Oh, Crispin Glover. How hard you work at appearing to be crazy! How tired you must be at the end of each day, having spent so many hours acting weird so that people would notice you! How attention-starved you are!
Well, here is the attention you requested: Your new movie, “It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine,” is complete crap, bad in nearly every possible way. But rather than repeat the word “bad” over and over again, I will express my feelings via a mathematical equation:
bad (acting + directing + dialogue + story + editing)
Be sure to multiply the term outside the parentheses by each of the terms inside. Add them all up and you get “It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine,” a movie that is crap! Everything is crap.
Imagine porn. You with me so far? OK, now imagine snuff porn, i.e., porn where after the sex, the woman is murdered. Now imagine snuff porn as produced by the Special Olympics. That is the vision of Crispin Glover.
Glover has a fascination with mentally and physically handicapped people, as demonstrated in his Downsploitation film “What Is It?,” and as further evidenced here. The protagonist is Paul, a 50-something man with severe cerebral palsy that renders him unable to walk and incomprehensible when he speaks. Paul is played by Steven C. Stewart, who had cerebral palsy in real life and who wrote the screenplay, too. (He died after filming.)
Paul has a vivid fantasy life in which he has sex with and subsequently murders beautiful longhaired women. But is it really fantasy? Or is Paul really a killer?
If any of the performers in the film are professional actors, it doesn’t show. Their dialogue is uniformly ridiculous, their performances flat and monotonous. Making a film inexpensively is fine — but there are plenty of filmmakers who spend very little money yet still manage to create films that look to have been made by professionals.
The biggest problem with the film is a logistical one: Paul talks a lot, but we can’t understand 98 percent of what he says due to his impeded speech. Not to be pedantic, but it’s hard to enjoy — or even follow — a film in which the main character is incomprehensible.
Glover seems to be daring us to be put off by his extremely off-putting movie: If we find it uncomfortable to watch dull, unsexy porn, or if we’re annoyed by the protagonist’s indecipherable dialogue, we must be hatin’ on the handicapped. But I love the handicapped. It’s boring, laughably acted movies I hate.
D (1 hr., 14 min.; )
