Day 175: Slackers (2002)

R, 1 hr. 26 min.  Directed by: Dewey Nicks.  Release Date: December 1, 2002. DVD Release Date: May 28, 2002.

I found this movie on the shelf of a friend of mine who has a... passion for bad movies.  When I stumbled across the King of Pain Blog-A-Thon on Dark Side of the Matinee, and saw the Hatter's invitation for other Bloggers to participate, I knew I had to find something.  I found it, in spades, and rearranged a ten-day period of my planned blog entries to make it happen.

When I saw this the first time, I wondered why the generation after mine hadn't made it into it's anthem statement.  In my day, I hardly knew anyone who admitted to cheating so openly.  Ten years later, I returned to an academic environment, and it was a rare thing when I didn't spot people cheating their way through proctored exams, or attempting to cheat through proctored exams.  The last exam I sat for was proctored by a major educational facility in Columbus, and I could hear at least three people (of the seven people current sitting for exams) texting back and forth throughout the exam period.  For whatever reason, the proctor, perhaps entranced by the richness and depth of her Janet Evanovich novel, didn't.  Even worse, she wasn't even laughing at the one-liners in the book, and that's the ONLY acceptable reason to read Ms. Evanovich.

But then I gave it some thought and realized why the next generation hadn't embraced this movie.  It's a wee bit on the disgusting side.  Characters played by Laura Prepon and Jason Schwartzman are particularly foul... doing things most of us do from time to time, but under circumstances where most of us would avoid those actions, such as an audience.  The scene where Schwartzman gives a sponge bath to an old woman that I've learned is Mamie Van Doren never fails to make my gorge rise, which I suspect is the point. 

There's a romance blossoming over the course of the movie that seems to jump in and out of focus, as if the filmmakers weren't quite sure what to do with it once the concept had been written in to the script..  Sometimes it's the overriding theme of the move, and then occasionally it's pushed to the side so that one of the more disgusting characters can do something outlandish and interrupt whatever sweet thing might actually have been taking place.  I suspect that the budding relationship was a little too pure and sickly sweet for what these filmmakers had in mind, thus the hopping around.  It involves the two lead characters, but neither it nor the lead characters in question receive as much screen time as they probably should. 

The movie is infrequently funny, usually in that "broken clock" sort of way, but I found the subject matter and premise so disturbing that it more than compensated for anything entertaining that might have happened.  You can miss this one without feeling any guilt or shame.  If only the cast members didn't feel the same way.