The Last Big Thing

Back in 1995, when it was actually made, The Last Big Thing might have had some edge to it. The story of a bitter man named Simon Geist (writer-director Dan Zukovic), who invents a magazine so that he can "interview" up-and-coming celebrities simply to get a chance to insult them to their faces, would have been a breath of fresh air when Quentin Tarantino was recycling 70s kitsch. Since then, however, the antipostmodern irony stance has become every bit as passé as that which it critiqued. Geist's companion is in awe of "profound epiphanies" like "Computers are evil!" and "They've been making the same car since 1986. It's called The Car," but chances are you know someone who's already said the same kinds of things to you. It takes the other characters in the film the entire movie to figure out that Geist is just as empty and lame as the culture he derides, but you'll have that figured out in minutes. In fairness, there are many amusing moments, most of them featuring an empty-headed alterna-rock band whose members wear T-shirts with slogans like "Norman Fell is God" and "Bill Macy rocks." And the opening scene is a great skewering of how people behave in video stores, as a bubble-headed blonde alternately says of every film on the shelf, "This is a great movie!" followed by, "This is a bad movie!" Unfortunately, the venom needs more of a focus: To say that the movie is light on story would be generous. Geist and his girlfriend yell at each other a lot, and there's plenty of smoking and drinking, but none of that's exactly original. The film's thesis -- that everything rebellious ultimately gets voluntarily co-opted by the mainstream -- is a point that sunk in right about the time we started hearing The Band on a TV commercial.