"The Brown Bunny" is, IMHO, not the worst movie ever. Roger Ebert called the first cut of iit the worst movie ever shown at Cannes, and the panel of critics convened by Screen International, the British trade paper, gave the movie the lowest rating in the history of their annual voting.

The DVD version is 25 minutes shorter than the 118-minute Cannes version that was vigorously booed by the audience. I would estimate that there are perhaps 6-8 minutes that are worth watching in the 93 I watched, so I would think the movie drab and tedious even if it were a half-hour film. The mostly hand-held camera shots are uninteresting, beginning with the opening ones of a motorcycle race (involving no one to whom the audience has been introduced) and more than an hour of driving west across the US before another race in LA.

Mostly, the viewer is alone in the front seat of the van driven by the motorcycle racer, Bud Clay (the star, producer, director, writer, director of photography, and editor of the film, Vincent Gallo) through a dirty windshield driving down the road or through a windshield being swept by windshield wipers. (Offhand, I can't recall home movies that were duller, though I was once shown a collection of (still) photographs of parking lot asphalt that might qualify, though it was occasionally supplemented by shots of gravel.)

Between New Hampshire (I think) and Los Angeles, Bud has brief encounters with two young women with flower names (Violet, Lily, and Rose) and a longer one with his ex-girlfriend Daisy (Chloe Sevigny). Through a significant part of the last of these, the woman has her mouth full (more on that below) through much of it.

The movie looks drab until the brightly lit hotel room in LA. The star (Gallo) looks very unappealing, with strands of greasy hair blowing in and out of his eyes as he drives (and drives and drives and drives). The star mumbles his lines, which are dull anyway (I know because I turned on subtitles to see what he was mumbling).

The editing is unmotivated, and there are seemingly endless, pointless takes. The motivations (not to mention lack of good sense) of Violet and Rose is implausible. The finale is pretty implausible, too, though it provides something resembling a plot, something missing in the first hour and five minutes. It comes close to saving the last half hour of "Brown Bunny," though doing nothing to redeem the tedium of the first hour.

And there is no "money shot"... I guess I should go into an
adult content alert
to discuss that. Most of the notoriety of the movie relates to the unsimulated fellatio of Gallo performed onscreen by Sevigny. This is not unmotivated, although why this is so becomes clear only afterward, in the last few minutes of the movie. (And even with a key to Bud's character, the movie offers no catharsis and he is just as messed up at the end as at the beginning of the movie, though the audience now knows something of the reason for it.)

Having seen more fellatio (and irrumatio) than most, I was not shocked (not to mention knowing that it was going to happen from considerable criticism of the movie). Gallo (or his penis double or, Chris Jarmich suggests, prosthesis) was hard, thick, and circumcised. His ejaculation was faked (that's what I meant by there being no "money shot"). Sevigny did not go very far down on it, though she was not simulating going down on something phallic.

My reporting done, I can post an

end of adult-content alert.


Gallo's earlier egomania onscreen, "Buffalo '66" was considerably more interesting (and there were hardly any murmurs about the very graphic violence in it, but putting sex on the screen is horrifying to many Americans--at least they say so, whatever may appear on their computer screens and secret porn stashes...)

It is really difficult to decide whether Gallo'ss writing is worse than his editing or his editing is worse than his writing. Definitely, what he did in the way of editing and of writing is sub-professional. I would say his acting is, too. I realize that his character is supposed to be pathetic, but his performance is pathetic in other ways. He looks and sounds so bad, that I can't classify what Gallo did in this movie as "preening." If it's an "ego trip" it is a trip of a very bruised—if not broken—ego.

As in "Buffalo '66" the women are not given much screen time, but are far more interesting than Gallo, especially Elizabeth Blake (Violet) in her first two scenes and Mary Morasky (Mrs. Lemon) in her over-extended single scene.

The DVD does not include the cut material (Roger Ebert discusses much of it and an account of his hyperbole and verbal sparring with Gallo at http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040903/REVIEWS/409020301/1023). The only extras are two trailers, one of which is short and devoid of content, the other of which has pretty much all of what little story there is flashing by.

---

This review is my shot at an "I've seen worse" writeoff instigated by Stefanie (Dramastef), who labeled "Brown Bunny" the worst movie she had ever seen. My first suggestion to go lower was more a direct comparison than I knew, "Girl on a Motorcycle" with two stars whose work I generally like (Marianne Faithful and Alain Delon). It is also a pointless movie involving motorcycling (and was X-rated for its sex). It seems to be unavailable, so her new challenge is Todd Haynes's wretched "Poison," which is the most noxious movie I can remember. She has managed to find some merit in two of its three jumbled-together stories (and reminded me of what was so repulsive that more than half the audience left the screening of it I survived here. BTW, "Ishtar" is more fun than either, though it's not a good movie. I haven't seen "Skidoo" or "Leonard, Part 6," or most Peter Greenaway movies, but "Poison" was poison to me, whereas the tedium and self-indulgence of "Brown Bunny" eventually led the audience to some insight, and had two (or, arguably, three) interesting stops on the cross-country drive.



© 2006, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age