Relax. They left a long time ago.

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The past few months I’ve been in the process of digitizing my DVD collection because I like the idea of taking of all my easily available movies to a distant hard-to-reach location. That way, if I want to see one of these movies, my only choice is to try to access them on an incredibly finicky storage format that is not at all known to crash depending on what day it happens to be.

While going through my movies, I came across a DVD for a film I hadn’t seen in quite a while, and by merely holding the box, I had taken a bite out of Proust’s Madeleine, whisking me back to the year 2001 — a  year I look back on fondly.

A year of fun.

A year of love.

A year of hope.

A year of dreams.

Yup, 2001 was a particularly awesome year bursting with nothing but great times.

Well, uh, except for the other thing.

But let’s just, uh, forget about that one unfortunate event for a moment and focus on the —

WHAT THE FUCK? WHAT DO YOU MEAN FORGET, MOTHERFUCKER?! YOU WANNA FORGET WHAT HAPPENED? HUH? DO YOU? YOU GODDAMN FUCKIN COMMIE SOCIALIST TERRORIST FEMINIST SJW DINDU NUFFIN LOVING KNEELING FOR THE NATIONAL ANTHEM FAGGOT CUCK FUCK?! WELL YOU GO AHEAD AND FORGET. GO AHEAD, IT’S A FREE COUNTRY. A COUNTRY MADE FREE BY AMERICAN SOLDIERS WHO SACRIFICED THEIR LIVES SO YOU CAN HAVE YOUR PRECIOUS FREEDOM AND SO THEY CAN GET THEIR COLLEGE EDUCATION PAID FOR. BUT THERE’S ONE THING YOU CAN’T FORGET. ALL RIGHT ALL RIGHT LOOK, YOU SEE THIS? YOU SEE THAT? YOU SEE THAT? DO I DO I HAVE TO ASK YOU AGAIN? YOU SEE THAT? YOU SEE THESE COLORS? THESE THREE COLORS OVER HERE? LOOK AT ‘EM. I SAID LOOK AT EM. YOU SEE THIS? DO YOU SEE THIS? I SAID DO YOU SEE THESE COLORS? YOU DO? GOOD. CUZ LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT THESE HERE COLORS. SOMETHING I BET THOSE LIBTARD PROFESSORS IN THAT FANCY COMMUNITY COLLEGE OF YOURS DIDN’T TEACH YOU. THESE COLORS? THESE THREE COLORS? LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT THESE COLORS. 

THESE COLORS? 

THEY DON’T RUN. 

YOU GOT THAT? THEY DON’T RUN.  

DON’T MESS — DON’T MESS WITH THAT. 

NOW YOU GO AND TAKE THAT BACK TO HOLLYWEIRD COMMIE MEXI-CALIFORNIA AND DON’T YOU FUCKIN’ FORGET IT. 

I sure won’t, sir. Perhaps “forget” was the wrong word. What I meant was, let’s not dwell on that, let’s not make that the topic of this particular blog entry/episode. I’m just trying to set up my ramblings about a movie.

I’m just saying — what I’m trying to say — is that I remember that time — most of that time — being a particularly free-flowing fountain of fun for me and my fellow fellows. It was during those wonderfully irresponsible limbos between high school, college, and the real world, when those of us who had jobs used our paychecks towards financing our weekends — weekends that weren’t necessarily relegated to Friday and Saturday. And yet, despite the parties and the drinking and the drugs, my fondest pastimes involved none of those. The experiences I remember the most involved seeing movies or hearing live music or going to museums.

Oh, and banging chicks.

Now if we must go back to the September-sized elephant in the 2001 room — one can almost look at what happened on that fateful day as a cold hard slap of Reality to remind the rest of us lucky enough to continue our existence that everything is finite.

So enjoy the good times while they last, motherfuckers.

I have no idea what I’m trying to say with all of this or if I’m even trying to say anything with all of this. I think I’m just trying to put you in the same frame of mind that I was when I found this DVD of a movie that was released in the summer of that awesome/horrible year: Nostalgia. It hit hard and refreshed my memory of the first time I saw this movie.

