative sex is the domination - dildo rape that Miss Procter, the most on top of it of the four girls, performs on Ron Livingston, the most selfish, dense, and nerdy of the four guys—and finally the one who is ends up the most satisfied.

The movie is mostly a lengthy and dull set up for a brief and highly focused payoff. Another bad idea was to intersperse interviews with the characters as if a documentary crew were following them around a là Real Life, and recording their stumbling thoughts on contemporary relationships (actually it's more like Real Sex 12). This straining toward internal commentary (unnecessary), irony (predictable), and jazziness (within an already visually lively context), really just fills up time that could be better spent clarifying relationships.

Besides, none of these characters are all that appealing, or at least are allowed to win us over. They are all "California types," sure to repel most viewers as shallow and overpaid. Amanda Peet, a gaunt woman with frightening teeth, especially comes across as shrill and unfair in the opening sequence where she turns on the man she has ended up with in a manner that the audience can only view as clearly unfair. The nice girl (Miss Temchen) is the most affecting, and at the end she sees the man she made love to in a parking lot rush to the aid of a woman who doesn't even really like him. It's a touching moment, but also a deeply manipulative one.

ut as I was watching the film I suddenly realized that what at first seemed to be a mistake—the fact that Miss Procter and Miss Reid look almost identical—was in fact cunningly pre-planned. Miss Reid's character says she is raped by the athlete who drags her out of the bar. He says it was consensual, and that she got mad when he called her Whitney instead of Sara (surely a common mistake in California). The movie that was about dissipation, a relatively unfunny Go and Swingers, suddenly turns into a discourse on date rape and the media. It also turns suddenly prudish. Miss Procter, who has just spent the night handcuffing and dominating a man she barely knew, the next morning is lecturing Miss Temchen that walking around a bar with a full bottle of wine in her hand is "unattractive." Nevertheless, there was something interesting going on here all of a sudden, and though the movie doesn't take sides as to which of the two rape claimants is correct, there are clues scattered throughout the movie as to what really happened.

BodyShots is ambitious in its pedestrianism. It dares to be highly critical of the generation that is its target market. It proves to be much more planned out and cunning than it at first appears. I suppose that none of this really makes BodyShots sound more interesting. But then, within this context of quickly withdrawn "failures," few people even have the chance to give it a shot.

—D.K. Holm

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