Ask The Dust

I recall listening to Adam Carolla before his current podcast format, when he was doing his old radio show on terrestrial radio. Every few months there was a reoccurring guest that delighted Carolla to no end. They would muse upon the trials of growing up in the mid-1970’s which afforded them nary a peek at the naked female form. Both Carolla and this guest were in emphatic agreement that if they had Redtube growing up, they would never put down the Jergens or go outside. This guest was none other than Chicago’s own institution, that’s right, Mr. Skin from Knocked Up and Olivia Lavery fame.

Well, on one segment Mr. Skin breathlessly endorsed Ask the Dust (Salma Hayek) as Best Nude Scene of The Year. As fortune happened, Ask The Dust found it's way onto my Netflix queue. After all, I had to see what all the fuss was about... You know, for Art.

The Netflix envelope arrived, I took out the DVD, dropped it in the player, and promptly skipped directly ahead to the 33-minute mark. After watching Salma go commando in the waves, I started back to the beginning to actually watch the movie. To be honest, I expected to like this film based on the writer bum source material of John Fante. I watched the first 33 minutes, rewatched the artistically-vital-to-the-story Salma Hayek beach scene again and then nodded off at some point thereafter. I never made an effort to finish the film after that first truncated viewing. When Benny suggested Colin Farrell Week, I figured I might as well revisit Ask The Dust to see if I missed anything.

Very quickly into the second viewing, I realized that I did miss something. Namely, the horrible second and third acts of the film. The later scenes, which seemed to stack up against each other, left me confused about the love story, unclear on the central themes, completely turned off by the characters and ultimately longing for something more than a movie known for displaying Salma Hayek's sweater puppets (to borrow a phrase).

First, some positives: The set design is amazing and other era specific nuances are very well executed. Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell) lives in a roominghouse that is pitched in a hilly area of L.A. such that his room is on ground level of the street below, causing him to come and go through the side window and never the front door. I thought that was an effective device to depict him as a writer, transient, impermanent to this world. I loved sparsely used Donald Sutherland and his performance as the drunk across the hall, his subtle alcoholic twitches and desperate eyes reinforced my high opinion of him as an actor.

The story jumps between novel vignettes from Arturo's writing and his mundane courtship of Camilla Lopez (Salma Hayek). Farrell's voiceover work is efficient, yet dulcet to the ear, exposing his inner thoughts, motives and insecurities, but the story itself is very slow to form.

Hayek is decent in this role, but her chemistry with Farrell is highly dubious. I never felt like I knew where their contentious cat-and-mouse game was supposed to lead. They never really stopped being hateful to each other long enough to form an attraction. In their third scene together, they get into another verbal spat, he then tells her "your shoes are not good enough for your legs" and she melts, does a complete 180 and gives him this smoldering look. The next scene is the 33 minute mark, time for the naked beach romp and cuddle time. Upon seeing his penis, she bellows, "You've got a pretty one! Relax!"

After this, they find more things to argue about. She claims she will "never forgive him" which will be a running theme throughout the movie. At this point, Vera Rivkin (Idina Menzel) shows up in Arturo's life to commence an extremely strange second act. Vera is a stalker who fell in love with Arturo's bravado and short story writing. She is an alcoholic, battered woman with terrible burns on her body who appears to have some fairly serious mental problems. She claims she came to L.A. to be discovered and loved, but now that she is disfigured at the hands of an abusive former lover, only an artist like Arturo can find the words to express her true inner beauty.

I always thought Barfly suffered from flat characters, but at least they had heart. Ask The Dust is a plodding, uninteresting meditation on the American Dream. Our main characters - Arturo, Camilla and Vera arrive in L.A. not just to dream, but to idealize their own existence. They hope their sheer proximity to other desperate, lovelorn people will somehow enrich their lives.

Auturo floats by on cheques received from a publisher who the audience never meets. The money always seems to arrive just when he is about to hit rock bottom. His fiscal standing fluctuates throughout the story and he usually blows through it quickly, but we don't care because we don't really understand what went into acquiring those cheques. When he's rich he's obtuse, when he's a starving writer he pines for a waitress and always combs his hair, not exactly the romanticised madness of Bukowski that I was expecting.

Here is the tagline for the movie:

Passion and ambition drive two dreamers in 1930s LA. Their love affair is ferocious and hot-blooded as they fight the city and themselves to make their dreams come true.

Let me do you a favor and rewrite this bullshit:

Boredom and mutual acrimony drive two dillusional transplants in 1930s LA. Their verbally abusive relationship is mind numbing and uninteresting as they learn very little about themselves, eventually the audiences' dreams of seeing Salma Hayek's boobies come true. No Go.