Dustin Ingram and Kim Cattrall (right) in a scene from "Meet Monica Velour"Supplied
In her gig on that endless Sex and the City franchise, Kim Cattrall is fit and sassy and plays a sexpot who is aging really well. In Meet Monica Velour, she's flabby and morose and plays an ex-sexpot who has aged really badly. To her great credit, Cattrall is convincing in both roles but, since this one required her to bloat up and grow love handles that bulge from hip-hugger jeans like jelly from a roll, you can't help but wish her feat of non-vanity had found a worthier home. In short, pretty good performance, awfully lame movie.
Unwisely as it turns out, she put her trust in the rookie hands of writer-director Keith Bearden, whose feature debut is itself rather flabby - just a sentimental comedy pretending to be raw. It starts out not with age but with youth. A teenager fresh out of high school, Tobe (Dustin Ingram) is curly-haired and bespectacled and thus your typical nerd, his self-consciousness as protruding as his front teeth. He lives with his gramps, who lives in his undies and constantly rags on the kid in the way that grandfathers often do in mundane pics.
Still, Tobe is man enough to own his nerdiness. By day, he continues the family biz, piloting the "Weenie Wiz" - a snack truck with a giant hot dog for a roof ornament - on its regular rounds. By night, he's something of a classicist, favouring pop music from the thirties and porn from the seventies, back in the good old Boogie Nights era when copulation was shot on actual film and came with a thin plot - and back when Monica Velour, his all-time favourite, was strutting her stuff in the likes of New Wave Nookie and the incomparable Pork 'n' Mindy.
Cue the road movie. Keen to sell off the truck, Tobe finds in faraway Indiana both a potential buyer and, eureka, a Monica sighting. After all these years, she's scheduled for a guest appearance at a local gentleman's club. Packing up his star-struck libido, off he drives. Several hundred miles later, the club is located and so is Monica - on a stripper's stage, overflowing a white teddy and fetching from the rowdies in the crowd a derisive chant of "Leave it on."
Defending her honour, Tobe gets socked in the nose. Defending him, Monica gets fired, leaving the pair to wend their way to her trashy trailer home. There, at 17, he's naive and thrilled and still sees her as the Miss January she once was. At 49, she's tired and tough with a hateful ex-husband, a beloved daughter rarely glimpsed, a tattooed brace of biker buddies, and an occasional coke habit, chased with jugs of cheap brandy. So, naturally, our boy and girl go an a sylvan picnic. And make love. And face romance's funny complications.
Huh? Exactly. Poor Cattrall is caught in a script that, much like the white teddy, is an impossibly tight squeeze, obliging her to hit the farcical laughs while still playing the cellulite realism. Her efforts are valiant but, in essence, she's all dressed down with nowhere to go. At the other end of the spectrum, Ingram faces a similar dilemma yet seems completely untroubled by it - basically, he just pitches his voice high, keeps his manner antic, and sails through the choppy proceedings. If nothing else, consistency is his strong suit.
As for those aforementioned complications, they're the kind that arrive with attached philosophizing, where the intended comedy pauses a beat to make room for some intended smarts. Like when the wise black man (don't ask) appears just long enough to offer this three-part secret to living a full life: "Show up on time, do your act 100 per cent, hope for the best." It's not bad advice, with an unspoken corollary that this movie serves to prove: Sometimes, your 100-per-cent best is brilliant; other times, it's good enough; but still others, it's Meet Monica Velour.
Meet Monica Velour
- Directed and written by Keith Bearden
- Starring Kim Cattrall and Dustin Ingram
- Classification: 18A