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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
MEET MONICA VELOUR Tobe is a fan, by that I mean he collects anything he can on obscure celebrity Monica Velour, a porn star from the ‘80s. A slightly less-weird Napoleon Dynamite nerd, he should be the spawn of Woody Allen instead of the grandson of a curmudgeonly Brian Dennehy. Tobe sits in his room watching old videos of porn star Monica Velour, with 1930’s jazz playing in the background. He has a truck, part of the family’s hot dog business, with a big weenie on the top (an obvious phallic symbol not lost on anyone, I’d hope), which he decides to sell after he graduates. And as luck would have it, the man who wants to buy it (Keith David) lives in Indiana—just where Velour is having her current run at a strip club. Road Trip! But as luck wouldn’t have it, Monica, real name Linda (Kim Cattrall), is a mess, a divorced mother fighting for custody of her kid and without any job prospects past doing tricks for money. The life of a porn star is no bowl of sunshine and rainbows, certainly not if one is over 40. Meet Monica Velour becomes funny and touching almost in spite of itself. Its writer/director, a first-timer with a few shorts under his belt (including the fun The Raftman’s Razor), pulls the film in two different directions. He wants it to have that kind of quirky fun/weirdness like Dynamite, albeit Tobe is less dysfunctional, and the dark drama of two people at a crossroads. The director shows more confidence in directing his actors, chiefly Cattrall, who is able to finally let loose from the constraints of her bitchy sex-pot Samantha from Sex and the City. She plays a character who has honest to goodness dimension and who can be funny, sad, and deep, all in one scene. She also plays off Ingram well, which is good as he’s more one-note as a nerdy kid coming out of his shell. And hey, it’s hard to knock a movie that has Brian Dennehy AND Keith David, even if they too show up as stock characters. Keith Bearden gives his actors some breathing room with dramatic and funny material. (Dustin, on one of Monica’s movies “That was an homage to the old Hammer horror films.” Monica: “Homage, what’s that, cheese?”) Yet as a debut director, he’s not totally confident with his camera. He moves it around just a little too much in certain scenes, like an overhead 360 circle turn above Tobe and Monica as they sit in a field at night talking comfortably. And midway through the film, there is a choice made in the narrative that takes the story in another direction—seemingly just for the moment but it sticks out—that changes Tobe and Linda’s dynamic together. Suffice to say I enjoyed the movie more when it was a kind of a kid-looking-for-a-surrogate-mother tale (Tobe’s died when he was three years old) that just happened to be about a geeky teen and an ex-porn queen.
Certainly the film deserves some points for making dramatically
plausible its premise, more so than last month’s
Elektra Luxx. And it sweetly celebrates the nerdy side of life,
like, um, the sincere love for old-school ‘80’s porn (Paul Thomas
Anderson would approve) and ends at a place that is satisfying, if a bit
rushed in tying together the plot threads. It’s a decent debut, though it’s not worth
rushing out to see except for Cattrall fans looking to see her post-STC
or its two character actor legends.
Jack Gattanella
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