It was a warm July evening when my friend and I went to a classmate’s apartment with hopes of convincing her to appear in a short film that we were making for a student project because she was taking acting classes, but more importantly, she was attractive. After walking up three flights of stairs, we arrived at her place and were greeted by the scent of long-extinguished marijuana and the sight of this lovely-looking woman and her skater boy minions gathered around a 27-inch Philips CRT television set watching amateur video of long-haired, cap-wearing White boys trying to land various tricks on skateboards with a success ratio of 30-percent.

The girl — who we’ll call Avril — noticed that I was particularly winded and I immediately gave a chuckle, and with the little breath I had to spare I said something incredibly witty and on point like “You sure have a lot of stairs.”

Avril smirked and responded with “Looks like somebody has to hit the gym” and I’m sure her skater boy minions would’ve high-fived her and each other, were they not already entranced by Jonny D-Boy Deez pulling off a sick Sigma flip on the television.

(Avril didn’t end up in the film.) 

Preemptively defeated, my friend and I decided to end the evening by taking in a movie. We stopped at a local AMC theatre and decided on the film starring that cute snaggletoothed chick from Bring it On, co-starring some dude who was a friend of a friend from high school, and directed by Cougar from Top Gun.

Originally titled At Seventeen before being changed to something more stylish, Crazy/Beautiful stars Kirsten Dunst as Nicole Oakley, a teenager who goes to a very nice high school and lives in a very nice house in the very nice L.A. coastal region known as the Pacific Palisades. Financially, she has zero problems. Emotionally, the bitch got issues. Her mother died a few years back and it seems like the only way Nicole can deal is by getting wasted — whenever, wherever.

Meanwhile, there’s Mexican-American Carlos Nunez played by Jay Hernandez and he’s from the brown side of the tracks aka the barrio. He lives among mi hard working gente who wake up early every morning to go to work even though your average Hispano-hater would call them lazy. And yet at the same time they’ll complain about these people stealing jobs. Well, which is it, you indecisive fucks? Are these dirty wetbacks lazy or working? Because they can’t be both. Pick one reason to hate and stick with it, you fucking cunts.

Anyway, Carlos also wakes up early, except in his case it’s not to be a lazy beaner working an eighteen hour day in this country made great again. He wakes up at five in the morning so he can catch a bus that takes him to the same high school Nicole attends. See, the thing with mi hermano Carlos is that he has aspirations. He has dreams. He wants to attend Annapolis and he wants to become a Navy pilot. And that means busting his ass harder than your average student — not unlike how immigrants to this country, legal or illegal, tend to put more effort in comparison to people who were born here.

I like how a sequence early in the film reflects this, in a way, sorta, kinda. I mean, Carlos is a born American but I’m gonna go ahead and still use this as a metaphor because I need something to talk about. What I’m saying is that at the beginning of the film, you see Carlos going through his way-too-early-in-the-morning-for-a-teenager routine. You can tell that he doesn’t waste a second to lolly-gag; his mom wakes him up, he gets dressed, he eats a fast breakfast, and then takes off in the pale blue early morning light for what looks like a long walk to a bus stop for what is clearly going to be a long commute to school. 

Then we cut to Nicole’s bedroom to see how the other half gets ready for school. Now we’re at a much more reasonable morning hour and the sun is as out as a homosexual in the Castro, but Nicole is still in bed, wide awake. Like Carlos, a Latina is there to make sure she’s up. Unlike Carlos, the Latina is her housekeeper. Wearing the wrinkled shirt and drawstring pants ensemble she was sleeping in, Nicole eventually gets up and shuffles herself over to the kitchen where she then serves herself a bowl of cereal with a Paxil chaser before sitting down to enjoy the cartoon “Ed, Edd N Eddy”. She then gets picked up by her best friend Maddy, and off she goes to school — in the same clothes that she slept in. I’m assuming she took a shower the night before, but that still doesn’t excuse going to school in dirty clothes, especially a girl in her income bracket.

But hey, that’s America for you. Regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity: the privileged are really all just a bunch of dirty White girls.

