The Brown Bunny (2004)

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The movie starts with a loooong shot of motorcross racing which gives an illusion of an alt art movie in the making. But that illusion soon fades. The first forty five minutes of the movie has about seven dialogues in total, ordinary background track in between and three unemotional and not even sexy kisses by the director Vincent Gallo who not surprisingly also plays the lead in the movie. The movie is painful to watch and makes you wonder about life in a way, you don't know how you decided to see it in the first place. Who exactly paid for it and why. Was it the tyre company, American tourism, the car glass company or the roads? And if so, why? And what the heck is the obsession in shooting from behind a dirty car window glass? And not to mention you also see roads at night under headlight. Not to mention, you see Vincent Gallo sitting in five different places trying to convey some deep meaning which was beyond my comprehension. Oh did I mention, you also see Vincent Gallo taking bath and watch his blurry nipples from close quarters. One more thing which you cannot miss, Vincent Gallo's hair. Half the time, they obstruct the view of the camera. After about fifty minutes, you start missing what a human voice sounds like. Overall, it looks like an hour and half bad advertisement of Vincent Gallo. Ya I get it, the guy is lonely. But seriously there are a million other ways that were far more tolerable. The movie does not make you empathize, it makes you sad. About yourself. There is no good editing, no screenplay, no story, dialogues music or even actors. Do not waste your time. Did I mention there is Vincent Gallo in the movie? Here's my suggestion, skip the first hour and watch just the remaining 25 minutes of the movie.

By now, it's no secret why anyone would sit through "The Brown Bunny", and the best advice I can offer is skip to the 80-minute mark. You won't be titillated, but the curiosity will be sated. Apart from that notorious scene, the whole journey to this point is a grueling series of static camera shots, aimless drifting and lots of driving. My god, the driving. It's not so much that I didn't like Vincent Gallo or his character in this (I didn't), it's that I wanted something to happen. We just hang there awkwardly in scenes and the lack of rhythm was the most frustrating. There's a narrative twist at the end which serves as the movie's fulcrum, but it just keels the whole thing over.It's not the story being told, it's the guy telling it. I know this is supposed to be a sad art-house movie, but it's Gallo driving cross-country for a blowjob. To be fair, it's not the crime against cinema that the Internet has made it out to be, but it's also not something I want to endure again.2/10

There really is nothing like a Vincent Gallo film, their weird depraved little pictures with a few notable stars that end up haunting our memories for years to come. I liked Buffalo 66 and Gallo's appearance in the video for "cosmopolitan blood-loss" i thought was probably his best work ever, but this crap was nothing more then someone jerking off into our faces for ninety minutes. Nothing happens, try telling someone what the movie was about, lot's of Gallo riding his motorcycle while making out with a really busted crack-addled looking Cheryl Tiegs, and the blow-job that got me to wait in line to get in. It's not like i'd never seen a bj up until then, my friends wanted to go and it was the selling point for the movie. Random shots of the dashboard with some Gordon Lightfoot playing, seriously? This guy has gotten way to artistic to be understood and this film really did nothing for me or practically anyone else. I really don't know what happened to this guy, he seemed to "have-it" at one point and mysteriously lost it for this flick. Could you imagine seeing either Winoda Ryder or Kirsten Dunst doing the knob-job at the end! My god it would have been totally different, instead we get the equally hot but in film terms much more damaged goods Chole Sevigny pulling the line. Boring does not begin to asses my issue, it's a movie based around a blow job, and not a real earth shattering one either. Just a simple little fluf in an otherwise random and meaningless film.

Roger Ebert called this the worst movie ever to appear at Cannes and the writer of Beneath the Valley of the Dolls knows crap when he sees it. Vincent Gallo - who wrote, directed, produced and edited this item, probably in his garage - stars as a motorcycle racer who drives across the country to compete in California. He drives. And drives. And drives. And considering that he is supposed to be a professional racer, he doesn't seem to have much enthusiasm for it, or flair, and this is a key failing. Racers are speed demons and daredevils. Dale Earnhardt would trade paint with you in a supermarket parking lot. Gallo makes the act of piloting a vehicle about as exciting as washing one.The road movie as existential quest has a long cinematic tradition, and this means that any new entry in the field needs to achieve genuine novelty or risk being trite. Yet, with its hand-held camera shots of Gallo driving in medium closeup, most of the film comes off like a drive cross country with your uncle, complete with randomly bad song choices and fly splatters on the windshield. Like a lot of indie films, this one tries to make a virtue of its lack of conventional film aesthetics and its grungy production values, as if this somehow makes it 'realistic'. Reality, of course, is boring. Thus 'realism' is only a worthy goal if its makes the fiction more compelling. Very little in this film is in any way compelling. The storytelling certainly isn't, as next to nothing happens. We get occasional glimpses of Gallo interacting with random women along the way, and some of the moments quietly yet articulately convey his character's pain and neediness. Unfortunately, this only serves to remind us that when he is alone in the scene, we get nothing from him as an actor. What we get is dead air. Note to Gallo: fiction is supposed to be interesting. And his portrayal of an emotionally bled out loner just isn't. He fails to make his character even minimally sympathetic or interesting, and thus although the viewer recognizes that his journey is a search for meaning in a life gone somehow off the rails, that viewer doesn't really care. Gallo could find the meaning of life or drive into the ocean with equally uninspiring results. In short, the film fails as a character study as thoroughly as it fails as a road movie. There is little to see, and even less to contemplate as we go along on this American odyssey. I suggest counting the windshield bugs.If you must watch this dog, look for Cheryl Tiegs as a woman sitting at a bench at a roadside rest stop. Yeah, sure, EVERY rest stop has a retired supermodel hanging out there. Highways are thick with 'em. Anyway, she hits the perfect note as a wary, yet in her own way needy person when she meets Gallo. Moments like these in the film hint that there was the germ of a successful idea here. Gallo lacked either the vision or the discipline to carry it through over the film's length. Filmmaking is generally a collaborative exercise. Indie artists decry Hollywood's committee approach as an artistic melting pot that confines cinematic mavericks. This is certainly true. It has the advantage, however of creating checks on directionlessness and egomania, and I suspect that a trusted collaborator could have pointed out the flaws in Gallo's approach before he exposed them on film. Ebert was right. This thing sorely needed a better edit. There was probably a pretty decent ten minute short in there someplace.What truly shocked me about this film was not the brief explicit scene - if indie film artists want to use sex to distinguish themselves from Hollywood's puritan wary mainstream, they should go right ahead. What was shocking about The Brown Bunny was that it cost $10 million, or roughly the budget of Pulp Fiction, to produce a movie that looked like somebody's film school thesis project, and which was thoroughly hated by 90% of those who saw it.If the road trip really is a metaphor for the pursuit of meaning, then Gallo got nowhere because this movie is pretty much lacking it.