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.
