Ebert and Gallo

I don't know how many of you heard about "The Brown Bunny", but I found all this pretty amusing. Note Ebert's fairly obscure Winston Churchill reference at the bottom.

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Gallo's "Bunny" Hops to Top of All-Time Worst List
by Roger Ebert

CANNES, France--Coming up for air like an exhausted swimmer, the Cannes Film Festival produced two splendid films on Wednesday morning, after a week of the most dismal entries in memory. Denys Arcand's "The Barbarian Invasion," from Quebec, and Errol Morris' documentary "The Fog of War," about Robert McNamara, are in their different ways both masterpieces about old men who find a kind of wisdom.

But that is not the headline. The news is that on Tuesday night, Cannes showed a film so shockingly bad that it created a scandal here on the Riviera not because of sex, violence or politics, but simply because of its awfulness.

Those who saw Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" have been gathering ever since, with hushed voices and sad smiles, to discuss how wretched it was. Those who missed it hope to get tickets, for no other film has inspired such discussion. "The worst film in the history of the festival," I told a TV crew posted outside the theater. I have not seen every film in the history of the festival, yet I feel my judgment will stand.

Imagine 90 tedious minutes of a man driving across America in a van. Imagine long shots through a windshield as it collects bug splats. Imagine not one but two scenes in which he stops for gas. Imagine a long shot on the Bonneville Salt Flats where he races his motorcycle until it disappears as a speck in the distance, followed by another shot in which a speck in the distance becomes his motorcycle. Imagine a film so unendurably boring that at one point, when he gets out of his van to change his shirt, there is applause.

And then, after half the audience has walked out and those who remain stay because they will never again see a film so amateurish, narcissistic, self-indulgent and bloody-minded, imagine a scene where the hero's lost girl reappears, performs fellatio in a hard-core scene and then reveals the sad truth of their relationship.

Of Vincent Gallo, the film's star, writer, producer, director, editor and only begetter, it can be said that this talented actor must have been out of his mind to (a) make this film and (b) allow it to be seen. Of Chloe Sevigny, who plays the girlfriend, Daisy, it must be said that she brings a truth and vulnerability to her scene that exists on a level far above the movie it is in.

If Gallo had thrown away all of the rest of the movie and made the Sevigny scene into a short film, he would have had something. That this film was admitted into Cannes as an Official Selection is inexplicable. By no standard, through no lens, in any interpretation, does it qualify for Cannes. The quip is: This is the most anti-American film at Cannes, because it is so anti-American to show it as an example of American filmmaking.

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Director's Dud Widely Reviled - Even By Him
by Roger Ebert

CANNES, France--The Affair of the Brown Bunny, one of the most astonishing episodes in the history of the Cannes Film Festival, took another turn Friday when director Vincent Gallo apologized for his film and said, "It is a disaster and a waste of time."

Gallo's "Brown Bunny," which screened as one of three American entries in the official competition, was the lowest-rated film in the history of Screen International, the British trade paper that tabulates votes of a panel of critics. It was booed and laughed at during its screenings, there were countless walkouts, and its inclusion as an official selection called into question the judgment, even the sanity, of the programmers. That several French critics liked it was, Gallo said, "almost like salt in the wound."

The film consists of an unendurable 90 minutes of uneventful banality, as Gallo's character travels cross-country toward a motorcycle race in California, followed by a hard-core sex scene in which he imagines he receives fellatio from his lost love, played by Chloe Sevigny. Let it be said that Sevigny, who reportedly cried during the screening, is heroic in the way she finds conviction and truth in her character, in the midst of the general catastrophe. Many minutes of the earlier scenes consist of such shots as a windshield gradually accumulating dead bugs.

Gallo is talented as an actor, and his first film as a director, "Buffalo 66" (1998), was so quirky and free-spirited you not only forgave its eccentricities but cherished them. Nothing in his previous career would predict the disaster of "Brown Bunny."

"I accept what the critics say," Gallo told Screen International, whose panel gave the bunny its record low rating. "If no one wants to see it, they are right. I apologize to the financiers of the film, but I must assure you it was never my intention to make a pretentious film, a self-indulgent film, a useless film, an unengaging film."