And Nicole is most definitely a dirty White girl. The overhead shot that establishes the filthy bedroom she sleeps in — it’s just a mess with clothes and various rich girl knick knacks filling the place up and there’s mud tracked in on the floor. Who knows how long that’s been there. Clearly, Nicole’s bedroom is the one room the maid is not allowed in. And yet I bet you it’s Carlos who will more likely be called “dirty” by someone because he’s a Brown and people are fucking assholes. 

But that’s OK, because I’m an asshole too and I’m going to continue to demonstrate that by bringing up just how fucking greasy Nicole looks with her oily skin and unwashed hair. I think that’s the point though, because later in the film, there’s a part where she’s at a quinceañera and as she passes by a couple of guests, you can hear them refer to her as sucia which is Spanish for dirty. 

By the way, I remember someone in the movie theater say out loud “man, she’s greasy” and my friend and I tried our best not to laugh. Afterward, we wondered if that person was referring to Nicole’s shiny skin or the fact that her character had just finished scarfing down tacos. Maybe she hadn’t wiped her mouth completely.

The film underwent reshoots — more on those later — but you can tell which scenes were reshot because Dunst not only looks a lot cleaner and fresh-faced in them, but her hair is styled differently and it’s clearly dyed red despite the attempts to light her in a way that you wouldn’t be able to tell. But you can still tell, you can still tell that she just walked in from shooting the first Spider-Man where she was Mary Jane Watson, a character who probably showered and changed clothes more often than Nicole. 

All right,  so I mentioned Nicole being at a quinceañera earlier and you’re wondering how she ended up there. See, this is a love story and so Nicole and Carlos end up hooking up — and all that that entails. They first meet at the beach where Carlos and his homies are chilling out and she’s there doing community service by picking up trash, because drinking and driving is against the law and you should never do it unless you know for sure that you won’t get caught.

I remember when I once had to do community service; I wasn’t driving drunk or anything like that, I got caught by a red light camera at 3 in the morning. Being unemployed and broke, I took the option to work off my fine. By the way, you still have to pay to do community service. One way or the other, they’re getting some money out of your criminal ass.

So I was given fifty hours to work off, and I ended up doing those hours folding clothes at a local Goodwill, but after nearly murdering the bitch-whore manager and her pig fuck assistant manager, I was then transferred to a church where I picked up trash and cleaned tables. Unlike the Goodwill store, they let me listen to my iPod while I worked and they would give me double, sometimes even triple hours credit for a day’s work and so I was able to fulfill my fifty hours rather quickly. It was a Catholic church, so for all I know, they were banging altar boys two at a time, but because they were super chill and nice to me, I didn’t give a fuck.

So anyway, yeah, they hook up, and what’s interesting is that despite Carlos being from the poorer streets of East L.A. and Nicole actually being a resident of Pacific Palisades, he appears to be more of a well-oiled cog in the social machine of this high school than she is. Whereas Carlos is a straight-A student and star athlete on the football team, Nicole is more the type to ditch class just so she can drink and get high in the school parking lot with her equally dirty hippie druggy friends.

In her defense, Nicole isn’t a total useless layabout. She’s an intelligent girl and really into photography, specifically making scrapbook art using her pictures. When she’s not getting wasted, you can find Nicole developing her photographs in the darkroom at school. You can also find her making out with Carlos in the darkroom at school.

So yeah, they’re both ethnic and social opposites, and as Paula Abdul and her lover MC Skat Kat told us long ago: opposites attract. You have Carlos who has been toeing the line and following the rules for most of his life and you have Nicole who doesn’t seem to give a shit about anything resembling Responsibility, and I guess they each want what the other has — his dick and her vagina.

Maddy understands why her friend is into Carlos — “Break me off some of that shit!” she says — but Carlos’ friends and family don’t get it one bit. At home, his mother and brother are friendly to Nicole but they’re also clearly wary of this guera who seems too wild a force for Carlos to reckon with. At school, his football teammates are befuddled as to why he would blow off an after-game party with them just so he can hang out with a couple of drunk damaged goods like Nicole and Maddy instead. They’re probably thinking, why the interest in the skanks when there will be cleaner higher quality trim at the party?

