I’m Still Here (Movie Review)

SURPRISE... It's a penis!

If you saw The Crying Game more than a week after it came out, you didn’t really get to see it. After word spread about the “surprise” ending, the true cinematic experience was ruined for you. Although still a good movie, the climactic moment of revelation is stolen from you thereby cheapening the effect. Same goes for “I’m Still Here”. If you were lucky enough to see it before the “is it or isn’t it a hoax” debate, you actually got to see a movie that shocked, embarrased, entertained and, possibly, disappointed. Unencumbered by looking for clues of deception, you could witness performance art at its finest.

I’m Still Here, directed by Casey Affleck and starring Joaquin Phoenix, is an intricate and elaborate joke on the masses. It spotlights our obsession with celebrities and how we react when they fall. Take delight in, rather. I, myself, have thoroughly enjoyed watching the decline of Hilton and Lohan. The difference is they have no talent. Joaquin Phoenix does and so you care a little more.

Phoenix is a beautiful mess. It’s one thing to know (or think) that he’s retired from acting, but it’s a whole other thing to know (or think) that he’s done it to reinvent himself as a rap star. Especially when it’s clearly a terrible idea. His lyrics are abyssmal and his delivery even worse. He bombs so hard at his “debut” at a Miami nightclub that you truly feel sorry for him.

This sympathy is a feat in and of itself since you’ve just spent over an hour watching him berate his friends, snort coke off a hooker’s breast and slur his way through Late Night with David Letterman. These antics are tempered, however, with childhood videos of he and his siblings performing on sidewalks for tourists, images of him being bombarded by the paparazzi and clips of him pontificating upon his place in this world. You almost understand how one could grow tired of fame, especially after an entire lifetime of it. It makes it impossible to hate him or even enjoy the downward spiral.

Eye on the prize(s)! Diddy's mostly concerned with getting Beal's Golden Globes.

If anything, you are confused. You can sort of wrap your head around wanting to escape the madness but can’t wrap it around his new and utterly misguided career choice. One of the funniest scenes in the movie show Sean Jean-Puff Daddy-P. Diddy-Combs (?) listening to some of Phoenix’s “demos” with a look of sheer perplexity. It is made all the more comical by the obvious effort to restrain himself fom laughing when he hears the line, “I’m God’s chosen one, bitch!”

Shortly after being released, Phoenix and Affleck copped to pranking a nation with I’m Still Here. See it anyway. It’s still a thoroughly entertaining train wreck and a tour de force. It is an amazing prank, a genius performance and an instant classic. It could also be career suicide.

I doubt it.