Simone

When Hollywood grassfuckers make movies trying to say something nasty about Hollywood, they end up chickening out, like a horny guy telling a hot Born-again Christian chick that he wants to go down on her. He wants to get into the nitty-gritty, dirty details of how he'd like to mow her crotch lawn, or taste her crunch berries. But the fear of rejection makes it come out watered down and tame; something about doing unto others and Jesus and raising her little Lazarus. Simone is that sort of failure, afraid to be nasty.

Actually, some dimwitted trend-follower in studio marketing titled the movie S1m0ne, but fuck that shit. This numbers for letters crap is as tired and sore as a broke dick dog in a kennel full of poodle bitches. I seriously doubt that there is one person in America who says "Oh, this movie has a one for the 'I', let's go see it."

Simone is a pretty good example of an idea that got sold without a story to back it up. The idea is that a failed movie director (Al Pacino) who specializes in pretentious, lugubrious Ingmar Bergman ripoffs inherits a computer program that can place a digital woman into the lead of his movies. No more divas, no more trying to get actors to do exactly what he wants. Now he has the perfect actress, and as it turns out, she's incredibly popular. Director/writer Andrew Niccol doesn't really know how to make that convincing, or what to do after he sets up the premise. Well, maybe he did and the studio took their big rusty scissors and sliced his balls off. The result's as neutered and listless as the fat pervert at my cousin Larry's assisted living home who get a shock every time he touches his dick.

At the start of the movie, Pacino has been fired from his studio by his ex-wife (Catherine Keener) who now runs it. He is approached by a software developer who soon dies and leaves him a hard drive with Simone on it. She's a digital creation that can be plugged into films, and who can mimic and amalgamate the best of Hollywood's greatest actors, from Audrey Hepburn to Todd Bridges. Without telling anyone she doesn't really exist, and with the help of the world's stupidest and naïve media, he launches his latest film with her replacing the primadonna that ruined it.

The movie is the same old crap he has always made, but in some way that I didn't understand, the world falls in love with Simone. Pacino's success becomes tied to Simone. He is still a hack director, but as long as he has Simone he gets to keep making bad movies. Pacino suffers from a sense of inadequacy, he can't tell the world that Simone is a fraud without being considered a fraud himself. Yet, as long as she continues, he will never be considered anything more than the only man with access to her. He first tries to ruin her career by letting her "direct" I am Pig, a movie in which she wallows around with pigs in a trough. This is easily the movie's funniest part. Then he tries to overexpose her by turning her into a pop star, line of cologne and a guest on talk shows where she espouses her belief in arming children and smoking more.

Niccol fills out the story with a lot of "who cares" bullshit like a will-they-or-won't-they reuniting of Pacino and Keener, a pair of bumbling journalists who add nothing to the story, and a climax that's botched as badly as a Tijuana nose job and as obvious and execrable as the result of feeding a dog fifty greasy tacos. Pacino attempts to kill off Simone and is arrested for murder. Will he be saved by the timely return of Simone? Will he get back together with Keener? Will his movie career continue? The answer is... don't read any farther if you honestly are too stupid to know the answer. The answer is... yes!

Simone, the creation, is supposed to fool people with how real she looks. But Simone the movie is faker from beginning to end than Candy Bottom's 44DDDs. The horseshit gets piled on pretty heavy, with Niccol expecting us to buy increasingly preposterous plot points and conceits in order to make a point that gets lost 20 minutes in. Pacino, a director with no computer knowledge is able to paste a woman into virtually every scene in a movie all by himself. He is able to get entire casts to act around someone who isn't even there and that never even ask why she isn't. Masses of media swarm to get a glimpse of Simone, yet nobody ever bothers to notice she never enters or leaves the studio. And Pacino's computer set up must have been created by the same people who made the Batcave: very talented crafstman who never ever mention that, "Oh, yeah, I remember building that system. I guess I just never bothered to ask why I built it right smack dab in the center of a huge empty studio, the same one the whole world has its eyes on because it's where Simone works."

The movies Pacino's character makes are shit, and we as an audience are supposed to amusingly acknowledge them as shit, but also believe that Simone is so fucking great that we'd fall all over ourselves to see them. That's the most improbable thing. In the movie, Simone is more popular than Jesus, bigger than Elvis and more bankable than Traci Lords. She has no problem with nudity (not that we see any. Shit, this movie was so boring I would have been happy with even pixelated titties). From where I sat (in a 99% empty theater), she's just a pretty girl with no special talents. Why should I buy that the world's in love with her when I'm not? The movie just keeps telling us about Simone-mania, but it never explains it.

I'm sure at one point Niccol had something he wanted to say about Hollywood. It's a terrible place, I guess, where you have just as a good a chance of succeeding by being fake as being real. The best proof sure as hell ain't the thesis of his movie, it's the movie itself. He get millions of bucks, Al Pacino and Catherine Keener and he made the point that Hollywood works on one-sentence story descriptions, not on actual stories. I guess whole stories just take too much damn time to read.

It's a God damn shame, and I would have rather seen I am Pig. Two Fingers for Simone.