Spun (2003) – DVD (R-rated)

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Jason Schwartzman, John Leguizamo, Mena Suvari, Patrick Fugit
screenplay by Creighton Vero & William De Los Santos
directed by Jonas Åkerlund

by Walter Chaw I don't have anything in particular against music-video directors making the transition to feature films, except that so often strobe-lighting and images-per-second are the only lessons about film craft they've ever learned. Swedish wunderkind Jonas Åkerlund, who cut his teeth as a chop-horse for Madonna and Moby, makes his feature film debut with jittery crystal meth opera Spun, a picture so misconstrued and haphazardly slapped together that it doesn't so much suggest the sensation of being "spun" on meth as it does getting thrown off a tall building in a washing machine. It strives for a sort of grimy realism but succeeds mainly in being Ken and Barbie Take a Shit-Bath: the young and the beautiful are covered in a patina of grotesquerie, it's true, but the filth isn't taking

Ross (Jason Schwartzman) is a meth-head with a stripper girlfriend (Chloe Hunter) who, after meeting the maker of his meth, Cook (Mickey Rourke), is enlisted as chauffer to him and his stripper girlfriend, Nikki (Brittany Murphy). Three days, a couple of explosions, a bowel movement, a stripper tied to a bed, a few animations, masturbations, and animated masturbations later, Spun teeters to a stop like a broken carnival ride you wish had ended a couple of hours ago. Flashing by on this burnt highway are carbuncular Frisbee (Patrick Fugit) and his morbidly obese and naked mother (Lisa Brounstein, doing a mean Edith Massey); John Leguizamo as John Leguizamo (hyperactive and pesty); flamboyantly fey drug boss Eric Roberts; and, of course, Ron Jeremy as a bartender (ask for all drinks shaken, not stirred).

There's a moment in D.J. Caruso's own tweaker noir The Salton Sea where junkies on a speed bender emerge from a heavily shuttered den to find themselves surprised by sunlight. In one literal flash, the vertigo of drug-induced sleeplessness comes clear to the fore–an idea that Spun, by comparison, forwards with dozens of mindless camera tricks, quick cuts, and, worse, dialogue like "I haven't slept for days." Unused to narrative, Åkerlund tells his story in epileptic bursts and then is compelled to allow dialogue to recap and narrate. Åkerlund also makes the cardinal mistake of trusting a spastic cast that, with the arguable exception of Schwartzman, has never proven itself trustworthy to work without direction. (Some, like Leguizamo, have actually shown themselves dangerously unreliable without a strong hand at the tiller.) An aborted lovemaking scene between Leguizamo and a teeth-blacked Mena Suvari (with Debbie Harry's bull dyke sex operator on the line) is one of those things to which people refer when citing "last straws" and moments immediately preceding escape into the lobby.

Ultimately, what fails about Spun isn't its storytelling incompetence or the frenetic overreaching of its inexperienced cast, but the fact that it says almost nothing about addiction while saying a lot about how much fun it looks like to be a beautiful young actor playing "dress down" in a message movie. The technical aspects of the piece end up being the only thing discussed about the piece–making the star of the film not its story nor its characters, but its hyperactivity and, of course, its over-similarity to Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream. Spun is self-aggrandizing babble about nothing in particular, a picture that takes aim at the heart of a genuine malady and makes a music video out of it in all its slickified mock pretension, beautiful bodies, and guilty titillation. Originally published: April 18, 2003.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Because we didn't specify otherwise, Columbia TriStar sent us the R-rated version of Spun on DVD for review, but what secrets the unrated edition holds are not exactly left to the imagination by the "R" release, which blurs over the full frontal nudity and inexplicably bleeps out the slang terms for female genitalia while leaving in the profanity that serves as their adjectives. (The optional subtitles transcribe them as "c**t" and "p***y.") Thus the intricacies of censorship become impenetrable within minutes of the viewing experience: Somebody calls somebody else a "fucking goddamn motherfucking [bleep]," and a nude woman with jiggling breasts is cruelly tied to a bed, her eyes and mouth taped shut, her ears deafened with jock-rock, and all the while… her pubic hair is digitally obscured. Who in the hell is the MPAA protecting at that point? It's a bowdlerization so fascinating I've no choice but to recommend the disc as both a study in contradiction and a cultural artifact–a time capsule of early twenty-first-century hysteria, if you will.

Even better, the studio neglected to tamper with the deleted scenes (filed under, appropriately, "More Shit"), so everything they laboured to remove during the film proper is clear, if not as day (from the looks of their rough video quality, these excisions come straight from the AVID), elsewhere on the R-rated platter. A music video for an unknown song by an unknown female artist, trailers for Spun, Auto Focus, and Levity, TV and video spots for Spun (the latter an amusing spoof of a cooking show segment in which Mickey Rourke teaches us how to make speed, albeit with unnamed ingredients), and a DVD credit listing round out the disc, whose tech specs have merit. The 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is fine, though some shots are slightly out of register (one of the few tics of Eric Broms's cinematography that doesn't appear to be intentional); better still is the Dolby Digital 5.1 soundmix, bound to startle you each and every time a character snorts crystal meth, a frequent occurrence that utilizes the subwoofer and remaining channels in jolting tandem.

101 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Columbia TriStar