"L'Affaire Brown Bunny" has generated so much publicity, as the low point of a dismal year at Cannes, that it may actually find French distribution; there may be a cachet attached to seeing such a universally derided film. Some French critics specialize in defending the indefensible, to show that they alone can understand a rejected work; their explications of "Brown Bunny" may be--indeed, must inevitably be--more entertaining than the film.

Gallo might be expected to leave town quickly after the bunny debacle, but he is also an actor in Peter Greenaway's "The Tulse Luper Suitcases: The Moab Story," which plays in the official competition here over the weekend. That means he will be expected to march once again up the red carpet and into the Palais--where, he said, the "Brown Bunny" screening was "the worst feeling I ever had in my life."

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Gallo Goes on the Offensive After "Bunny" Flop
by Roger Ebert

Vincent Gallo has put a curse on my colon and a hex on my prostate. He called me a "fat pig" in the New York Post and told the New York Observer I have "the physique of a slave-trader." He is angry at me because I said his "The Brown Bunny" was the worst movie in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.

I was not alone in my judgment. Screen International, the British trade paper, convenes a panel of critics to score the official entries. "The Brown Bunny" scored 0.6 out of a possible five--the lowest score in its history, the paper said.

This came as a blow to the French. Their national pride could not abide the notion that an American film was worse than any of their own, and so a few days later they countered with Bertrand Blier's "Les Cotelettes."

"It actually scored even worse with our forlorn international critics," Colin Brown, editor of Screen International, told me. "Seven zeroes, vs. Gallo's five zeroes."

The "Bunny" press screening "was remarkable for the unrestrained hostility of the audience," wrote A. O. Scott in the New York Times. At the end, the audience "gave voice to that French form of abuse that sounds like a cross between the lowing of a cow and the hooting of an owl."

During a scene where Gallo shares a bicycle with a young woman, I became so nostalgic for "Butch Cassidy" that I softly sang "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head." I stopped after six words when my wife jabbed me in the ribs. I was overheard by a writer for Hollywood Reporter, who included it in his coverage about how badly the film was received, and that is another reason Gallo has put the heebie-jeebie on my colon and prostate. I am not too worried. I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than "The Brown Bunny."

A day after the fiasco of the movie's premiere, Screen International ran a remarkable interview in which Gallo apologized for his film, calling it "a disaster and a waste of time," and adding, "I apologize to the financiers of the film, but I must assure you it was never my intention to make a pretentious film, a self-indulgent film, a useless film, an unengaging film." He added that the official screening "was the worst feeling I ever had in my life," and said he would never watch the film again.

On Monday Gallo told the New York Post's Page Six that Screen International "made up" his quotes. He added, "I'm sorry I'm not gay or Jewish, so I don't have a special interest group of journalists who support me." Such comments might seem politically incorrect, but not to Gallo, who says he is a conservative Republican, although since his film ends with a hard-core oral sex scene, he is not likely to be fielding many group bookings from the Moral Majority.

But was Gallo actually misquoted?

"Absolutely insane stuff from Gallo," editor Colin Brown assured me. "Not only is everything we wrote in Cannes exactly as he spewed out, word for word, it was all recorded on audio tape." He added, "It makes me wonder whether this is not all some great marketing ploy on his part. I have actually come across people who say 'Brown Bunny' is top of their list of films they most want to see out of Cannes this year."

Fionnuala Halligan, who wrote the Screen International piece, says she quoted Gallo accurately and sent me a copy of his transcript. "By the end he is shouting and spitting, and his invective is so unpleasant, I feel quite shaken listening to it again," she told me. "I don't think it was a good day for him to meet the press, as he was obviously extremely upset. He was very late, and all the interviews that had previously been arranged got lumped into one group, which is fortunate for me, as he probably would have thumped me otherwise."

Gallo all but wept in a Cannes interview as he described the pain of "growing up ugly," but empathy has its limits, and he had no tears for a fat pig and slave-trader such as myself. It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of "The Brown Bunny."