Short Cut to Hollywood

Short Cut to Hollywood's very unusual premise is that a middle-aged German man with no particular talents can fly to the U.S. and become international celebrity "John F Salinger" on the basis of his willingness to have his limbs amputated and eventually commit suicide on-camera. This is nonsense, of course, but the clichéd assumptions about American media spectacles which inform the concept are what drive the film.

Short Cut critiques the American television dream machine by making thinly veiled references to American Idol – the John F Salinger Show's host is a Ryan Seacrest look-a-like, and the Salinger team negotiates with television producer "Paula Martini," who in one scene sits next to an executive wearing a kippah, providing both a reference to the Jewish-control-of-Hollywood myth and a curious opportunity for Salinger to offend – do directors Stahlberg and Mittermeier perhaps see themselves as exorcising German ghosts by having Salinger invoke Hitler?

Short Cut doesn't comfortably commit to a genre – at times it seems a buddy picture, depicting the relationship of three failed middle-aged men, but there is very little focus on Salinger's friends; it comments on the German fascination with the vapid wasteland of American television, but there's no real depth to the critique; it wants to be a road picture, but repetitive scenes of a camper tooling down the highway and shots of frenetic hotel room sex don't really suffice for this. Brief shots of gore may be intended to lend gravity to the piece, but for me only served to increase the queasiness of a viewer already uncomfortable with the film's weaknesses.

It's kind of ironic, that a movie that is Anti-Mainstream and/or Hollywood, does debut on the Berlinale. Unfortunately the pacing is way off here. The actors start to be annoying, which isn't good, even if it was a bit intentional. Some story point/jokes only work for German audiences, which on the one hand is nice, but on the other hand, is pretty short sighted for a movie, that should/could appeal to an international audience.

The movie starts off good though and it wins over audience members, with it's thin-layered, but fun characters. Unfortunately the plot starts to crumble and the pace isn't up to speed (no pun intended) too. Some ideas that are hinted aren't well executed and the overall feeling is that you have been watching a movie that was made "on the fly" (made up as it moves along, with no real script existing, except from some major plot points). A shame then, that this nice idea get's crumbled under many things that went wrong ... but at least the crew seems to had fun while shooting the movie. Still, even with it's gross moments, "Borat" is a much better movie, with more sarcastic moments on the American Dream.