Slogdance 12 — Why did I “Stayā€¯?
One of the movies I was most looking forward to was Bobcat “Bobā€¯ Goldthwait’s new movie Stay, from the director of my favorite clown movie, Shakes the Clown. Its premise is that sometimes it pays to NOT be completely honest with your significant other, especially when you have something in your past that is horrifically embarrassing. I didn’t expect it to be such a poorly written script full of stock characters and an unlikable, if cute, lead actress.
The movie looked like shit at the press screening, and not just because of the bad lighting within the film. Either the projector at the venue wasn’t calibrated properly, or the video master was off, but there was blotchy orange video noise in the highlights on people’s faces. That would have been forgivable if it wasn’t for the stock meth-smoking brother still living at home, the prudish mom who has a wild sexual history with famous rock stars of the ’50s, which she’s kept a secret from the straight shooting dad.
My biggest regret is not walking out of the movie early enough to catch the press screening of TV Junkie, which I read about in Matt Dentler’s Blog. For that I am still kicking myself.
-Andy Spletzer
reporting from Sundance
Park City, Utah
By the way, if you want to know what the transgression that she’s embarrassed to tell her fiancĆ© is, follow this link.
In the opening of the movie, we get her voiceover telling the story about how, when she was in college, she blew her dog. Yep, she gave her dog a blow job. She doesn't know why she did it. Some kind of whim. This is what she is embarrassed to tell her boyfriend. When people tell her that she should tell her boyfriend everything, we as an audience are supposed to laugh (and some people did--apparently, some people really enjoyed this movie). But she is so glib in her voiceover that she comes across as a horrible and insensitive person. Her boyfriend should break up with her for reasons other than the dog blowing incident.
I should also say that I walked out about half an hour, maybe 45 minutes into the movie. Maybe it got better. Maybe the characters started to become three-dimensional, maybe the cinematography started to be better, maybe she started to show some self-awareness, maybe the humor stopped being all about "shocking" revelations. Maybe, but I doubt it.
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