director/screenwriter
James Dale Robinson
producers
Mike Elliott
Mark McGarry
Holly Wiersma
cinematographer
Blake T. Evans
music
Joseph L. Altruda
editor
Robert Gordon
cast
Donal Logue (Raymond)
Cary Elwes (Carter)
Michael Rapaport (Norman)
Natasha Lyonne (Judy)
DJ Qualls (Archie)
Eileen Brennan (Mrs. Cresswell)
Monet Mazur (Kiki)
Danny Masterson (Conan)
James Duval (Baz)
Marshall Bell (Gun Store Owner)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 92m
u.s.
release: 1/1/02
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
q&a home
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War breaks out between two
rival comic-book-store owners over acquisition of a priceless,
pristine comics collection.
Interesting
premise.
Yeah, and I'd say the first
half of this is the best Kevin Smith comedy Kevin Smith never
made. Writer-director James Dale Robinson, who later wrote the
putrescent film adaptation of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen, clearly knows both the trivia and the milieu:
He's been in those comics shops and heard (or possibly
even joined in) the elaborately pointless debates over, say,
who was more fuckable -- Golden-Age Black Canary or Valkyrie
from Airboy.
That's the
kind of comedy cast you don't see too often, either.
Truly. Donal Logue, as the
pipe-smoking comics purist Raymond, is cut from the same cloth
as Jack Black's vehemently music-snobbish Barry in High
Fidelity (Raymond and Barry would either bond immediately
or despise each other on sight). DJ Qualls, of Road Trip
and The New Guy, is the film's closest thing to a moral
compass, a kid who likes comics but (unlike most of the people
around him) knows there's more to life than comics. Michael Rapaport
and Natasha Lyonne, as a married couple who own the more businesslike
comics shop in competition with Raymond's (they sell Magic cards
and action figures, a fact hilariously spewed at them by Raymond),
are properly Rapaportian and Lyonnesque. Then there's Cary Elwes
(whose American accent, as always when he plays Yanks, comes
and goes) as a macho jerk -- and, we come to learn, altogether
shady character -- complete with a stripper girlfriend (Monet
Mazur). All these people hover around a collection of mint-condition
comics formerly owned by a recently deceased elder geek, now
controlled by his mom (Eileen Brennan -- good to see her again),
who refuses to sell them.
You said
"the first half." Does it go wrong somewhere along
the way?
Intensely. The movie has a
clearly delineated conflict, and colorful characters acting it
out in a milieu we haven't seen much outside of the past two
seasons of Buffy (the Nerds
of Doom) and the margins of Kevin Smith movies. (Really, I'm
surprised not to see Kev's name hooked up to this film in some
executive-producer capacity. As it is, three of the actors --
Logue, Qualls, and Elwes -- are credited as co-producers.) Soon,
however, it turns into a full-fledged Black Comedy, with arson,
knifing, attempted vehicular homicide, and assorted handgun murders.
It's as if someone had turned off the laugh faucet: Once the
ante is upped to violence, about halfway through, the movie becomes
entirely unfunny and tiresome. And it's because most of the characters,
while mostly delusional and greedy, are also likable (due to
the actors), and we don't want to watch them go down this path
-- this isn't like Very Bad Things,
where the people are shitbags from fade-in. Also, the mix of
violence and comedy is exceedingly hard to pull off unless
(A) you're Tarantino or (B) the violence is there from the get-go,
as in Grosse Pointe Blank. Robinson
doesn't pull it off.
Will comics
fans like it?
I seriously doubt it, despite
the surface details and trivia, because the movie is essentially
anti-fan (and also anti-opportunist, as personified by the Rapaport
and Lyonne characters, who have no great love for comics but
run a shop because there's money in it). The more a viewer identifies
with the witty but sad, broke, and ultimately pathetic Raymond,
the less he or she will love the movie, because it comes down
in favor of the DJ Qualls character's take on comics: they're
fun to read, sometimes valid as an art form, but a life of nothing
but comics (this extends to all other forms of fandom, by the
way, be it Star Trek or fantasy fiction) is hollow. After
a fashion, the movie does have a sound message -- but to sell
it effectively, it needed to be either funnier or more serious.
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