PulpLit.net

Gigli

Gigli
starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez

I like to watch dogs. The other day I was at a Dog Run, a fenced-in quadrangle filled with the sinfully satisfying smell of wood chips and the stale urine of New York City?s finest handbag dogs. They come here to mingle, chase balls, and, if they?re lucky, sniff a little ass in the company of other discriminating, hyperactive canines. It is marked a ?dog-only? zone, so I was extremely surprised to see an estranged friend of mine pacing in circles, oblivious of the environment and muttering something under his breath about Marie Calendar?s famous pies. I called his name and he froze, eyes wide and ears perked. I re-acquainted the two of us and asked him what he was doing.
"I just saw Gigli," he said in a tone that couldn?t be mistaken for anything other than a desperate plea for understanding from a kindred spirit. When he saw that the spirit he sought was not I, he quickly leapt over the 3-foot tall fence and ran screaming through a group of protesters trying to decide which force of government they had assembled to verbally dismantle.
Rarely do I get a recommendation that good, and understanding the importance of film in today?s society, I broke off my date with the twins and made it a Gigli night.

Now before you assume that I?m just going to pan the movie and give you a verbal nudge to the ribs or a pseudo-literary eye roll, hear me out. Just like the most complex of artistic achievements, in order to understand Gigli, you must first experience Gigli. I?d heard, just as everyone else had, the terrible reviews from the affronted critics, but based on box office receipts, video rentals, and my own conversations with sane people, it seems that, although many people talk about it, very few have actually seen Gigli. If you fall into this category, you need to amend that now.

Gigli is one of the most important films in the history of cinema.

Martin Brest, the writer/director of Gigli was also responsible for Scent of a Woman and the classic 80?s chestnut Beverly Hills Cop (one of my all-time Top 10 Mainstream Movies), pieced together an enigmatic, mesmerizing film, the likes of which have never been available to an American audience. This film could potentially change the high-octane face of American cinema and should be taught in every film theory course across the country. Aspiring filmmakers and screenwriters should take painstakingly careful note of this film.
Gigli is so bad that it transcends ?bad-ness.? It is not campy a la Pink Flamingos or Evil Dead. It is not ?fun? like a night of karaoke with drunk friends or ?ironic? like a tight ?Somebody Loves Me at the Montpelier, Idaho Children?s Hospital? T-shirt. Gigli is a jaw-dropping study in cinematic gibberish, with a hypnotic repugnance along the lines of watching your father undergo a colonoscopy. It reaches such putrid heights that it should be required viewing for every tax-paying citizen. The creation and distribution of this film could be revolutionary. This could be the watershed moment at which the American public chooses to demand more from the Hollywood machine, for Gigli is analogous to bad community theatre.
Gigli is an anomaly because rarely do big-budget films get to this stage of production without at least one redeeming quality; movies are too expensive to make, and studio executives are too fearful with their money. There is a surfeit of terrible theater because it is cheap, easy to do, and you?re guaranteed to at least see your best friend forcing an ear-to-ear grin after the show. Even with all of the gratuitous, trite, and empty films made today, most of them have some sense of a creative or sensational checks-and-balances. However in Gigli, we see something akin to a first rehearsal of confused amateurs horrifyingly immortalized for all to see as a finished product on DVD.
During my third viewing, my sensibilities were agog with confusion over the quasi-faux Impressionistic levels this film plays on. The petrified, desperate acting aside, the characters played by Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez prove to possess an inability to say anything sensible (and by sensible, I don?t mean vulnerable or profound, I mean anything that makes sense). Such haplessness forces the viewer to assume that the inner workings of these characters must be extremely complex. So much so, that these feelings of angst and repression would never allow the characters to wrench free of their stifling grasp, even long enough to converse with one another through traditional means of rational dialogue.

The nursery school atmosphere of this film is so baffling that at times it could almost be confused with brilliance. The silences and pleading, expectant stares are reminiscent of Antonioni. The difference, however, is that instead of the viewer witnessing the deliberate crafting of a moment of silence demanding that a character confront a choice, in Gigli you are privy to an embarrassingly tangible sense of Affleck struggling to figure out if the next line is his or J. Lo?s. When Lopez sneaks a glance at the camera, it is not akin to Meg Ryan?s charming reaction to Billy Crystal?s improvisation about putting pepper on his poppycock; it is because Lopez is pathetically trying, in vain, to understand the words coming out of her mouth.
The overt use of monologues (unchallenged since Paddy Chayevsky?s scathing media commentary Network) don?t come out of a gift for language. Gigli's monologue-heavy structure is the result of a panic to fill the celluloid vacuum of two fledging celebrities? inability to engage in a slightly believable, rudimentary conversation with one another. Such a rough draft on film is truly a thing to behold, because never before has there been such an audacious attempt to pass off a half-baked piece of dreck as a final product.
Gigli should be taught in every film school. It is a clean, color-by-numbers lesson plan, about what not to do in a movie, and is therefore, an invaluable learning tool.

See this movie. You must.
If nothing else, grab some friends, a bottle of your favorite liquor, and do a shot every time every time:

1. An actor staring off into space, confused about what to do next.
2. A completely implausible event occurs.
3. A line, or exchange of dialogue, proves to be nonsensically syllogistic.
4. You say aloud, ?Wait, what ???

Follow this template, and trust me, you?ll be shit-faced on Johnnie Walker before you experience the angry genius of Christopher Walken.
Honestly, I hope this film changes the expectations of the American film-going public. I hope that it will force us to question our celebrity-obsessed culture, and our willingness to ingest the most puerile form of vomit that the industry tries to pass off as entertainment. The Hollywood machine has had no trouble taking advantage of the soporific workforce that floods the mega-plexes every weekend, but perhaps after seeing Gigli, we can help expedite the termination of the Age of Dumbing Down. I hope the Dog Runs have the capacity to accommodate everyone.