Bad Movies We Love: High Strung

Attention: You will see I Love You, Phillip Morris when it hits theaters Friday. It's a blitz of romantic desperation, flash, and (sigh!) gayness. You must go. To prepare you for Jim Carrey's gloriously shady role as Steven Russell in Phillip Morris, I give you this week's Bad Movie We Love, where Jim Carrey plays the most gloriously shady role of all -- Death in High Strung. Join us as we revisit writer/comedian Steve Oedekerk's low-budget, low-meaning flick, and discuss how Carrey's uncredited part might be his most genius.

Behold, High Strung's deepest sentiment:

"No matter how little milk you put on your cereal, there's always too much left in the end."

First, a little context: Steve Oedekerk and Jim Carrey have enjoyed a relationship as old as Fire Marshall Bill's urethane eye, as they've worked together on In Living Color, the Ace Ventura films, Bruce Almighty, and now, the upcoming Ripley's Believe It or Not!. (Yikes.) A few years before Ace Ventura became a jolty-necked Jesus for 8-year-olds everywhere, Carrey played a bit role in Steve Oedekerk's cinematic ode to misanthropy and boredom, High Strung. It's a movie for people who think Seinfeld is too plot-driven. Right. It'd be kind of an admirable idea if the film weren't seriously about nothing. In fact, I'm understating the matter. It's about nothing divided by zero. Your freshman-year algebra teacher makes googly eyes at High Strung and can't even explain it to the class.

Oedekerk plays Thane Furrows, a pissy children's book author who spends his life puttering around an apartment and bitching at us about pet peeves. Thane's huffy diatribes about annoying waitresses, telemarketers, and watermelon popsicles (with seeds) aren't worthy of the Mark Twain Humanitarian Prize, but they're justifiable snaps at humanity.

By the way, it doesn't matter the order in which you view this movie. You're honestly watching Oedekerk run through bits of a 75-minute stand-up routine and posit them as a cineplex draw. "What a narcissist!" you caw, but guess what? Jerry Seinfeld, whose show was already airing by the time High Strung arrived in '91 (making this film's existence that much more mysterious), couldn't saunter through an apartment and bark about nothing for this long. Oedekerk's determination to ensnare us in neurosis is heady, and Curb Your Enthusiasm can only dream of achieving such a monotony-fueled stupor. There is no plot to lose here, and I encourage you to click these clips at random. Feels like you're watching improv, sort of.

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