200% crap
Oh dear.
Conrad (Matt Walton) owns a New York advertising agency. Recently single, his nights are filled with TV dinners and channel surfing. Bored, he calls an Australian hustler, Tyler (Sean Matic) and book him for an hour in-call. After some stilted small talk (see below), a joint and some sex which we never see, Tyler reveals that he’s hooking to save for his marriage to his girlfriend and their subsequent honeymoon.
Brandon quickly develops a crush and offers Tyler a one-thousand dollar a week office assistant/live-in fuck bag role, which cash-hungry Tyler instantly accepts. On the job, Tyler confronts hostility and justifiable jealousy and suspicion from Brandon’s creative team and, well, things kind of go nowhere but also off into all directions at once from this point as this already-woeful movie jumps aboard the Crapola Express to Shitville.
The film is short, thankfully, at 80 minutes but despite this it is so underdeveloped and anorexic that scenes are still slow, overlong, and repetitive. Alfred Hitchcock shot Psycho in just over two months for a budget of less than one million dollars: a low budget or a hurried shoot doesn’t make glitches such as mismatched eyesight lines, glaring breaks in continuity and an almost complete absence of linear narrative flow in a straighty-180 narrative film acceptable. You don’t need money to write, either (I can assure you of this) but ludicrous dialogue is the order of the day and exemplifies the film’s slapdash approach.
For example, in one ridiculous scene Conrad - whose company looks pretty modest with low-rent offices staffed by a team of three or four including himself - consoles a nervous client on the phone by saying with complete seriousness that he’s “managed to book Naomi Campbell for tomorrow” after the scheduled models, we learn, have gone down with food poisoning and emergency replacements are needed for a big shoot the next day.
Anna Wintour would quiver in fear at the very idea of Naomi Campbell arriving for a shoot and since when were the schedules of top-shelf supermodels so free that 24-notice is all that’s required in any case? Didn’t have the time to clean up clangers like the bizarre Campbell reference? In lieu of a second draft, or a spot of research, there’s always the “delete” button, you know.
Backstory information is provided in the form of answering machine messages (”BEEP! … Conrad, I think it’s time you started getting out there again and there’s a guy that I think would be right for you and he’s nothing like your last boyfriend who you broke up with three months ago … BEEP!”) or overheard asides from peripheral characters who mutter to each other of things like “did you see what was going on there? I definitely think they were flirting with each other!” It isn’t the job of extras and set decorations such as answering machines to provide this kind of underlining and arrow marking. Scenes are either complete or incomplete, and none of the scenes in this film have been written beyond the slush draft stage.
Also, the usual john/hooker dialogue exchanges (”how’d a nice young guy like you end up in this line of work?”, “why does a good-looking guy like you need to pay for sex?” etc.) are unwanted guests which, as any john or hooker will tell you, never actually take place during jobs.
Most odd is Tyler’s Australian accent, which sometimes sounds vaguely Australian but is more a kind of Boston/New Zealand hybrid with Cockney aspects. Maybe Matic was raised all over the world by some kind of gypsy family, or maybe Tyler has plied his portable trade for a year here and there at various international locations.
It’s a strange, untrue sounding accent and Matic mumbles and swallows his lines anyway so even if he he had the diction of Vanessa Redgrave you probably still wouldn’t be able to understand a lot of what he’s saying.
200 AMERICAN
USA, 2003
Director: Richard LeMay
Stars: Matt Walton, Sean Matic, Anthony Ames