I get it. I mean, Nicole and Maddy are already drunk and therefore halfway there. These other girls at the party, I mean they’re clean and all, but they are gonna make you work for that shit, and if I just played four quarters of good old American football, I’m gonna be too tired to have to make with the charm when I shouldn’t even be going through all that rigamarole. Fuck, I’m a goddamn football star! You and the rest of the potentials should all be lining up for this fuckin’ chorizo, and if I make it into the NFL then maybe — maybe — I’ll take one of you with me, and as soon as I start making the big bucks, you can buy yourself all the stuff you want while I go bang some broad behind your back at whatever hotel I happen to be staying at after a game. And if you think I’m being a pig about this, shit, you go right on ahead and bang Paco the pool boy, Terrence the trainer, and Danny the Dietician if that’s what you want to do. That’s your prerogative. If I’m cheating on you, you can cheat on me, because I believe in equality! 

The one person who really doesn’t want Carlos to go out with Nicole is her congressman father, Tom, played by Bruce Davison. But it’s not for the reason you would think because you’ve seen movies before. It’s not because of Carlos’ social standing or his being a goddamn Messican. In fact, as Nicole points out earlier, her father is such a fuckin’ libtard social justice warrior who will show off pictures of himself with Jimmy Carter and Father Greg Boyle whenever possible, he probably wouldn’t be able to contain his boner upon finding out his daughter is banging raza.

I appreciate the sentiment, Tom, but you can’t be happy just because your daughter is fucking any brown dude, because what if she ends up banging Hector the cholo who just got out of Chino?

“Why Hector, it sounds like you and my daughter are quite the couple now.”

“That’s right, puto, Nicole’s wit me now, ese. Chee don’t belong to you, mang. Chee’s my hina, now.”

That wouldn’t be so nice, now, would it, Tom?

Thankfully, Tom can unclench his sphincter because Carlos is one of the good ones. And that’s why Tom wants Carlos to stay far away. See, Tom doesn’t want Carlos to go near his daughter because he knows Carlos is headed for a bright future, and that hanging out with his dark cloud of a rebellious daughter will only fuck all of that up for him. It’s actually a very heartbreaking scene when Tom tells Carlos this, and Davison’s performance during it is excellent; here’s a father who you can tell has aged considerably in the past few years as a result of trying to put back the pieces of his broken daughter, and now he’s resigned to hoping that she merely keeps the damage to herself. 

It’s not just Bruce Davison putting in quality work here in the acting department; Kirsten Dunst is legitimately fucking great in this movie, and I would put her performance here right up there with some of her other acclaimed roles like The Virgin Suicides and Melancholia. (Man, she sure likes playing depressed.) And all I knew about Jay Hernandez before this film was that he was on one of those wannabe Saturday morning “Saved by the Bell” fraud perpetrators on NBC called “Hang Time” and that a friend of a friend went to high school with him — which practically makes me and him fuckin’ related, bro. But he knocks it out the park here too.

I understand Hernandez is going to be the new Magnum P.I. on CBS, which I don’t know how to feel about. On the one hand, it’s great to see him get a big role like that, but on the other hand, there’s only one Thomas Magnum and his name is Tom Motherfuckin’ Selleck. On the one hand, his ethnicity is gonna be more fuel for the kneejerk types who love to bitch about what they perceive to be everything becoming P.C., including the casting on the reboots of their beloved favorite shows. But on the other hand, fuck those guys in their secretly bigoted mouths with their fathers’ openly racist cocks.

Eh, what do I care. Shit’s probably gonna get cancelled after two weeks, anyway.

When my friend and I went to see this movie back in the awesome/horrible year of 2001, we were just looking to kill a couple hours watching what appeared to be a throwaway teen flick. By the end, we were surprised by how good it turned out to be. Crazy/Beautiful was more mature compared to its contemporaries, which were mostly goofy comedies. OK, yeah, I know Ghost World came out that same summer but that film is in a class of its own, and if I’m gonna be real with you, I feel like that one is not so much a film for teens as its really a film about teens but for adults. But this one felt more like an actual teen film that took its target audience seriously.

