MSF
As reported by Dollyforme
The lovely Yvonne Zima stars in this very funny so bad its good movie. Now, there’s a particular difficulty in reviewing so-bad-they’re-good films. By the very fact of including “bad” in the descriptor, you’re necessarily being critical of the creative forces behind the movie. Rare is it that an intentionally “bad” film turns out to be enjoyable. The true shining stars of the trashterpiece subgenre are those made with, if not total sincerity, then at least an attempt to create a basically decent film. What happens, though, sometimes when ineptitude crosses a line past mere badness and into the realm of “this is so awful, it’s fun to watch”? What to do when the movie is legitimately enjoyable, but for all the wrong reasons? Should it be ignored, too, to spare the creative powers' indignity? Or should the film’s failings be shared in a critical yet gently appreciative way, in order to share the joy with audiences? So, yes, I decided to share the gem of a movie.
Now here’s the plot - Gillian (Yvonne Zima, of ER fame) has a problem: She’s bonkers. True, there’s a throwaway scene where it’s implied the character is meant to be bipolar, but her behaviour crosses the threshold from textbook bipolar behaviour and enters Single White Female territory. Case in point: When we first meet her, she’s in the midst of the world’s gentlest breakup, with her latest boyfriend letting her down on the phone on his way to Estonia. (In the first of the film’s many off-the-wall subplots, it’s kinda-sorta implied this guy is a gangster. Spoiler: the movie doesn’t really go anywhere with that). Setting the tone for her behaviour for the rest of the film, Gillian goes to his house, trashes it, vandalizes his car, cuts up all of his clothes, and finishes things off by spray-painting over a modern art painting in his den. All this over the supremely lackluster opening credits (MSF: Brought to you by Helvetica).
If this sequence weren’t enough to show that Gillian is an incredibly unhinged and unlikeable person, we almost immediately cut to her browsing through this universe’s version of OKCupid and hatefully dismissing a bunch of average looking guys for reasons she arbitrarily makes up as she goes along (although, to be fair to reality, anyone who’s spent a fair amount of time on a dating site has probably received similar treatment from seemingly normal people, so we might just chalk this scene up to the writer’s bizarre grasp of the online dating world). She finally settles on Andy, not so much because their interests mesh up or because he seems like a decent guy, but because he looks like a model and a search of his name reveals that he’s the millionaire scion of an online marketing empire. It just so happens, though, that Andy really is a decent guy, and the pair hit it off. They hit it off so well, in fact, that Andy starts to consider making their relationship long term; and it’s at that point, dear readers, about twenty minutes into the film, that things go completely off the rails.
From this point forward, MSF becomes such a cavalcade of madness that I don’t want to spoil anything for you. Although there is a coherent storyline that dominates most of the film’s running time, it’s bogged down in a variety of subplots that rival Tommy Wiseau’s The Room for their sheer insanity. Prostitution? Sexual blackmail? Robbery? Frickin’ murder plots? It’s all here, and then some. Before the movie is over, Gillian will have gotten involved in seemingly every criminal enterprise imaginable save drug trafficking, and if the movie’s running time were just a tad bit longer, that would probably be in there, too.
The movie’s spastic tone is the result of a number of factors, all of which perfectly coalesce to bring this into “must see” territory. Most glaring is the script, which, in addition to its’ wonton sensationalism, suffers from a compulsion to have Gillian narrate her own actions, apparently in an attempt to let the audience in on her thought processes. The result is that we get a sort of weird blow-by-blow of exactly what we’re seeing onscreen, almost like a film for the visually impaired. In the opening sequence, for example, we don’t just see Gillian get pissed and destroy her boyfriend’s house, we have Gillian tell us she’s pissed and tell us she’s going to destroy her boyfriend’s house. She’s not breaking the fourth wall, mind you—she says these things out loud to absolutely no one while sitting alone in her car and wandering her boyfriend’s early 2000s sex palace.
Said palace brings me to another source of the film’s unintentional knee-slappery. It becomes an important plot point that Gillian lives with her mother. Mama suffered a heart attack not too long ago, and Gillian’s money from her job as an office manager largely goes to pay the bills and keep her mother in good health. Throughout the film, Gillian goes to Three’s Company-level lengths to cover up where she lives, not because she’s embarrassed of her living situation but because her house is ostensibly such a dump that not even Mama June would live there. At one point, she even goes through a complex charade in order to make Andy think that she lives with her sister, just because she’s so embarrassed of her absolute dumpster dive of a house.
And that leads me to both the source of the film’s biggest flaws and why it is so eminently enjoyable: Yvonne Zima. If I had to guess from her performance here, I’d have to say that either Yvonne Zima woefully misunderstood the script, or she’s one of the nicest people walking the planet. For all of Gillian’s alleged craziness, meanness, and downright evil, Zima projects a warmth and gentility that’s simply irresistible. That could have worked for the character— the most dangerous psychos are the ones who charm us. Yet even when Gillian is supposed to be in full-on freak out mode, her viciousness comes across less as the venom of a disturbed individual and more as the flirtation of a very self-possessed young woman. When she snaps at someone and says something particularly vile, it seems like it should be followed up with a wink and a toss of the hair. You come away thinking not so much that Gillian is a sick maniac, but that Yvonne Zima would be a really fun girl to date. It’s not necessarily a bad performance, it’s just not the performance the script calls for, and Zima’s natural charisma is enough that I’d watch another movie simply to see her in it.
A big thumbs up. You have to watch this movie!
