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I’m ashamed to admit this but – we’re friends now, and can share stuff, right? – there are times when a movie looks so bad that I start writing the review in my head before actually seeing it. Here’s an insightful syllogism about film criticism: like working at a bookstore (“Oh, I would just love to get to read all day!”), reviewing movies is a lot less fun than it looks, because you have to sit through a lot, and I mean a lot, of tripe; reviewing a bad movie is actually easier, if not necessarily (but often) more fun than reviewing a good one, because once you’ve stated what you don’t like all you have to do is try to be wickedly funny; therefore, when deadlines approach and you’re tired and bleary-eyed and would like to relax in a sensory-deprivation tank for a few months, sometimes a bad movie is actually preferable to a good one because it takes less work.
That’s how I felt going into the last showing of Held Up Saturday night. I’d seen one trailer, so I knew it starred Jamie Foxx as a guy who gets dragged into a convenience-store robbery among rural types who don’t see many black people. In my head I was already working on a generic essay on the challenge of criticizing ethnic comedy without sounding like David Duke. Then the movie started, and instead of some 30mhz bass thump under the opening credits, there’s what sounds more like the theme from Raising Arizona, fading into “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” by Tony Orlando and Dawn. Onscreen a pristine ’57 Studebaker – which I recognized, because my dad’s always had an interest in the marque -- was kicking up dust along the edge of the Grand Canyon.
My first thought was, I’d walked into the wrong show. But I’d seen all the other movies, so my second thought was, the theater must buy popcorn from one of those little Italian communities where lackadaisical monitoring of bakery procedures occasionally lets a lysergic ergot fungus get into the local bread supply, causing widespread hallucinatory episodes. But I could still feel my hands and feet, and I didn’t hear Mariah Carey singing “Dixie,” as happened once when I slipped on some 10w-40 in the driveway, so I started getting interested. What unfolded was one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen. Not in the same sense as The Judas Project or David Lynch’s Lost Highway, but strange that this movie ever got made at all.
Foxx plays Mike Dawson, a Chicago resident vacationing in the Southwest with his fiancé (Nia Long). After a spat following the theft of his prized car, she leaves him at the Sip-n-Zip, where an inept robbery attempt by migrant workers transporting a curiously large parcel degenerates into an equally inept hostage standoff drawing the whole town of Crested Butte out to watch.
Penned by a couple fledgling scriptwriters, Held Up is by no means real theater of the absurd. It’s not even what you’d call very funny. But consider – it’s directed by Steve Rash, who hadn’t done anything since the questionable 1996 Whoopi b-ball comedy Eddie, but is best known for one of the best music movies ever, The Buddy Holly Story. Besides Foxx and Long, the only faces I recognized from the rather large cast were Barry Corbin, mostly incognito since “Northern Exposure” was canceled; Julie Hagerty, from Airplane!; Jake Busey, whose dad starred in Buddy Holly; and Sarah Paulson, who was the resident ghost-sister in “American Gothic.” Scanning the IMDb credits of the rest of the cast for some kind of pattern to make sense of it all, like a tortured netizen from William Gibson’s novels, the only thing I could see they had in common was, almost everybody had appeared in “X-Files” or a TV move about Joe Torre. Adding to the dreamy quality of proceedings are the film’s being set almost entirely within the convenience store, like Clerks but in color and with more-attractive women, and the use of a cheap film stock that contributes to the impression this is really a student film made of a student stage play.
I’m starting to wonder if I imagined it. C-
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