By
Mark Betancourt
Arizona Daily Wildcat
UA student-made film a promising offerings at film fest
GRADE: C
"The Bookie Dilemma" is one of the best films showing at the Arizona Film Festival this year - given its competition, that's not necessarily saying much.
Unlike many of the films screening at the festival and dozens of other festivals across the country, "Bookie" isn't a cutting-edge experimental dive into the abstract possibilities of artistic cinema. While those films can prove to be interesting, this year's crop shows that - for the most part - they usually aren't too engaging.
"Bookie" is a straightforward, fast-paced story filled to the brim with pop culture. It's funny, sexy, violent and cool - and in this case, completely unoriginal.
Whitter, the film's protagonist, is a college student at the University of Arizona. He gambles. He loses a big bet to this Italian guy named Zito. Zito wants to kill him. Whitter has to come up with the pay-off money in five days or else. Sound familiar?
"Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" comes to mind. So does "Run Lola Run." In fact, that plot has been fueling a growing number of films made by the youngest and hippest new film directors for the last ten years. Quentin Tarantino has practically based his career on it.
Unfortunately, "Bookie" has nothing to contribute. Nothing in this film is original. Any one of the sequences, scenes, shots or lines can be traced to another film, and "Bookie" seems like it should be displayed under the "film collage" category.
Frankly, however, it's an excellent collage. Given the fact that it was made by UA students with what must have been a significantly small amount of money, the film is extremely well-made. There are lots of cool stolen film tricks, like light-speed drives through the Tucson night life and freeze-frame celebration shots that break into motion in time with the hip, techno soundtrack.
But "stolen" is such a harsh word. It's been said time and again that an artist who doesn't acknowledge that he "borrows" ideas from others is lying to himself. Coppola stole the slaughter scene at the end of "Apocalypse Now" from a Sergei Eisenstein film. Why should mere copycatting incriminate the makers of "Bookie?"
There is definitely something missing from "The Bookie Dilemma." But "Apocalypse Now" has it. Some call it a point while others call it a theme. Still others - attempting to get to the root of the thing - call it mojo.
In essence, "Bookie" lacks meaning. It would be a mistake to trash the film because it doesn't deal with some enormous global issue that shakes the very humanity in us all. In the end, it isn't the issue that makes meaning.
Films about nothing can move us far more than films about the end of the world. The difference is empathy. In this case, it would be nice to know why anyone in the audience should care whether Whitter, who shows no signs at all of being a nice person, escapes from danger.
No matter how cool it looks, in the end "Bookie" merely moves from A to B without tapping the empathy that draws us into truly great art. Nothing new is ventured, and therefore, nothing new is gained. Luckily, the filmmakers are young and they still have plenty of time to learn.
