Go

In the continuing effort of teen movies to cover every possible genre in filmdom with cute-ensemble-cast versions, "Go" is the young people's "Pulp Fiction," aping its structure and its atmosphere of semi-scummy people engaging in what is supposed to be amusingly mundane conversation in between shooting people or liberating each other from captivity. As a matter of fact, I think this film packs in more amorality than "Pulp Fiction," featuring among other events a drug deal gone awry, a rave, casual Tantric sex, a brawl at a strip club, a subsequent destructive car chase, drug users recruited to work for the Man, and hit-and-running with attempted remorselessness, among other things.

This film, though, does have an amazing new take on those often-featured-in-a-movie events, which is to make them really really boring. I have to say that I am not as much a "Pulp Fiction" enthusiast as the major mass market media say I ought to be, but one thing about that film: your attention stayed with it all the way through the movie. The same cannot be said of this film, which manages to render the above compendium of events in tones that eventually take on an air of indescribable but palpable sameness, like radio DJs from different towns or New Yorker cartoons. This is the kind of film where two of the many, many protagonists have sailed into the Crazy Horse and I looked up at the screen and thought, "Oh, so we made it to the strip club?"

Part of the fault is the direction, which lacks the tension Tarantino brought to "Pulp Fiction" and makes an ill-advised decision to make this film basically laaaaaid-back. But the cast has to take their lumps for this crap too. With the exception of Sarah Polley, who makes the first section actually pretty good with her big-eyed intensity and who commands attention whenever she's onscreen, and Katie Holmes, who I have some kind of irrational problem with but who was actually a relief when she appeared onscreen in this film, these are unknown actors. There is a reason these actors are unknown. It's the same reason as why they will remain unknown after this film.

Certainly, this movie has some good points. The first section with Sarah Polley is good stuff (theater-hoppers, take note). The drug dealer is actually pretty good, I must say. Katie Holmes is not odious to me, which means the rest of you will like her. And there are some very amusing, but also very transitory, moments. The big A-1 reason to go see this film, though, is the incredible cuteness of the cast herein assembled. Besides Taye Diggs, who is just an incredibly hot man, we also have Polley, the drug dealer, the two strippers, the English guy, the gay men...no one who has lines and is aged under 30 in this film is unattractive. If this is what you're interested in, look no further. If you would prefer to save your time and money for something engaging, keep searching.

Attractive Man Count: Beatriz Sanchez and I, although adding up different components of this count, both come up with a 4.

Attractive Woman Count: I have a 3, unless I'm forgetting someone.

Overall Grade: C-. Would that "Go" ever went anywhere.

And they took my tentative title for my potty-training film Lindemann

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