The Adventures of James and David

Thrown in as an extra on the DVD release of his feature film THE PORNOGRAPHER, this English-language short reinforces my impression that writer-director Bertrand Bonello is without talent. His winning a prize at the Cannes Film Festival for the later XXX movie is mere evidence of the plummeting of critical standards in recent decades.

This junker has two guys, apparently played by brothers, improvising a one-upsmanship conflict as they sit in the barber chairs of one guy's new hair salon. It's as boring in English as it would have been in French, and is clearly aimed (film festival circuit-itis rearing its ugly head) at devotees of the unfunny deadpan comedy style pioneered by Jim Jarmusch.

Short in running time but long on boredom, film develops into a one-joke effort at the climax, poorly done. It's crap, right down to the use of a Dean Martin song as background. Film bears a 1997 copyright, but is listed as circa 2002 in IMDb because that was when it apparently received a video release in France.

Bonello pompously ended his THE PORNOGRAPHER with a quote from Pasolini (subtitled by Koch-Lorber as "Pazolini"), a filmmaker/renaissance man whose boots BB would not have qualified to lick, if you catch my drift.