Even the style of the film was different from other teen films of the time, with a kind of moody blue-ish look to some scenes and a harsh hyper-real lighting to others; the cinematography was done by Shane Hurlbut, a man who has worked on many Hollywood films and television shows but you will know him best as the subject of Christian Bale’s wrath on the set of Terminator Salvation. I can only assume Kirsten Dunst did not threaten to trash Hurlbut’s lights on this movie.

Some of the songs used in the film led to me buying the soundtrack — and by “buying the soundtrack”, I mean I downloaded it illegally on one of those Napster wannabe sites. One of the songs on it is called “Shattered” by Remy Zero (remember them?), but to be honest that song worked much better in the 1998 film Suicide Kings starring Christopher Walken. But there were a couple that were far more fitting and evocative, and they sounded like they wouldn’t sound out of place on some cool public radio music show like Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW — which is why I wasn’t too surprised when they did pop up on that radio station: “To Be Free” by Emiliana Torrini, and “I Want to Believe You”, a collaboration between singer/songwriter Lori Carson and the film’s composer — former member of Tangerine Dream, Paul Haslinger. There’s also another one I really like called “Who Am I” by Lily Frost (no relation to Kid Frost). It’s such a chick song, but I don’t give a shit. I like chick songs and I like chick movies, bros, come at me.

Crazy/Beautiful is very well-acted and directed from a sensitively written screenplay that treats everybody in the movie like human beings — even Carlos’ douchebag teammate who introduced the pejorative “browntown” into my lexicon. He’s a douche, all right, but I’ve known douches like that douche. All that plus the stylish music and atmospheric visuals turn this teenage love story into a genuine mood piece.

Having said all that, I also feel that the film has some serious flaws. Yes, it’s better than most films of its type that were released back then. But it doesn’t ditch all the pitfalls of the genre either. Most of the problems are relegated to the final act of the film, where you can tell that the studio wanted everything to wrap up quickly and in a neat little bow. But there are also scenes that pop up during the rest of the film that feel as if the studio had been asleep for most of the production until they finally woke up and freaked out over what was being made: a serious teen drama that respected the intelligence of the people watching it. And they certainly couldn’t let that happen.

There are a couple scenes — one of them an obvious reshoot featuring a red-haired Dunst — that damn near make me cringe from watching the characters as they practically spell out and draw on a map what they’re going through. Without spoiling anything, there’s one scene where you can see everything you need to know about what a character is feeling just by looking at the actor’s incredibly emotive face. Then in the very next scene, you have that same character practically explaining for the people in the cheap seats what just happened.

There are also way too many montages for my taste. Unless your name is Rocky IV, cool it with the montages, people. Having said that, there’s one montage that features Maddy trying to cheer up a morose Nicole by playing her a song on the guitar, and that always makes me laugh even though I don’t think I’m supposed to laugh.

Anyway, a lot of my suspicions about the film were confirmed in the DVD audio commentary by director John Stockwell and Kirsten Dunst; during production, the studio informed the filmmakers that Crazy/Beautiful had to be released with a PG-13. This meant scenes were changed and/or shot differently than originally intended in order to ensure that the film would receive the family friendly rating. But even that didn’t save them, because after the film was shot, it turned out that the film was still considered too strong for the rating and so then they had to edit stuff out. Mostly, what ended up being taken out was Nicole’s propensity for strong drink and illicit substances. But also removed was dialogue considered too strong for PG-13 ears and some sweet sweet physical blending of brown and white flesh aka fuckin’.

Reportedly, Stockwell’s cut was over thirty minutes longer and featured the stuff that was deemed too much for the average teen who was probably no stranger to alien concepts like drinking beer and pulling out. It’s too bad this wasn’t a Miramax or Dimension film because that would mean they would’ve released that cut on DVD after the Weinsteins — oy vey! what a shanda! — left that company, the way they finally released the director’s cuts of Bad Santa and Copland as a final fuck you to those departing asshole creepers.

