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.
Bizarrely, supporting characters find a way to appear in High Strung. Thane's superior at the children's book company, a humorless powersuit named Melanie (Denise Crosby), hates Thane's work and defends the brand's best-known star, Happy the Clam. ("I will not sit here and listen to you badmouth Happy the Clam!" is the movie's coup de grace.) Thane prefers more practical children's book ideas like How to Start the Family Car for when "someone chokes on a chicken bone" and "there are no adults around."
Other drop-ins are weirder: Fred Willard shows up at Thane's apartment as an insurance salesman. Thomas F. Wilson (Biff in the Back to the Future movies) plays Thane's lone friend, Al. And in one odd dream sequence, a young Kirsten Dunst appears. (We've done three Bad Movies We Love, and Dunst has already come up twice. Statisticians, mark up the books.) The finest cameo, though, belongs to Carrey, whose glowing visage interrupts the film at random intervals and shocks us out of Thane's cynical hermitage.
While we wait the length of the movie to discover just why he keeps popping up in Thane's mind, it takes but one glimpse to realize Carrey's greatest talent: He can do scary. Dumb and Dumber and Liar, Liar are choice, but it's Carrey's menacing stare in The Cable Guy -- first witnessed in High Strung -- that sticks years later. You'll see bits of that in I Love You, Phillip Morris, too, but without the sub-human rubberface. Like Andy Kaufman, Carrey is in touch with something deeply maniacal. Oh, REM, explain it to us!
Anyway, lo and behold, Thane "confronts" Carrey at film's end. Wowzers, turns out he's Death! Spoiler: Death thinks Thane is too annoying to deal with and lets him toil in civilization for eternity. Teehee. Pardon the annoying intro in the following clip.
High Strung would be screwball existentialism if it weren't also so ghetto, you know? Still, we earned our share of Sartre by way of the sardonic, and if you can't respect shoestring-budget action and Oedekerk's wild gesticulations, you deserve to come down with amnesia, wash ashore in a new town, and be forced to watch Bad Movies We Hate like The Majestic. I said it, Martin Landau.