Fine vulpine Stephen Dorff is perfect in Sofia Coppola's new film Somewhere, so it's only right that we revisit his most shameful work for this week's Bad Movie We Love: 1994's S.F.W. No, it doesn't stand for "Safe for Work." Yes, it stands for something just as annoying.
Couple things: 1. I swear we'll evacuate the '90s soon. Problem is, those years are an arable BMWL meadow, and we're just starting to tap its terra firma. (We haven't even brought up Jean-Claude Van Damme yet. Or Robin Tunney! Or Sandra "BMWL BAMF" Bullock. So settle down, nephew.) 2. This movie is horrible. Loving it requires utmost condescension, a quality I only condone when the movie condescends to us first. And girl, does it try.
Let's unpack S.F.W.'s worst attribute (the entire plot!) first: Cliff Spab (Dorff) and his buddy Joe (Not Important) visit a liquor store one night and -- whoops -- terrorists force them and three others into a basement where Patty Hearst antics commence immediately. For over a month, Cliff, Joe, and a nervous teen named Wendy (Reese Witherspoon!) deal with masked gunmen who film them nonstop. These terrorists have forced TV networks to broadcast their footage live for weeks on end, an occurrence that turns the detained Gen X-ers into accidental TV-land heroes. Ratings prove they are even more compelling than Home Improvement and Randy's cancer. This is where credibility gets murky.
Soon, Cliff gets his hands on a gun and kills the terrorists, but amid the bloody upheaval, Joe ends up shot, then dead. After Cliff and Wendy escape, the town decides Cliff, who took a bullet in the shoulder, is the main hero because he was the most apathetic during detainment. More importantly, the home viewers really dig the slacker catchphrase he hollered at his captors: "So f*cking what!?" Yes, "S.F.W." stands for "So F*cking What?" It's the new "I'm a Loser, Baby, So Why Don't You Kill Me?" or "Talk to the Hand" or "I Unfriended Your Mom," etc. Before you know it, "S.F.W." t-shirts, posters, bookmarks, Kangol hats, Pogs, and pantsuits crop up all over Cliff's neighborhood. He is a star -- albeit an apathetic one whose hair-flip is only matched by Christian Bale's in our beloved Newsies.
You see where this is going, right? The media, the town, and Cliff's loved ones seize on his fame, but he's over it. Over it! A horrible Sam Donaldson impersonator says on TV: "We hope to have Cliff as our guest as soon as he permits!" Cliff's dumbo, one-scene dad tells him, "All that stuff I said about you being a loser? Well, forget it!" The fast food joint where Cliff worked is even hawking a "Cliff Spab special" -- a 36-cent burger, one cent for each day of his detainment. Right. The only sensible person in sight is Cliff, and because this movie is clearly written by a condescending Baby Boomer who thinks Gen X is full of indifferent ciphers, we're full of contempt for Cliff too.
After an hour of his scattered hookups with babes who tell him to feel worse about the dead hostages or good for being such a hero, we hit the film's climax at a school assembly, where the coupled-up Cliff and Wendy are the main speakers. By this time Cliff has owned his status as a cult and/or mainstream hero, and he's unleashing gruff soundbites left and right. (The best one: "I don't consider myself nothing -- with all you reporters doing it for me.") Before he can proclaim himself a benevolent god of not-caring, a dorky pariah in the crowd (Amber Benson!) stands up, points a gun at him and Wendy, shrieking, "Everything matters!"
She's taken off to jail, but "Everything matters!" -- mysteriously -- becomes the town's hot new catchphrase. It's like "Where's the Beef?" or "I Ain't No Hollaback Girl" or "Sic Semper Tyrannis." People love catchphrases in this movie! You can always use another tie-dye tee, after all, and catchphrases spelled in Comic Sans font look fetching on their magenta-lime tableau. While "Everything matters!" overtakes the world, Cliff and Wendy quietly decide to marry at the hospital, even though both have suffered gunshot wounds. They've survived the press's onslaught, and now they can get back to caring (!) about important things like each other.
Lame. An early-90s spin on adjusting to life after a psychological trauma? Um, did you want the creators of Reality Bites to remake The Best Years of Our Lives? That's what happened here.
Yet despite the past 45 paragraphs, I promise this is lovable. "Why? How?!" you clamor, like clueless witnesses in a whodunit.
Well, the heavy-handedness of director Jefery Levy's film is delightful. Guess what song plays when Cliff sees a picture of himself on a newspaper and feels disoriented. It's "Creep," by Radiohead. Guess what song plays when Cliff bangs a petty teenage whore. "Teenage Whore" by Hole. Guess what music video Cliff watches when he's feeling isolated? "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden. The S.F.W. soundtrack might be called "Now! That's What I Call Disenfranchised Youth 14!"
Lastly, guess how Cliff responds to the press question, "Exactly what is it you are rebelling against?" Oh, child: With, "That depends. What you got?" Yes. Stephen Dorff, our own personal Star Fox, is ripping off Marlon Brando dialogue. That's the crux of S.F.W.'s woes and wonderfulness: It is serious about being the not-take-itself-seriously movie of a generation of un-serious people. Seriously. Historians will note that the box-office take of S.F.W. ($63,649, according to IMDB) is less than some contestants make on a single episode of Wheel of Fortune. Maybe it should've curbed its ambitions of a searing Hoop Dreams triumph somewhat.
The pomp of it all. Plus, Joey Lauren Adams plays a meaningless role. And Jake Busey plays a meaningless role. And he is an angry albino warlord at 6'4 and 121 pounds.
