I have a theory about film. I call it The Dabney Coleman Theory. The Dabney Coleman Theory postulates that any movies with Dabney Coleman will unequivocally suck. The exception to the Dabney Coleman Theory–the exception that proves the rule, if you will–is The Man With One Red Shoe. The Man With One Red Shoe is, despite the presence of Dabney Coleman, a masterpiece of the 1980′s spy comedy genre. Unfortunately, Domino continues Dabney Coleman’s career long trend of appearing in terrible movies.
Domino is the story of an asskicking supermodel turned bounty hunter and her bounty hunter companions: a fiery and temperamental Venezuelan, a cat-eating Afghani suicide bomber and Mickey Rourke. The film also features a supporting cast that includes a trio of sassy black women, and pudgy, slightly lisping Hispanic homosexual and Delroy Lindo. Despite having a cast of unique, innovative and highly original characters, Domino never manages to be anything other than an extremely annoying movie. I think this is due to the fact that director Tony Scott assumes his target audience consists of a bunch of earless retards.
Domino, at times, plays like a silent movie. By that I mean that it features a constant soundtrack to emphasize physical actions on the screen and some of the dialogue is printed in text on the screen. Such techniques worked well in the silent era of film making, when sound effects and spoken dialogue were difficult to implement. Funny thing is, Domino has sound effects. Domino has spoken dialogue. So why does Tony Scott feel it’s necessary to print the text of Mickey Rourke’s dialogue on the screen? Obviously, he thinks I’m some sort of earless retard.
Fuck you, Tony Scott. I have both my ears. They are sexy, if somewhat large, ears. And I am not a retard. Could an earless retard read almost half the first chapter of the first book of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu? I don’t think so. But what an earless retard could realize is that it gets kinda tiresome when a director puts some sort of lame Eurotrash techno or stupid Eurotrash tango or silly Eurotrash Afghani music in every damn scene of the movie. Hey, I like Xzibit as much as the next white kid who’s spent his entire life living in the slightly upper-middle class suburbs, but I don’t need to hear his songs every time a black person comes on screen.
Oh, and while I’m on the subject of things I don’t need in movies, I also don’t need lines of dialogue echoed over and over again. Once again, I am not an earless retard. Could an earless retard purchase an unabridged, illustrated, hardbound edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur but never actually read it, because it turns out it’s like 900 pages long? I highly doubt it. As someone who is clearly not an earless retard, I’m somewhat annoyed by the fact that Tony Scott saw fit to replay the same lines of dialogue over and over again in the span of thirty seconds or so. “My name is Domino Harvey. Domino Harvey. I’m a bounty hunter. I’m a bounty hunter.” What’s the point of that? The movie is named Domino. It’s quite clear, after two hours and seven minutes, that Domino is a bounty hunter. If there’s any line in the movie that doesn’t need repeating, it’s “My name is Domino Harvey. I’m a bounty hunter.”
As for the ending of Domino, it never had the potential to be anywhere near Shakespearean in magnitude. In fact, it’s a pretty standard ending. Three characters get shot to hell, but still manage to live long enough to pronounce their love/say their goodbyes to Domino. Then Domino, assault rifle in each hand, screams and kills the bad guys. All this happens in slow motion, naturally. And the cat-eating Afghani dude blows up all the other bad guys with a homemade bomb. God forbid there be an ethnic character in Domino that didn’t completely fulfil his ethnic stereotype requirements.
Between the ceaseless annoying music, terrible sound editing and generic ending, Domino is filled with far too many reference to Beverly Hills, 90210, a completely unnecessary Jerry Springer scene and a scene with a sofa in the middle of nothing, but not the entertaining kind of sofa suspended in the midst of a vast emptiness. From start to finish, Domino is a mess, an insulting uninventive mess that could only be enjoyed by earless retards. But even the most earless and retarded of the earless retards could find something better to do that watch Domino. On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give Domino the dreaded evil tiny head of Sergei Eisenstein.
Will you be making a rare trek to the theater in order to provide us with an awesome movie review of the Sidney Lumet / Vin Diesel picture?
I’ll try to get out and see it next week, possibly Wednesday. And don’t call it a Sidney Lumet/Vin Diesel picture. It’s a Vin Diesel/Peter Dinklage picture.
I’ll have to admit that I didn’t know who Peter Dinklage was. I checked over at imdb.com at found out that he is that dwarf actor from The Station Agent. His list of in-production films include “The Dwarf” and “Mendel’s Dwarf” which fit with the notion that a dwarf actor will act in a lot of little-people centric movies. The list also includes a film entitled “3/5 of a Man”. I thought “Well, I guess that refers to a dwarf being about 60% as large as the average guy, but it also refers to the pre-civil war constitutional interpretation that slaves were to be counted as 60% of a person for purposes of population based representation. That’s odd. Will Peter Dinklage be wearing blackface?”
I click the link and it turns out that 3/5 of a Man is about the Nat Turner slave revolt, which raises the question of what a white dwarf has to do with a slave revolt? I can only imagine a scene such as:
NAT TURNER: Yeah, if you step up with me you may die. And yeah, if you don’t rise up right here, right now, you’ll sleep safely in your bed tonight. But when you lay in that bed years from now, as your last breath of life slips away, would you trade all the days from now til then for one chance, one chance to be free?
LAMAR: Sure, sure Nat, going is tough right now, but if we’re patient, if we sit tight, we may well receive the right to vote in congressional elections within the next few decades. And isn’t true change only to be brought about through the ballot box, through the consolidation of popular support and the inherent validation conferred via the same, not the instability propelled forth from the barrel of a gun, with such velocity that it be ahead of its time?
NAT TURNER: Well, you just wait for your congressional elections, Lamar, you just wait. Who do you think counts the ballots? Who do you think draws the district boundaries? For god’s sake, when the government proportions congressional representation, do you know to what extent you count? You count as 3/5 of a man! You are not 3/5 of a man! I am not 3/5 of a man! (Cut to white dwarf whittling on nearby porch) That’s 3/5 of a man!
I’m far more interested in The Dwarf. Did you check out the description? “Set during the Italian Renaissance, Piccolino the dwarf (Dinklage) commits heinous, vile acts on behalf of his master, a prince.” From the review of the novel on amazon: “Don’t miss this. You will not soon find another like it. The evil in the Dwarf’s nature is in ours, too–is universal.” How can that not be a fantastic movie?
As for the Nat Turner movie, according to IMDb, the sister of the director is an English professor at Rutgers.
That summary of “The Dwarf” sounds like a brief summary of Book Two of the Song of Ice and Fire.
I’ve never read the Song of Ice and Fire series, but according to wikipedia, the first novel in the series was written almost fifty years after The Dwarf. But I suppose it’s still noteworthy that a fantasy author ripped off someone other than Tolkien.