Flypaper

I had never heard of this movie until I saw it mentioned online somewhere that Lucy Liu had done a nude sex scene in it. I, of course, rented the film and watched it. The movie isn't very good, honestly. As for Lucy, she's naked all right, and in a short sex scene, but the shots of her body are very brief and you have to use the pause button on your remote if you want to catch any of it. The sex scene itself is NOT graphic, as one user commented, it's very very tame. Lucy and the guy...I don't know his name...they have sex in a pit of snakes. You get brief glimpses of Lucy's breast(s) and a shot of her butt, but I have a sneaking suspicion that was a body double since we never see her face in the shot. Well, if you're like me, and you watched this movie to see Lucy Liu's nude beauty, you'll only be happy if you don't expect much. She is beautiful but the nudity is short and tame. If you watched this movie for the movie itself, then you probably wasted an hour and a half.

This movie consists of a bunch of quirky characters doing incredibly quirky (and violent) things and mouthing absolutely unbelievably quirky dialogue. I'd imagine that how it came to be was that the folks who created it saw films such as those of the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino and basically completely missed everything that was going on other than the superficialities, i.e. the quirkiness and the violence... so they said to themselves "Hey, we can make a movie like that... just take a whole mess of quirkiness and some violence, throw it all in a box, and shake!" And that's just what they did... with Fly Paper being the result. It's sort of what you'd get if you took Fargo and Pulp Fiction, removed all the intelligence and humanity, amplified the quirkiness by a couple of hundred percent, and then threw the mixture into a blender set on 'Purée'. Only recommended to those with a high tolerance for and liking of quirkiness and violence, and no requirement that a film should contain anything else. Technically the film is thoroughly professional on all levels... it's a pity the content is o limited (perhaps it's meant to be a parody... but then shouldn't it be funny or something?)

Okay, I'm pretty sure I am the only person in the entire world who liked that movie. And no, before you ask, I'm not a die-hard Lucy Liu fan. Admittedly, this movie was riddled with problems, but I think Quentin Tarantino said it best when he commented on Brian DePalma's "Bonfire of the Vanities" that it takes a director of quality to make a truly disastrous film. A hack wouldn't doesn't take the risks that failed to pay off in Flypaper. That being said, I have to wonder why a film like Flypaper falls so hard when films like "The Unbelievable Truth" launch a prolific career and a borderline cult following. Though the two films are as different as night and day, they both spring from the same impulse: stepping outside a genre and examining it outside the confines of illusionism. For all the griping that goes on about unoriginal, cookie-cutter genre pieces, shouldn't we have just a little generosity when a director has the guts to break the mold? Personally, I was hooked after the very first scene. Anyone can be outrageous. Anyone can be true-to-life. Combining the two takes brass balls, and Klaus Hoch has got him. For sure he's willing to throw a bucket of gratuitous sex and violence in our face, but, believe it or not, there is something rustling behind the curtains in Flypaper. No, we are not supposed to take anything anyone says in the film without a whopping grain of salt. That's part of the point. Every single character is a walking contradiction, a grotesque hybrid of celluloid and flesh. But -God help me, I know this is where I'll lose you- isn't that what it's always been about? We go to the movies. We rent DVDs. We sit back and watch human beings transformed (at best) into morons and (at worst) objects. It's a twisted zero-sum game, and it mirrors real life in ways we don't even want to think about. Flypaper is compared unfavorably with Pulp Fiction and various Cohen Brother films, perhaps because there is no warmth or adulation, no well-thought-out view from nowhere. Essence absolutely refuses to precede existence. These characters are going to do some very stupid, pointless things, and there is no redemption, no "correct" path for them to return to, not even a solid realization of their sad, silly condition.

To be fair, no matter how bad a movie this is, it has a graphic sex scene with Lucy Liu. So it can't be all bad.

Started out interesting enough, but then the movie completely devolved into nothing.

The entire Lucy Liu storyline was dumb. It was trying real hard to be Pulp Fiction (like a LOT of stuff around this time) but fails. If you stop to think about Pulp Fiction, every segment tied in together. This one started out with a simple storyline, simple plot, then tried to add other stuff, that doesn't have anything to do with the main plot (like the before mentioned Lucy Liu part). It goes off into its own story.

Still, not awful and it was enjoyable. Worth a rent, I am glad I didn't pay $9 to see it (was this even in the theatre?).