Party Monster
Party Monster
is a pointless movie about pointless people that is sure to
be embraced by self-alienated teenagers the world over. The
acting is stilted, the script is a mess, and the direction is
bad. Still it's bound to get a lot of attention for focusing
on a subculture and starring a "grownup" child star.
The picture
is a remake of sorts by homo-kitsch filmmakers Fenton
Bailey and Randy Barbato. They've already told this story
in their documentary of the same title, but this time it's
open to poetic license and stunningly lame performances. The
story is basically Scarface with 80's New York clublife
substituted for Miami gangstering. Michael Alig (Macaulay
Culkin) comes to the Big Apple from the Midwest and takes
over the club kid scene with James St. James (Seth Green)
and its decadence leads to murder and Michael's downfall.
Culkin
tries to play Alig as a heap of affectations but the performance
itself comes off as an affectation of its own. He and Green
exchange dialogue like a couple of high school freshmen doing
a cold reading. It's flat, the timing is wrong, and worst
of all it's grating as all get out. If you're one of those
people that is waiting for Green to break through with his
rumored talent you can just keep waiting. Green's St. James
plays like a bad Kevin McDonald character doing a bad Andy
Dick impression.
Surely
more than a few will claim that Culkin and Green's somnambulism
is an artistic choice that further exposes the shallow nature
of the club kid lifestyle. This is just the same justification
that many use on pictures like Showgirls and Starship
Troopers that the filmmakers were knowingly making a bad
pictures and that the weakness of the scripts and performances
is all intentional. While some awful films are self-consciously
wretched - Troma Pictures for instance - the clues are there
that it's all a goof.
With Party
Monster the clue that it's not all a goof is Dylan McDermott
as a club owner. McDermott brings that natural, sincere movie
star quality that is just a notch below George Clooney. Even
in a black turtleneck and an eye patch McDermott oozes authenticity.
Had he seemed even for a moment to attempt to put on airs
some of it might have worked. It would have still sucked;
it would just prove that the sucking came from a poor artistic
choice and not just from rank amateurism.
Rank and
amateur are Party Monster's two defining characteristics.
Poorly shot on digital without any apparent knowledge of such
artistic affectations as white balance or composition, the
whole thing plays like a senior video project desperately
shot over a weekend. Interiors, skin tones especially, skew
orange. When you have as much skin tone has this picture has
between Culkin's pasty thighs in cut-offs and an endless supply
of shots of people's noses and upper lips after snorting various
powders, getting them to look right should be of at least
slight importance.
Again,
even this could be forgiven had the script been there to save
it. Hell, 28 Day Later had the story to overcome bad
digital handheld, but there is nothing to these characters.
They don't DO anything; they just ARE, as they proclaim more
than a few times. They find themselves horribly cute, as do
the filmmakers.
The filmmakers
also find themselves horribly cute, having their characters
argue over who is telling the story and hear their own background
music, but then they undermine all of this self-referential
silliness by having St. James telling the story to the cameras
in shots that I can only assume recreate the Party Monster
documentary.
They spend
all of their time proving to us how shallow these two characters
are and then have one of them be the storyteller. I'm sure
it's all very droll for those involved and they can laugh
up their sleeves about all the little things that they put
in - "Look we got John Stamos to be a cheesy talk show
host!" "Isn't Marilyn Manson hilarious in a dress?"
- but they don't give anyone outside of their clique a reason
to care.
Even aesthetically
the picture fails. All of these characters are just about
their personas and their style, but the picture lacks any
style. As shallow and stupid as all of the characters come
off, they are at least interesting at first glance. They are
somewhat different, but the picture itself is not. When Alig
pines away for his lost love he lies on the floor listening
to "Total Eclipse of the Heart," a retro-gag only
slightly less played out than playing Sir Mix-a-lot in a party
scene or busting the joke of making a joke sequel by adding
2: Electric Boogaloo to the end of any title.
Party
Monster is hollow. Without any real redeeming factor at
all the picture is just lifeless, acloying whine for attention
that wouldn't exist if its star hadn't dropped a paint can
on Joe Pesci's head over a decade ago. Heck, at least Dickie
Roberts doesn't put on any airs about exploiting failed
child stars.
Rating: 
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