So now I’m just left with the option of breaking into John Stockwell’s house and stealing what I’m guessing is the only available copy of the director’s cut, and I bet you it’s on VHS. I’ll go in prepared; if suddenly the lights turn on and I’m facing down John Stockwell in his underwear, aiming a Glock 22 .40 caliber and he asks me just what in the fuck am I doing in his house at 3 in the goddamn morning, I’ll pull out a Sharpie and my DVD of My Science Project and tell him “I just came to get your autograph, my man!”

Even with studio interference, the final cut of Crazy/Beautiful is still a much better movie than it has any right to be, and it’s too bad the filmmakers weren’t allowed to see the true vision of the picture all the way through. But what are you gonna do? It was the early 2000s, the beginning of the end for this type of big studio movie and the only choices left would’ve been to hop in a time machine with the screenplay and jump forward fifteen years in the future where it would’ve gotten some love as a lower-budgeted R-rated indie that premiered on VOD, or take that time machine back to 1980 back when studios would’ve been like “Teenagers drinking and drugging and fucking and using the F-word? Sure! Here’s a million bucks, have at it!” and it would’ve starred Jodie Foster and Danny De La Paz.

But I’m gonna be even more real with you and admit that maybe, maybe the movie is good but it isn’t that good. Maybe in the same way that re-watching this movie in 2018 took me down Nostalgia Road, watching Crazy/Beautiful for the first time in 2001 took me back to an entirely different lifetime that was a mere two years earlier: I’m talking about high school when I was dealing with my own Nicole experiences.

I don’t mean that she was fucked up on drugs, booze, and mommy issues. I’m just saying that in high school I dated out of Browntown a couple times and that was kind of a big deal. I mean, today that means nothing to me. If I like a girl, and her standards are lowered and she likes me, race and ethnicity and nationality don’t figure into it — at least not until it’s time to visit her parents. But that’s another story — a story that ends with: I never get myself far enough into a relationship to visit any girl’s parents. Fuck that shit. I don’t need some asshole playing the passive aggressive Are You Worthy Of My Daughter game, or worse, if they’re not a Brown, the How Different Are Your People From My People game with special guests Well-Meaning Liberal Mom, Distrustful Conservative Dad, and Asshole Brother & His Equally Asshole Friend.

Anyway, watching Crazy/Beautiful back in 2001 brought back those high school memories. There were a couple things that kind of cut a little deeper than I was expecting, like the part where Nicole puts her pale arm next to Carlos’ tanned arm and says “Look how good our skin looks next to each other.” I actually had a girl of the porcelain persuasion do that to me. She didn’t say anything, she just put her arm against mine and I guess she loved the contrast? I’m not sure. All I know is that I then showed her what a smooth motherfucker I was by immediately complaining about how thin my wrists were — and still are, by the way. I don’t know what to do. I’ve been doing wrist curls, knuckle pushups, to say nothing of constant masturbation. And still, my middle finger and thumb can practically touch each other if I wrap my hand around my wrist. The fuck, man.

There’s also a part where Nicole and Maddy insist that Carlos order from the taco truck in Spanish for them, because they like the sound of that language, and that’s happened to me a couple times with the non-Spanish speakers I dated back then. They’d want to hear me speak Spanish, particularly in food ordering situations. I don’t remember if any of the wait staff rolled their eyes at my dates, the way the lady in the taco truck in this film did to Nicole and Maddy, though.

And you wanna hear the most Twilight Zone part of this whole deal? The Anglo girls I dated back in high school were named Nicole and Kirsten.

What am I saying? Movies are subjective. And if a movie can create Inception-style multi-level waves of nostalgia that causes the viewer to feel nostalgia for the movie that made him or her feel nostalgia, then that’s a top notch mind & emotional fuck of a cinema experience, right there. Even with the lame narration, one-too-many montages, and that cringe-worthy final shot, even with all those flaws, Crazy/Beautiful is that good — to me. Because it’s ultimately about how movies make you feel, right? Many movies bring back memories, and this is just one of them.

By the way, big ups to my sister for naming my niece Nicole, effectively ruining that name for me. But what was I supposed to say? Don’t name your daughter after a girl I had a semester long relationship with in high school who certainly doesn’t remember me but I sure as heckfire remember her because my heart is cursed with goddamn Marilu Henner’s disease? Chale!