20/12/2001

You really ought to go and hire - as I am reasonably sure no cinemas will show it as a cult feature late on weekends - Yves Simoneau's 1999 cinema-merde, "Free Money" at the first opportunity. Especially if you're feeling lowly about anything you've done lately. I warn you, it will be an utter waste of $2.75 which could be better given to a charitable organisation, but it still comes highly recommended.

It was 4am and I was feeling the need to get the image of Linda Blair's awesome green liquid projectiles out of my head after introducing some uninitiated friends to the intellectually riveting filmic feast that is "The Exorcist" - which is, incidentally, also $2.75 well spent. And there it was, sitting in a pile of other weeklies': a Canadian film that boasted the names of Marlon Brando, Donald Sutherland and Mira Sorvino. However, I should have been wary - it had two members of the Sheen family in it.

Not wishing to spoil the experience for you, but feeling some need to explain, as the sun was slowly rising in the east, I viewed what was the metaphoric equivalent of lime-spew hurled at lightning-pace straight and smack-bang into the middle of my baggy-eyed face. The only thing that kept me watching this celluloid equivalent of a techni-coloured yawn was the extreme interest I had in whether it was going to get any worse. It did. Indeed. Amazing stuff.

In the cold shower that followed, it suddenly, like the sun, dawned on me that someone had financed this or at least convinced someone else to finance it. Someone had spent an exorbitant amount of money to pay the likes of Marlon, Donald, Mira, Marty and Chuck to actually be a part of it all. Someone had chosen to not only direct it, but see it through to completion. Someone had written what they thought was a funny, wacky and quirky comedy (and clipped it mercilessly with that abrasive tell-tale alternative chopped-editing style which is so often put into films by the creatively-cretinous who desire to make their product "arthouse" - when their product is as "arthouse" as a tie-in souvenir kiddies lunchbox). And someone with a supreme gift of the gab also convinced a hell of a lot of other people to be a part of "Free Money". The lengthy list of credits at the end of the picture now replays itself in my mind more scarily than anything Linda Blair threw out of her mouth or niftily rotated with her flexible neck.

And Brando, whose performance of Stanley Kowalksi I had scrutinised earlier this year for Free-Rain's version of "A Streetcar Named Desire"; whose image kept me nervously pumping weights up to seconds before I walked on the stage; whose muscular portrayal had me hyper-analysing his every subtle move, flex and nuance; whose characterisation had been the reference point of nearly every audience member over 22 who sat in The Courtyard Studio in March; that self-same Marlon... was very fat, very unenthused, very no-dimensional and very crap. By breakfast I was wondering if, fifty years on, I too, like most middle-aged people, would have absolutely no idea about anything at all and be laughing at my own flaccid attempt at "art" or worse, a "cult-comedy". I started shovelling down Bran with gusto.

Sleep deprivation makes you far too intro-suspect.

I will say this much though. Most art practitioners I know in this town, both amateur and professional, could do a better job than this. So if you're feeling slighted by un unfair crit, disappointed that you're not hitting the creative marks you've set yourself, frustrated that you are not being credited or noticed for the innovations you bring, or simply insecure that others are "better" than you, just watch this array of "greats" make an expensive goose of themselves in 94 minutes of a movie Satan keeps in constant-repeat in the video player in hell's waiting-room, and you'll feel totally swell by the end of it all. If any of us was to be supported and financed by whatever amount it cost to concoct "Free Money", we would probably do a "better" job.

In short, watching something inferior to what you know you can do can make you feel a hell of a lot "better" about things. And strangely, creatively, rejuvenated. So...

$2.75. Do it.