Factory Girl

Well, kids, the plan was to go see The Host, that Korean monster movie that I keep hearing good things about, and not from the fucking weirdos who think anything Asian is cool. But it's only playing in one theater in Denver, which is pretty fucking hard to get to when the Falcon has a flat and I'm no longer welcome on the RTD buses. So, fuck. Second choice was 300, but when I got to the Arvada Colorado Cinema, the God damn lobby was overrun with mouth-breathers. Fat fucking slobby, goateed men with no dates who were shitting their pants they were so excited to see another comic book adapted into a movie that they not only could understand but also have something to say about because it came from a kids' book that they actually read.

Which reminds me: what do the Cliff's Notes for comic books look like? Stick figures?

To be fair, not everyone in the lobby was a mouth-breather. A good percentage breathed through their noses. I know, I could hear the air whistling through the nasal passages. Is this sound some sort of status symbol used to let other comic book assholes know you've elevated yourself to almost being able to exhale like a normally socialized person?

Back to the topic at hand: me. I wound up not seeing movie, so what you get is a review I didn't put up a few weeks ago, for Factory Girl. Not like anyone but a toilet's gonna bother catching this turd. Who knew Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick were so fucking boring? Who knew that his muse was so predictably pathetic and that he was such a droning nabob? Thank you, Factory Girl for letting me know. Now, fuck you, Director George Hickenlooper, for wasting 90 minutes of my time telling me. Seriously, the basic story is told better in Public Service Announcements on scratchy AM radio stations during Coast to Coast broadcasts late on Sundays nights. That is: drugs are bad.

The first time I really heard about Andy Warhol was in high school where I used to steal movies about 8mm filmmaking from the school library. I was mostly interested in making animated stuff, but it was a bad library and most of the books were leftovers from the 70s. They always talked about crazy movies this guy Warhol made, like 24 consecutive hours of the Empire State Building and then weird, intentionally bad and grainy stuff that went on forever. I was pretty jealous because Super8 cartridges were damn expensive. I had to figure out how to tell my whole story about how Gumby became a junkie, or how angry lemons killed my dog within the three minutes on a cartridge. This Warhol guy sounded pretty damn rich.

I eventually got caught stealing the library books and my film career was crushed by THE MAN before it ever began. I had to wait for Factory Girl to come out to discover that bad, boring movies could be unintentionally made about men who knowingly made bad, boring movies.

Edie Sedgwick was a wealthy, young socialite bored with her tony upbringing. She decided to take her trust fund to New York City and try to be a real, live artist. There, she met Andy Warhol and became his muse in the "Factory". That was the studio space where he made his pop art, and all sorts of weird shit went on with all sorts of hangers-on and starfuckers.

Sienna Miller plays Sedgwick. She may or may not be a good mimic, I have no idea because I didn't hang out with the real Sedgwick. But her performance sure feels like mimicry and not acting. Guy Pearce plays Warhol, and I have seen enough footage of the real guy by now that I know that Pearce isn't even mimicking the dude. He's mimicking a caricaturish mimicry. Holy shit, who knew that even a cold, impersonal man could be portrayed this lifelessly and joylessly?

The entire plot of the movie is that Miller is a shining star briefly, gets used by Warhol then gets discarded once she no longer is new and shiny, She gets hooked on drugs, blows through her trust fund and spirals downward until she dies of a drug overdose. There is not a God damn thing that's new about this story. N o new angle, no distinct voice or message. He takes the story of Edie Sedgwick, which I presume he wanted to use to make a statement, and then makes the same fucking rich girl spoiled story we know by heart. It's trite and tired, full of people spouting predictable shit like, "You did this to me!" and "I have no friends!", and drama from after school specials, like Sedgwick revealing that her father molested her, or that her upper-crusty parents are shocked by her new lifestyle.

Mixed in there is Sedgwick dating the Bob Dylan impersonator from Legends in Concert at the Imperial Palace in Las Vegas. I'm pretty sure that's how the movie goes. I can't imagine a guy that doesn't look, sound or act like the actual Dylan is meant to be him. I am still not real clear on the point of this subplot, other than to give Dylan a chance to say Warhol is a vampire. Still, Factory Girlbenefits from the starpower that a bad Dylan impersonator can give it.

I don't want to forget mentioning that the "Velvet Underground" are also in the movie for no particular reason. To make that even lamer, Factory Girl didn't even get the rights to their music, so some Velvetesque muzak is played instead. How fucking lame and annoying. "Hey, here's a great band, one of the progenitors of punk rock, but sorry, you can only hear a bad imitation."

Which is all this movie is. It feels like a bunch of unintelligent actors playing dress-up. "Oh my god! I love Andy Warhol! I want to be in the movie!" They mimic icons, but they add nothing to them, and the movie is so fucking compromised that it becomes pointless. For example, the whole debacle with the Velvet Underground music should have forced the filmmakers to keep them out of the movie. But no! Someone wanted to make a movie with them, and somebody wanted to play them. Sedgwick has nothing on Starfucking compared to Hickenlooper, except he's a necrophiliac starfucker.

If Edie Sedgwick was in any way interesting, why the hell didn't the movie tell us? Wouldn't that have been a better flick than seeing a bunch of stars just sort of wander around mimicking dead people? For that matter, if it had anything new to say about Warhol or his factory, why didn't it?

Fucking bullshit. Factory Girl proves that you don't need a big budget to be uninspired; it only takes a feeble mind. One Finger.