There's a surefire but criminally overlooked trio of rules when it comes to films. The first two are relatively well known. Firstly: be careful what you watch when you have the flu or hangover beer fear. Secondly, be careful whom you watch porn with. And the last, and in my view, the most important, is be careful what you choose to watch with your parents.It starts out simple. They don't get something, anything, the most minor of details. A joke, maybe. A gratuitous, but stylized bit of violence. A reference to something. You burst out laughing. They look at like you've just channeled the spirit of Mussolini. You feel queasy. You feel like explaining. You maybe, can't explain without incriminating yourself. They think, you don't actually like this sort of thing do you? You think, well, no, err, yeah, well, I don't know, it's just a film. And then the generation gap begins to open up. They feel bad because their child has mutated beyond their vision. You feel guilty. They feel helplessly old and out of touch. You feel as though another layer of parental comfort has fallen away and you are truly alone. You both squirm and contemplate the cruelty of life as the film trundles on. Your memory of the film is forever tarnished the thumping great awkwardness. Neither party wanting to carry on watching, but if either one says anything, it would be like admitting that your whole relationship was little more than a clump of shared genes.
One such film was Leaving Las Vegas with Nicholas Cage and Elizabeth Shue. I have no idea why I thought this would be a good film with me mum, but alas I did. It was the most uncomfortable and squirmworthy 90+ minutes of my life. This happy-go-lucky tale of doomed pisshead and depressed whore seemed to consist solely on conversations about how drunk you have to be before you can’t enjoy head. It made me feel bad about my own drinking too. The trauma of sitting through this film with a prickly layer of sweat across my brow led me to re-Christen the film The Anti-Cocktail.
Part of Cocktail’s enduring appeal is that it portrays a lifestyle saturated in booze, which is virtually consequence free. It’s a place where only tourists get hangovers, no one minds if it takes 20 minutes to get a drink while the bar staff throw bottles around to the 'Hippy Hippy Shake', no one is hooked, and although there is a suicide it inadvertently leads to a marriage made in heaven, to be lived out in a bar. The bride in that instance is Elizabeth Shue: the ‘original rich chick’ who forsakes her father’s massive ill-gotten lucre to run away with a poet barman. In this, the Anti-Cocktail, she is a rootless and depressed Las Vegas whore pimped out to all and sundry by a doomed Latvian pimp. Out main lead, instead of being a barman poet, is a washed-up, yet wealthy LA hack. It is almost impossible to be sympathetic to him as he bums wads of cash off of other equally soulless Hollywood corporate shills. Oddly, despite his Oscar for Best Actor, Cage’s performance is oddly reminiscent of the Cruiser at his most over exuberant. In other words, he’s an annoying shit.
I decided to re-watch the film, without me mum and see if it has any redeeming features now that I’m a little older. I sat down to it and immediately felt that very same discomfort. For a start off, Sting started fucking singing! If you find yourself longing for the music of Starship, you know it’s going to be a long evening. The film went to type, depressing, uncomfortable, and with far too much of the filmmaker’s own jazzy noodlings. The soundtrack is shit. Everyone is talking about death and knob sucking. Instead of Cruise saving a her mate from a potential Champagne overdose, Shue bumps into Cage by nearly having herself run over by him. She promptly gives him the finger. The closest thing we have to a “waterfall” moment is when he tells her to stop sucking his cock and drink some tequila. Knowing that things were not going to get better, I decided against watching the last half hour of the film. It seems, sometimes, it doesn’t matter who you watch a film with it still sucks dong. I couldn’t help trying to fathom why I had chosen to watch this film with my mum. My curiosity led me to watch the trailer on the DVD extras, and hey presto! According to the this, this is a cheery love story about a man at the end of his tether who meets an equally lost lady of the night and they fall, ‘head over heals in love’. As this bilge emanated from the telly, The Wife (who had the misfortune of sitting through the end of the film, and therefore is this edition's guest reviewer) commented:
Not exactly head over heals in love. It’s more like two desperately lonely people who will take anyone who pays attention to them while one of them gets raped up the bum and the other drinks himself to death.
Yeah so this film retains its Anti-Cocktail status. Although it maybe somewhat cheery to see Cage die on screen, no one want to see “Our Liz” bleeding from the bottom. Take our advice, we’re watching the films so you don’t have to.
