The Smokers

I wish I had checked the IMDB reviews for this movie before renting it.

Don't be fooled by the reasonably interesting summary on the back of the box, this is one of the worst films I have ever sat through. The acting is laughable, with lines being delivered in a horribly stilted, mechanical style by all but one actor (excepting Thora Birch, who only has about ten minutes of screen time). Of course, you can't fault the actors for having to deliver lines that are horribly cliched or needlessly dramatic. Finally, it appears to have been edited by fairly intelligent chimps, with massive skips in the story leaving you trying desperately to figure out what's going on. The last ten minutes are among the worst ever commited to celluloid in movie that is trying to take itself seriously.

I rented this in hopes of seeing, at the least, a film with some memorable lines or fun moments, and hoped that possibly I was stumbling across an underrated, obscure gem. I didn't even get any memorable lines or fun moments. It seems that what the film is trying to do is show a feminist view of sex, but the viewpoint doesn't go very deep or really seem that intriguing. It hardly even makes sense. The characters don't do much to support this attempt at deepness, and the acting is lousy all around. One of the main girls is trying her best to be an Angelina Jolie type, but she has zero charisma or screen presence. I think the best acting in the film was from a minor female character in a bar that one of the male characters was trying to pick up, and she had about three lines. Seriously, the acting is that noticeably bad. Thora Birch must be trying to earn indie cred by appearing in this right around the time her career was taking off, and she does have one of the better moments towards the beginning involving playing a Russian roulette-type game with an almost completely loaded gun, but the fact that the gun is loaded is the only fascinating part about this scene because her acting isn't particularly stellar. Dominique Swain doesn't even shine at all, and she has definitely saved some films I've seen in the past. The pot smoking seemed like a gimmick tacked onto the film. It's a shame. This movie looks good on paper, but suffers from weakness factoring in from all aspects that go into the making of it.

Wow, did this movie ever suck. I don't usually write commentary, but for any girl who might think that this movie has anything to do with female empowerment, watch something else. The girls claim they want revenge on the cruelty of a male-dominated society that uses women only for their reproductive and pleasure-giving capacity, but the whole time all they do is bitch about wanting someone to complete them and make their lives meaningful, thereby contradicting the intent by inferring that men make our lives meaningful. argh. an hour and a half of my life I can never get back.

There's not many movies where I seriously consider not seeing it all the way through. I watch 5-12 movies a week, new releases and classics, and typically I see them all through to the bitter end.

But 20 minutes into "The Smokers" I was fighting a most uncharacteristic urge to hit the Stop button.

And 30 minutes into the film I found myself in great sympathy of those animals who gnaw their legs off to escape a trap.

I picked up the film on spec because it had some good people involved with it. And I cannot hold them at fault for my discomfort -- all of the actors do their best with the material. (Thora Birch is a standout as the younger sister.)

But it is the material itself which is at the root of my desire to flee. What was (I believe) intended as a trenchant commentary on power, empowerment, and male-female relations instead struck me as a mean-spirited, dark and ultimately pointless exercise.

Perhaps if I were more familiar with the subjects of the film -- rich, bored, disaffected boarding school girls -- it would be more poignant for me. But I'm not a rich, bored, disaffected boarding school girl (nor do I think I ever shall be), just a film enthusiast with the ability to empathize with characters on screen if given half a chance. I ended up not caring two squirts what happened to any of these characters, and the vague message of the movie regarding the validity of the culture which produces rich, bored, disaffected etc. -- one of the characters tells her little sister "I don't want you to end up like mom" -- was insufficient reason to care about the film itself.

This film obviously comes from a very personal space, as many films which are written and directed by the same person do. Just as obviously, the director had it in the back of her mind that this film become a cult favorite -- the wild makeup is otherwise largely pointless.

An ardent feminist might claim that the source of my discomfort comes from receiving the barbs directed at self-serving men. To which I say pish. *And* tosh. The characters are empty on both sides of the sexual divide. I am a feminist (a humanist!) myself, and I feel this movie makes no contribution to insight regarding the opposite sex, and is in fact so confused and hostile that it can actually cause greater problems. My wife felt the same way.

Midway through the film, my wife and I debated whether or not to see it through; we decided to reach the bitter end, to see if *any* redemption was offered. But we also discussed what movie we should watch afterward, to take the taste of "The Smokers" out of our mouths. Something cheerier, like "Apocalypse Now".

And I found myself thinking of Kurtz's penned message: "Drop the bombs. Exterminate them all."

The horror. The horror...

Little need to reiterate that this is a terrible film; the other reviews do that well. I wanted to add a particular displeasure not yet mentioned: The cliché ending filmed at convocation, with a voice-over of the Animal House/American Graffiti "Where are they now?" blurbs. Suddenly, in the last minute of the film, it decides that it is a retrospective! Until that point it was a 2001 movie depicting 2001 girls, but now we are to imagine it as a movie from 2030 looking back at the turn of the century! Obviously this was tacked on in postproduction as a way of cleaning up the end and trying to give the picture more of a direction. Strange, though, that they had Dominique Swain do it; apparently her voice and diction hasn't changed at all in the intervening 30 years, and she still speaks like a teenager. Guess no-one was paying too much attention. Neither should you...