S.F.W. (1995)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Excellent but underrated film

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

I had high hopes for this movie but was totally disappointed upon seeing it. For how much I didn't like it, something about this movie stuck with me ten years later, looking back I've created a more interesting version of what this movie COULD have been in my head, It put me on the edge of wanting to believe that it was a poor man's Oliver Stone movie. The most intriguing thing about this movie is that watching it puts you in a specific time and place, a short lived style in the early to mid 90's that seems like a twilight zone dream. It captures something about that time that very few movies have done. Other than that quality, the plot, which starts off great slowly rolls down an incline and falls flat off a cliff. The characters almost have depth and catch your interest right from the start but end up over the top annoying, especially the main character Spab. By the end of the movie, he's lost any redeeming quality and Joey Lauren Adams character's continual whining becomes like nails on a chalk board. Having had no background knowledge of this movie upon seeing it, I really thought that Kevin Smith was somehow involved because it has the same feel of his early work and uses a few of the same actors. All in all, this could have been a memorable movie, far ahead of it's time with it's depiction of reality TV and media sensationalism but in reality, was really just a big waste of time.

Cliff Spab doesn't really care about anything. He gets held hostage at a store for 36 days by terrorists, who demand that the entire thing be broadcast on national television. Cliff ends up taking a bullet for fellow hostage Wendy - making him a national hero. The two are the sole survivors of the ordeal, and soon become prisoners of the media. Cliff escapes it all, only to find himself being pushed further away from Wendy when he needs her most....Once you get past the fact that Dorff sounds uncannily like Christian Slater, you get another one of those films from the mid nineties that tried to define good old 'generation X'. And for the most part, it works.Dorff is great as the guy who is having his fifteen minutes of fame, but cannot decipher why people are not mentioning his friend who was killed. But this was a time when media only really dwelled on the good stuff, to sugar coat the public, to get more money behind their new 'celeb'The film doesn't know what genre it belongs to. One minute it's hilarious, next it's soul searching, and then it goes for a Araki/Solondz hybrid that baffles.But it's good, and all the performances are great, I just wish it didn't get lost in its own smugness every now and again.The last fifteen minutes is great though, showing us how fickle the media were/are, and how fame really slips through your fingers, once a new fad has been found.Everything Matters? S.F.W...

I watched this film not knowing what to expect; what I got was one of the coolest, most original films I've seen. It is ostensibly a hostage-drama set in a Fun-Stop convenience store, but rapidly reveals itself as more; a biting attack on the media circus and the hype machine, a revealing portrayal of suburban life in America, and a comment on the nature of heroes. The leads are played effortlessly by Stephen Dorff (who seems to not be acting at all)and Reece Witherspoon, with excellent support from B-movie stalwarts Joey Lauren Adams and Jack Noseworthy. All the characters are unlike those you see in most films... they are the sort of people you've met, but never expected to see on screen. Characters the hero Spab (Dorff) meets along the way are delightfully unattractive and random, from the hippie Earl and his militant partner to the receptionist in a neck brace at a posh hotel. Richard Portnow's FBI agent has some wonderfully quotable lines, and Mr and Mrs Spab soon reveal themselves to be far from the perfect parents. The arrangement of the story (flashbacks are employed heavily) lets you build up a rounded picture of the events that made Spab a hero, not revealing the true account of what happened in the store until near the end. Up to this point the events are clouded by the media and gossip surrounding the "Fun-Stop Hostage Crisis" and although we are led to believe Spab did something spectacular, the later flashbacks reveal why he is unwilling to assume the mantle of hero and why he seems to be in a bad mood most of the time!. A great film that depicts a classic anti-hero with more than adequate back-up from the script and cast. Watch it soon!.

While S.F.W could have been so much better than it actually is, Jefery Levy deserves praise for successfully highlighting the fickleness and parasitic nature of celebrity. The film has an uneven feel to it, often seeming like scenes are randomly cut and pasted together, but it does communicate its message effectively. I felt the film would have been better if the first half had dealt with the hostage situation and the second with Spab's elevation to generation spokesperson. The constant shifting from the here and now to a small segue of Spab acting up to the terrorist camera doesn't seem to work very well. Stephen Dorff is quite good as the slacker cum hero, however the rest of the cast are fairly marginalised and have little to do. It might have been better if we had seen more of Spab's best friend Joe and saw more of their relationship, then the tragic events would have had more impact. I believe this plot point fell a little by the wayside amid the beer drinking and cursing that was slightly overdone. S.F.W does make you wonder how our society has become so vacuous that we bestow fame and adoration on ordinary people, stars of fake, idiotic reality shows like Big Brother and Survivor. In this respect the film was indeed ahead of its time. S.F.W is not a great film, but it is not a bad one and is worth a look if you're bored of teen comedies.