Went To Coney Isand On A Mission From God…Be Back By 5

I hate to bad mouth a film festival, especially if it an Austin film festival, but something has to be said. The Austin Film Festival is second to none in screw ups in the middle of films. I missed the premiere of Pleasantville, but I hear that the film broke six times. SIX TIMES!!!! Then the sound didn’t quite synch up. The first movie I saw, Wicked, screwed up twice in the first five minutes. This time the film melted less than an hour into the movie and it took 20 minutes to get back on track. And these are Union guys! What’s going on?!?! The director of Went To Coney Island (Richard Schenkman–The Pompatus Of Love) was pretty cool about it, though. He joked around saying that they were thinking of putting intermissions into all of their films from now on as a homage to Gone With The Wind. He also said that Austin audiences were amazing because we actually sat through it. New York audiences would have walked out or thrown things at the screen. My friend that I was with put it succinctly. “We’re used to it!”

Why’s that, you might ask? And well you should. We shouldn’t be used to it! Why can’t we get people who know what they’re doing to run our festivals? Well, at least the one that bears our fair city’s name. South By South West does it (for the most part). Where do they all go in October? Come out, come out wherever you are!

Well, enough ranting. On to the raving.

This is the second feature that Jon Cryer (yes, Duckie from Pretty In Pink) has co-written and the first that he’s co-produced with his friend Richard Schenkman. I haven’t seent he first one (The Pompatus Of Love), but I hear that it’s pretty good. Nothing too special, though.

Went To Coney Island is about two friends in New York. One is a part time loser named Daniel (Cryer), andhis friend who’s working at it full time, Stan (new guy Rick Stear). They get word that their third friend, Richie (Rafael Baez from Sea Of Love and Hangin’ With The Homeboys), has gone insane and is now living at Coney Island off of the trash from the carnival grounds. Richie had had a history of mental instability (lying about his sexual exploits, clinging to his little sister, etc–nothing really major, but sort of telling) and now he’s gone off the deep end according to someone who saw him. So Stan gets his friend to walk out of his job at a jewelry trader’s and look for their long lost friend.

Along the way they talk about the old days of how they all met, how they met their current girlfriends and the good old days. Then the darkness comes. We see how Stan really is. He’s a drunk. He owes people money. (Bad people.) His girlfriend, Gabby (Ione Skye from Say Anything and Dream For An Insomniac), is always finding him peeing in the closet and hanging his clothes in the bathroom. She threatens to leave him many times. You think she has cause? Just wait.

There’s a lot of funny stuff in this movie, too. Frank Whaley pops up as a caustic Skee-Ball direktor. (Yes, I meant to spell it that way. He’s actually credited as the Skee-Ball Weasel.) He’s hilarious, annoying voice and all. “Go back out there and read the sign.” “It says ‘Skee-Ball.’” “Not ‘Information’? Then don’t ask me.” There’s also a freak show with one of the funniest unbearded bearded ladies ever. The director has a cameo as the guy who runs the freak show. Then there’s a guy who is tatooed and pierced all over the place. “So he’s pierced. What’s the big deal?” That’s where the film broke. Richard said that we missed the single funniest bit in the movie and he re-inacted it for us. That was pretty cool.

This movie was really good. I was amazed that this kind of thing could come from Jon Cryer. There’s a lot of depth to the characters, the dialogue is good, the direction is good. The only problem for me was the sound. It could have been the theatre, but there were parts that I couldn’t understand because there was a weird noise in the wind that was over-powering all of the dialogue. The characters ask about the sound, so I know it isn’t a film glitch. It’s just way too loud.

The cinematography is pretty cool, though. The film is very gritty and grainy and it works. These guys are working class. This is probably how they see the world.

After seeing this movie I started to feel these guys’ pains. What if my dreams don’t work out the way I planned? What if I end up stuck in a dead end job with no real hope of succeeding? (Oh, yeah. I’m already there.) What if I turn into just another one of life’s losers? Is there a way out once you’re there? Can we break our routines and turn success out of failure?

Hopefully this film gets a good distribution and is seem by a lot of people in the Gen X age range. It deals with the problems that we all have in a way that we can understand. We have problems, but so do our friends. And, sometimes, their problems outweight ours in our minds.