What Just Happened (2008) - by Faro

Indeed... what did just happen? Another bait and switch... we were given a trailer and a movie poster that present this movie as fun, fast, irreverent, and involving unexpected facial hair. Instead we were served up a dark grim slice of Hollywood satire that ended up being more bleak than biting... 

Sure, everyone is in it... hell, even the Penns are in it, and its always a pleasure to see them in a film together, even if they never share a scene.

But what about all the other movies that have played inside this “cruel and shallow money trench where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs” (Hunter S. Thompson)?

I mean... just for starters, does anyone remember Timecode by Mike Figgis? I mean, there was a movie with balls... a four-way split screen, multi-part narrative that examined this exact same world with far more interesting results.

And of course, one of my favorites is Mullholland Drive, lost in a fog of its own overlapping timelines and perspectives. Then there is  Adaptation that shows us more about film writers than we would like to know. Oh, and Hurlyburly, again with the Penn’s, digs all the way into the empty echoing place that is the heart of this shell game of the film industry, and still remains emotionally and intellectually involving. And the list goes on and on...

But here, in this movie, all we get is pain and suffering and humiliation when we were initially promised wit and wisdom. And there are no surprises, no subtleties to unravel... it all just comes at us as straight and dour as a cold stiff rain.

This is perhaps most notable in the opening and ending of the film, which force feeds the point to us in case we missed it during the rest of this un-subtle movie. These two scenes (we need to see it twice to understand its cleverness I guess) center on a photo shoot for a Vanity Fair cover, where the word POWER stands in bold physical letters on a stage and Hollywood power players are clustered around it to get their picture taken. This is supposed to show us that in Hollywood, where the name of the town is itself up on a hill, it seems that one’s relationship to Power is similarly determined by how close you stand to a physical manifestation of that word during a photo shoot.

Sure, that’s a clear enough image... and a nice way to sell some magazines... but shouldn’t the movie have shown us this relationship already without this blatant imagery? And if these visually blunt didactic scenes weren’t enough, they even give us a detailed voice-over narration during both scenes to make the purpose even more explicit.... gods... I need a drink and a Alejandro Jodorowsky film to cleanse my palate.