The Smokers

I think this movie is laden with heavyhanded irony; while a lot of it is

inexplicable, poorly edited and just plain strange, the main thing I

took away from it was that while these girls thought they were starting

a "revolution", they were only hurting themselves.

Case in point; the girls try to get back at Guy #1 by trying to force

sex on him at gunpoint. It fails, but they think it was a success. The

rest of the males in town think it's hot, and want it to happen to them.

A couple of more feeble attempts are made at controlling males at

gunpoint, but also fail miserably. Instead of realizing that they are

getting into these situations themselves, and allowing themselves to be

used by guys, they get even angrier at the men of the world.

The whole dynamic of the girls' lives seems to be that they are rich

prep-school stoners who dress flamboyantly and have rigid, antiseptic

relationships with their parents. The decor of their rooms and the decor

of the girls themselves is probably monstrously tacky on purpose; not

meant to be taken literally. It sort of shows you what's in their heads;

fluff, feathers, glitter and smoke.

In their desperate attempt to be feminist/radical/revolutionaries who

defend the honor of women everywhere, they take the completely wrong

path and wind up raped, messed up and worse. They allowed themselves to

be used, and then got furious at the men for using them. They handled

the whole thing in a childish, super-hero-wannabe way. And they paid for

it.

I think Thora Birch looked cute in those goofy getups. Even though her

character made little or no sense. I saw her as the ultimate

rich-kid-acting-out-against-parental-control archetype. And her

now-learned sister gives her a nice life lesson

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.

This really is as bad as people have commented. I thought anything would be at least watchable with Dominique and Thora in it, but I was wrong. Absolute, jaw-dropping, unbelievably bad performances from everyone involved, in wildly distracting outfits and makeup. And I like the actresses - in other movies. I liked Lolita, American Beauty, Ghost World. What happened?

Thankfully, it has been a little while since I saw it and it is starting to fade from my memory.

The plot, which was hard to determine, was plain silly. Since when does a tile bathroom go up in flames from a Bic lighter? Oh yeah, at the end of this crap.

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...