Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I finally discovered one aspect of why I absolutely despise Hollywood movies: it's all a fucking insider joke. Watching Get Shorty reminded me quickly of everything wrong in Hollywood. This is an attempt to get an all star ensemble and witless dialogue thrown together like a garbage salad and put it on screen. It's like watching a chatroom or blog for celebrities who have a need to bitch about the way they intially paid their dues. Is this a movie for people out there or a movie just for celebrities to crack up while sitting around in their thousand dollar formal attire at a masturbatory awards ceremony? Besides that, all I saw were old actors and actresses on the last leg of their careers. People will go see them for name recognition, but these people have absolutely no soul left. You could feel the banal motion that these people made as they passed through the script like strolling through a crowded mall during Christmas. The movie allowed them to pat each other on the back and blow their nose on their hated producers, directors, and other nemesis. But there wasn't any substance for the average Joe to care about unless you are a fan with no prescience nor conscience outside of what the media trap sells you. Compare that to a more artful and introspective Fear and Loathing in Vegas. Although Johnny Depp had impressed me since his performance in Pirates of the Carribean, he once again managed to stun me with the drug induced persona here. Starting off with the voice he uses as the narrator, he instantly reminds you of those older movies in the 50's of guys on the radio broadcasting their thoughts. Right there, you instantly incorporate the mood which Terry Gilian is expert in producing. Depp stumbles through hallucinations from intense drug usage in a manner that paralleled the writings of Thompson (whereas people in Get Shorty simply stumbled through the script). You feel with the camera angles and Depp's swooning the sense of being induced by whatever Depp was absorbing in the movie. The movie itself was introspective in how a person could push themselves to the limits of the act of sin. This was part of the attempt to personify Vegas as the ultimate ground which would be denounced by the church. The movie made no sense from a narrative perspective, but it was the mood generated that captivated me. The point wasn't the typical hollywood crappy linear storyline, but a disembodied one that reaches the extremes of our conscious. It wasn't masturbatory either in just being a drug trip, but perhaps a question of our restraints in the society and using drugs to escape all sense of conformity and gain new vision.