Open Water

Man, people get pretty fucking excited and nutso when they think they've discovered something. I remember calling National Geographic when I discovered this concrete shaft near Lake Rhoda that I believe was never known to man until I found it. I mean, how fucking cool is that?

The folks at National Geographic wanted nothing to do with the story of the Filthy Shaft; something about needing space for a pictorial on naked African chicks. Still, I told everyone I knew about the shaft, and bragged how it has been there for centuries, maybe millenniums, as an unknown treasure. And did the Dorito bag and Mountain Dew can at the bottom of this previously unknown treasure mean that our civilization was created in the distant past by space aliens geek programmers? Good question for archeologists to answer, although I have to confess that the discovery site has been defaced. A man's gotta go some place to take a shit when he feels unwanted at home and ate too many bean and cheese burritos from the 7-Eleven.

I think people go into low-budget movies with the same attitude, thinking that because it's small and poorly made that it is their discovery, and they take pride in it and cut it some slack. It's like the Olympics, where some assholes get a swelled head because of the actions of some stranger, just because you're from the same country, or because you paid nine bucks to see their movie.

That's gotta be what's going on with this crap-ass, whiny independent movie Open Water. Man, there just ain't much there, and still a lot of people talk it up. It's because it was made cheap, so it feels like some sort of discovery. While big budget often means lousy script and too many hacks spending the money, low-budget doesn't automatically mean quality. Some people think so, but they are usually the pretentious sorts of assholes who see their movies in theaters where cappuccino and brie are served.

You sure as hell don't have to be smart or have a good idea to have no money. Look at me. Any jackass with no money can make a movie, and do a shitty job. So I ain't cutting no slack for a movie that was made cheap, because I still have to pay nine boners to see it. Look, I'm not asking for fancy special effects or big stars. I'll settle for decent dialogue, a good story and some tits. Open Waterhas a flash of tits, five minutes of good story, and no good dialogue whatsoever.

Based on a true story that'd make a good cocktail party anecdote, Open Water is the tale of two whiny yuppies who get left behind by their diving boat in shark-infested waters. Perhaps the story would be more interesting if you didn't know the couple dies in the end. But now we all know that. The movie's objective, then, is to pad out 79 minutes between its start and its inevitable conclusion.

Open Water pads out its playing time with brutally boring shots of people packing, unpacking, lying in bed, almost fucking, whining and bickering with passive-aggressiveness, and finally bobbing around in the water saying "What's that?", "I felt something!" and "Don't look! Don't look!" The repetition gets tiresome faster riding a bicycle while smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes.

I think the point is to show us an average couple stuck in extraordinary circumstances, but these people aren't average enough to be worth giving a shit about. Actually, maybe they're average for the people you'd find drinking at the bar in an Applebee's. But I don't drink at Applebee's for that reason. I hate whiny, pushy, career-obsessed stereotypes more than I hate soft-core porn. The movie makes a few clumsy stabs at defining the couple's relationship, showing they are tired of the tedium and bored with each other. The movie goes for a low-budget feel of realness, but for that I can watch moms slapping their kids around at K-Mart. Reality is fine, but I want a more interesting reality that reveals more than this from my movies.

And fuck if this isn't one cheap-ass looking movie. It wears its cheapness like a badge of honor, but low-budget should only be something to be proud of when you don't spend the whole God damn time in the theater thinking about how cheap it looks. The cinematography is B-grade repetition of the same images. It's close-up of the struggling couple, followed by a medium shot of water and sky, then back again. The sharks thrashing about even get to be pretty redundant. The continuity is appalling with the sky changing from light to dark and back and cloudy to sunny without much consistency. The water takes on different colors from shot to shot. And the picture quality is worse than an eight-millimeter film I once saw of a woman fucking an elk and then being trampled by it. Well, it was either that or a high-school driver's training film. Like I said, the picture quality sucked. Either way, man, did that movie give me a hard-on. The digital video images are flat, blurry and better suited to a television than a movie screen.

Overall, Open Water is a pretty bad fucking movie. Probably the better story is how it was made using real sharks, but I didn't pay to see that. Two Fingers for Open Water.