Bottoms Up (2006)

In this, uh, comedy, Jason Mewes, as in Jay And Silent Bob, romances Paris Hilton. How good a movie is it? Just about exactly as good as you expect from reading that sentence.

This is comedy of the raunchy-dialogue school, and the writer/director(s) are obviously Kevin Smith fans. And sure enough, there’s Kevin as one of Jay M.'s slacking friends, lying on a couch and farting and occasionally philosophizing on topics such as space aliens introducing dwarf rabbits into people’s recta.

Jay voyages from Minnesota to Hollywood to enter a bartending contest, refuses to go home without the money he would have won, and gets a job on a TV show with his gay uncle (David Keith) which leads to The Fateful Meeting. Said uncle gets to describe Hollywood as “a ten story cock just fucking everything in its path”.

Paris is introduced about fifteen minutes in... and what does she do? She gives us expository character development which shows that the other girls she hangs out with are shallow and superficial and class-conscious, but not her by golly! And that they make fun of her behind her back, for supposedly getting a head start from a powerful and famous father. And people who don’t even know her form an opinion that she’s a dirty whore. And the tabloids print gossip about her. Poor poor Paris! It’s so hard being the envy of the lesser females.

Basically, like every other single thing P.H. has ever done in the public eye for the last several years, this role makes you want to call her up and go “Please, you’re not fooling anyone. You can stop now.”

Also, her acting here is not nearly up to the standard of, say, the House of Wax remake. She’s awful. Like Madonna, it appears she fundamentally doesn’t get the distinction between make-believe and acting. If Paris were capable of embarrassment, you’d think she’d feel humiliated at being blown off the screen acting-wise by someone like Jay Mewes, who knows perfectly well that he is lucky to have any film career at all. He even out-enunciates her, and there are not many people in the movies he can make that claim about.

And she doesn’t look good either — somebody didn’t get the standard memo about photographing her in appropriately flattering ways, or more likely on this budget, just didn’t know how. She’s all piggy squints and a complexion already going haggard at 25. Dreadful hairstyle too.

It gets better. Guess who Paris’s evil dad is? Tim Thomerson! This is casting upon which cannot be improved.

The only other name actor is — wtf, Adam Beach in a bit part as a Mexican valet with a screenplay?

There’s a character in the film who practices the art of copromancy. Ahem, “fecal therapy”. Without him our lovebirds would never have met. You can’t spell copromancy without romanc(e)!

Not that the road to true love is smooth. Things start out on a basis of hostility, antagonism, lying, backstabbing, thirst for vengeance, and blackmail. This shows the power of true love.

Once Paris starts to reveal her true character... it turns out that honestly she’s bored by Hollywood and would rather stay home and read a book. Want proof? Well, proof you shall have: for this role, she’s a brunette. That settles it, she’s a nerd. Also, she’s secretly funneling money to local charity, and nobody knows what an awesomely selfless good citizen she is.

Paris trying to say something semi-profound that makes people think: “Punk rock was a media event.”

There’s a fair number of boobs out. Not Paris’s, of course — she’s the decent classy girl amidst the sleaze, like Jessica Alba in Good Luck Chuck, except in Alba’s case it isn’t ironic.

There’s an industry newspaper that spells roles as “rolls”. And when they display a second story to show how the situation has changed, they replace the picture but reuse the text, leading to utter confusion for anyone who tries to figure out what the paper is saying plotwise.

There are random bits that are animated instead of live-action, using cheapass Flash®-style animation... and they don’t even bother to give the animated characters any visible resemblance to the actors.

Our hero learns that some Hollywood folk are decent and cool and don’t deserve to be papparazed. Even if they lie to you and sell you out, that doesn’t imply they’re bad people.

Finally, our heroes face a moral test: money or love. Why the two have to be mutually exclusive is hard to see, so they go to some rather head-scratching plot lengths to set it up. Which are then dwarfed into microscopic insignificance by the vast lengths of contrivance used to work out some kind of halfway happy ending. Which is happy in the sense that minor side characters get completely and unfairly fucked, rather than any of our designated good guys.

And we learn that Paris really is willing to give up wealth for truer values. Of course she is, how could you doubt it? And Jay... well, he actually chooses money over decency, but then gets all forgiven for it, so it’s cool.

And by the way, they don’t actually get as far as True Love. The movie ends with them pretty much still at a stage of mild like. (This appears to be true to life for Jay Mewes at least; according to Smith, he’s a quite successful womanizer who shows no signs of settling down.)

Our final lesson: the right little bit of celebrity magic can make anyone or anything popular and successful.

In conclusion, this is a jaw-droppingly lame, smug, conceited, and retarded movie. RECOMMENDED.