A passable, if often dreary, evocation of those '70s road movies in which disillusioned young men (and the occasional woman) took to the highway in search of America, the meaning of things or maybe just a hamburger.
The Brown Bunny (2004)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:30
Fresh:13
Rotten:17
Average Rating:4.8/10
Consensus: More dull than hypnotic, The Brown Bunny is a pretentious and self-indulgent bore.
Theatrical Release:Aug 27, 2004 Limited
Synopsis: Vincent Gallo shocked the 2003 Cannes Film Festival with this highly personal film that he wrote, directed, produced, edited, photographed, and stars in. Gallo plays Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer on... Vincent Gallo shocked the 2003 Cannes Film Festival with this highly personal film that he wrote, directed, produced, edited, photographed, and stars in. Gallo plays Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer on his way from New Hampshire to California in a van. The cross-country trip includes stops at a gas station, where Clay meets and falls for a gas station attendant named Violet (Anna Vareschi); a roadside food stand, where he meets the sadly beautiful Lilly (Cheryl Tiegs, making her feature-film debut); and the Las Vegas strip, where he picks up local prostitute Rose (Elizabeth Blake). As he comes into contact with these women, he can't let go of his past, which centers around Daisy (Chloe Sevigny), whom he hopes to find when he returns home to Los Angeles. Nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, THE BROWN BUNNY is a poignant, emotional drama that features long scenes with little or no dialogue, as Gallo uses natural sound and lighting, jazz and folk music, and long, lingering shots of the open road, raindrops on a windshield, and the scraggly-haired protagonist to create a nearly suffocating atmosphere of loss and loneliness. Winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the 2003 Viennale "for its bold exploration of yearning and grief and for its radical departure from dominant tendencies in current American filmmaking," THE BROWN BUNNY is sure to cause a stir because of its infamous and shocking X-rated sex scene near the end of the picture, although it is a tender, soft, and powerfully subtle film. [More]
Starring: Chloe Sevigny, Vincent Gallo, Cheryl Tiegs, Anna Vareschi
Starring: Chloe Sevigny, Vincent Gallo, Cheryl Tiegs, Anna Vareschi, Mary Morasky
Director: Vincent Gallo
Director: Vincent Gallo
Screenwriter: Vincent Gallo
Producer: Vincent Gallo
Studio: Wellspring
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Reviews for The Brown Bunny
A road movie, but made by someone who seems so self-absorbed he might as well be asleep at the wheel.
What plays for 80 minutes like an intolerable, self-indulgent road trip largely redeems itself in the last 10 minutes, through a moving explanation of the anti-hero's catatonic depression.
So mind-numbingly dull it makes you yearn for one of those World War II-spy instant-death pills.
Must be one of the truest songs of roadside America that the movies have produced.
Narcissisistic, self-indulgent, solipsistic claptrap is still narcissistic, self-indulgent, solipsistic claptrap, no matter how long or short.
Less a story of undying love and passion than a singularly focused lovefest. And it's a self-lovefest, really, no matter who the flower girl is.
Luckily, Sevigny has a promising future before her, and this bizarre little diversion will soon scamper into the wild grass, never to be seen again.
It's not really a movie. I suppose it's what could be called a recorded behavior.
Much like Bruno Dumont's equally provocative Twentynine Palms, Gallo's peculiarly earnest film ultimately questions the nature of cinema, that continuum of reality and illusion that starts when the theater dims and the screen lights up.
One of those movies that work retrospectively: the final scene pulls the film together.
Can have a relatively sophisticated visual sense and yet in other respects seem like a teenager's first short story.
It's a somber poem of a film sure to frustrate those who prefer resolution to ambiguity. Controversial hype aside, that indeterminacy is its primary draw.
The Cannes version was a bad film, but now Gallo's editing has set free the good film inside.
The kind of fascinatingly bad film only a really gifted and fearless moviemaker could make.
[Gallo's] treatment here of his star, and his audience, is his rudest insult yet.
Latest News for The Brown Bunny
November 04, 2005:
In Other News...Vincent Gallo: Weirder Than We Thought
First there was celebrity air, and then Britney's bra -- now, an even more intimate celebrity item is up for sale: fatherhood. More...
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