FilmFemme

I’ve gotten to the point in my tenure as a Netflix customer (I like how they call it “member” like it’s exclusive) where movies will show up in my queue and I will have no idea what my thought process was when I decided to add them.  Such was the case when Overnight showed up in my mailbox last week.  But, I don’t have cable and I’m too broke to go to bars, so I watched it.  Overnight is basically a documentary about any and every asshole aspiring screenwriter that you have ever met.  Now, there are plenty of perfectly nice aspiring screenwriters, but if you have met one of these asshole ones, you know who I am talking about.  Overnight follows one Troy Duffy beginning as his script for The Boondock Saints is bought by Harvey Weinstein with Duffy attached to direct with a $15 million budget.  Duffy dismisses the cynical naysayers (e.g., realists) that warn him it could all go to shit tomorrow.  He knows that won’t happen to him because HIS SCRIPT IS SO AWESOME AND HE IS SO AWESOME AND FUCK EVERYBODY THIS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH LUCK HE IS AWESOME.

Then everything goes to shit, he takes the script somewhere else for less than half the budget, signs away his rights to DVD profits and makes The Boondock Saints, which I watched on Saturday.

Overnight is a pretty decent documentary. At the very least, it does a good job conveying Duffy’s brand of assholery which I have been in the vicinity of a few times in my life.  So after watching it, and considering I knew people who counted it among their favorites  (e.g., my old roommate who in retrospect I like well enough but whose opinion on film I never really respected in the first place) I figured I should maybe see The Boondock Saints, so I bumped it to the top of my queue.

IT IS FUCKING AWFUL.  It is corny.  It is cliche.  And the writing.  The By Troy Duffy script that Harvey Weinstein took an interest in at some point (probably while he was drunk) is the worst part of the whole mess.  This movie sucks.  It wants to be Pulp Fiction so badly, but it has none of the wit or attention to things like, you know, character or production design or, like, making sense.  Sources (the internet?) tell me that this movie reached some kind of cult status on DVD.  That is something I cannot understand AT ALL.  It’s not good.  It is NOT A GOOD MOVIE.  This is not a matter of opinion.  This is not because I was in a bad mood when I saw it.  I was eating cheese and getting high: I was in a great mood.  A wonderful popcorn action movie mood.  But this movie sucks.  It sucks so bad.  And it wasn’t bad because I had already seen Overnight, either.  Knowing the extent of Duffy’s jerkoffishness was the only thing that actually held my interest.  That and Willem Dafoe as a homophobic gay FBI agent.

Fuck you, Troy Duffy.  Seriously.  I hate you.

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