Go

Go is an appropriate title for a film about people who are constantly in motion; the protagonists, all blessedly youthful, churn through activities both legal and illegal (mostly at nighttime) without any regard as to possible consequences. This small film from the spring of 1999, not so much the son of Pulp Fiction as its goofy grandchild, exists like the myth of Icarus without so drastic a fall. Now available on a new Special Edition DVD, the film is if nothing else a swan song for the '90s, a period of quick living, drug dealing, awkward rocking and young peoples' belief that they could never die.

Like Pulp, Go unfolds through a tripartite narrative. In Part 1 we meet Ronna (Sarah Polley), a seventeen year-old grocery clerk who's spent the past fourteen hours scanning coupons for snippy soccer moms and catching occasional breaks with her friends Claire (Katie Holmes) and Mannie (Nathan Bexton). Into Ronna's life comes Simon (Desmond Askew), a goofy British coworker who's heading to Vegas with his buddies and wants Ronna to take his shift. Things get complicated when Ronna also decides to take over Simon's Ecstasy deals, more complicated when Mannie takes a pill himself and most complicated when Claire gets stuck in the company of the dangerous drug dealer Todd (Timothy Olyphant, of HBO's Deadwood).

Part 2 (and the funniest): Simon and his friends, who include hipster Marcus (Taye Diggs) and poseur Tiny (Breckin Meyer), get into trouble when Simon touches the wrong girls during a lap dance. This leads to wild car chases, flaming hotel rooms, gun shots fired by a father-son duo and the following question: "Just so we're clear "” you stole a car, shot a bouncer and had sex with two women?"

Part 3: Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr) are a pair of beefcake soap opera stars who have been busted for possession by middle-aged cop Burke (William Fichtner). Burke is not your average policeman, though; on top of getting the boys to entrap dealers, he will inquire about their girlfriends, invite them to sniff his cologne and ask if they are open to new experiences. The boys, secretly gay themselves, grow uncomfortable with Burke's measures, but not as uncomfortable as they feel about entrapping Ronna.

Go's plot sounds complicated, and it is, but director Doug Liman (who captured another kind of zeitgeist with his previous cult smash, Swingers) keeps the action delineated so that we always know what is happening, when and where. He's helped by John August, whose witty screenplay holds distinctive characters who wax poetical on everything from Family Circus to Sidney Poitier. Editor Stephen Merrione works closely with Liman (who also photographed the movie) to create a hyper-kinetic effect of life lived at warp speed; they are particularly successful with Mannie's drug-addled visions, of

which the one with the cat is more or less unforgettable.

Liman has assembled an eclectic cast to help sell this material, and the fact that they are all near their characters' ages makes their success that much more impressive. Polley, the pale-eyed Canadian actress known for indies like The Sweet Hereafter, provides a plucky, cynical center that grounds the movie as it spirals off into crazier directions, some of which include Askew's puppy-dog cluelessness, Diggs' superhuman cool, Wolf and Mohr's desperate earnestness and Olyphant's deadly sex appeal. Holmes, years before Tom Cruise went crazy for her, provides some nice quiet moments as Claire falls for Todd; the movie's best performance belongs to Fichtner, whose smiling officer gives us the impression of an inmate running the asylum.

The closest thing that the movie has to a message comes from the older Vegas bouncer, who tells his son, "In the old days, you know how you got to the top? Huh? By being better than the guy ahead of you. How do you people get to the top? By being so incompetent, that the guy ahead of you can’t do his job. And now the top is down here, it used to be up here… and you don’t even know the difference." Stupidity is punished in Go, and ingenuity rewarded, but every one of its characters is gladly living stupidly, and this is something worth thinking on even as the film rides its lunatic pleasure cruise.

Special Features:

The greatest delight of the special features is a feature-length commentary by Liman and Merrione that acts as a kind of film school primer for those wanting real-life lessons on how to make a movie. The two, who previously worked together on Swingers, give relatively little thought to August's script but constantly justify technical decisions, from creating the effect of a rocking boat in one scene in order to disorient viewers to creating a club set design that would highlight the darker side of Christmas. Liman, a Brown graduate, also provides goofy pieces of trivia like how he and August felt the need to minimize characters smoking despite the movie's heavy drug presence.

The next most interesting feature is a trio of music videos for songs from the movie. The first is Len's poppy "Steal My Sunshine," which fits in well with the movie's Los Angeles setting; the second is a remix of Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" that features prominently in the Vegas sequence; and the third and most '90s-ish of the videos is for No Doubt's "New."

The DVD also features a short making-of featurette, a theatrical trailer and several deleted scenes, most of which prove to be little more than discarded outtakes (the lone exception is a funny Vegas scene with a precocious twelve year-old). Even more disappointing than their presence, though,

is the lack of other deleted scenes, as Liman and Merrione make reference in their commentary to at least two cut sequences that are nowhere to be found. Finally, the disc gives viewers the option to watch the movie in widescreen or in fullscreen, which is meant as a benevolent gesture but makes me wonder how much Columbia Pictures respects its audiences' intelligence.

All in all, though, Columbia has created a fun disc for a very fun movie.

Movie Grade: B+
DVD Grade: B
Overall Grade: B+