Real Cancun, TheDirector: Rick de OliveiraGenre: Documentary Publisher: New Line Released: 2003 MPAA Rating: R Cast: Alan, Amber, Ben, Brittany, Casey, Sky, Snoop Dogg |
A Review by Andrew Hicks
04/30/2003
It seems like kind of an arbitrary pick for an out-of-retirement return to the movie review game, but I figured The Real Cancun would give off such an acrid stench that my filmic typing fingers would explode effortlessly for the first time in more than two years. (And there's my first run-on sentence of the new batch.) I've always enjoyed reviewing brain-dead bullshit, from ludicrous horror and sci-fi flicks to lugubrious teen movies and gross-out comedies. But as it turns out, The Real Cancun isn't entirely awful, nor is it entirely what I expected. Its IQ never exactly crosses into three-digit territory, but students of sociology - that is to say, nosy mofos - and people with voyeuristic tendencies will find some entertainment value here.
Cancun is being billed as the world's first "reality movie," a big-screen response to the gimmicky low-budget nonfiction revolution of primetime television. It's also being marketed as a shock-value collection of drunken antics and anonymous Girls Gone Wild nudity, complete with a concert appearance by Snoop Dogg. With no more weed to smoke, it seems the gangsta rapper's preeminent duty these days is to entertain intoxicated white folks in movie parties. This makes two in two months. (Next up: a ten-year-anniversary update of "Gin and Juice" for Robert DeNiro and Billy Crystal to shake their asses to in Analyze That Shit One More Time Why Don't You? Coming to theaters this fall.)
In actuality, there's not a whole lot of titillation. The Real Cancun is further franchising of producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray's "Real World" concept. Snatch up a handful of demographically preordained twentysomethings, make them live together, record what happens and slap it into a narrative. Worry about what nondescript pop music to underscore it with later. THC-free Snoop is always available.
Here we have sixteen college-age kids from across the country tossed into an otherwise-empty resort hotel for nine days of Spring Break partying. And, over the course of the movie, it becomes clear why Bunim and Murray usually just throw seven kids into a living space together - at least half these characters get lost in the shuffle. Two of them, twins Nicole and Roxanne, only seem to get screen time when they participate in wet t-shirt contests. (And, I have to admit, those are four nice, identical, perky A-cup boobies.) Another, a big, hilarious brother named Jorell with more genuine traces of humanity than the other participants, only gets to play sidekick to his playa friend Paul.
There's not a whole lot of nudity, and any actual sex is of the "shifting blankets" variety, as captured from a distance by black-and-white night-vision surveillance cameras. But, in the spirit of Spring Break and college in general, there's a buttload of drinking. Most of the dialogue takes place in the hotel bar, while kids who aren't even legal to drink in their home country are chasing away hangovers with a breakfast Bloody Mary or two.
One character (in every sense of the word), an aspiring male model named Casey, is wasted seconds after the tour guide's welcoming remark, "This is the dream, take it all in." And I don't think it's through the magic of editing; I really think this guy can get this drunk in the amount of time it takes the average person to convert a lungful of oxygen to carbon monoxide. Casey wanders the beaches and clubs randomly asking girls to make out and then asking "why not?" when they turn him down. His approach never seems to get him anywhere, either, but he's persistent. Give him that.
The party sequences are usually brief montages - The Real Cancun prefers to hone in on the relationship side of things. Paul, the playa, is enamored with Sky, "the token black girl," who actually likes Jeremy, who has a girlfriend but is busy playing head games with Laura, the "naughty" waitress who really wants to be an actress. David and Heidi are best friends who have never crossed the city limits from Platonica to Romantica and can't really point to any reason why. Well, aside from David's guitar-strummed "ode to the '80s," which mentions the Jackson 5 as being charter participants in Reagan-era culture. Come on, David, you should know the Jackson 5 were strictly a Richard Milhouse Nixon act. These kids today, I tell you.
But fuck all that unfocused mess. The movie really belongs to Alan, the 18-year-old geek from Texas who enters Cancun as a wallflower whose humble goal is to see a bunch of "boobies" and exits as the undisputed champ of the hot body contest. He's the one guy in the group who won't drink (the partiers in one scene keep referring to him as "Diet Pepsi") and can offer only the excuse, "I don't want to ruin my soberness." No points for guessing he'll be shitfaced by Reel Three, sucking body shots off random coeds and slurring out such dialogue gems as, "You know what? You're hot!"
It's not the satisfaction of seeing the token prude get peer pressured into tequiladom that makes the Alan angle the most entertaining one. It's his attitudinal transformation, one as long-established as the teen movie genre itself - Alan longs for a girlfriend but is shy. He hates the game, hates taking the initiative to approach females and hates the idea of rejection. Yet he realizes his way of living is not really living; the "nothing ventured, nothing gained" speech he gives to one of the female characters should logically result in him trying to kiss her, but it doesn't. Likewise, Alan literally runs away from the first girl who shows interest in him. But by movie's end, he's won the contest (and, echoes of the geek-turned-stud transformation of Charlie Korsmo in Can't Hardly Wait, "Paradise City" starts blasting in the background), met an exotic yet sensitive girl and declared that he regrets none of his Spring Break behavior. But he doesn't know if he'll keep drinking when he gets back home.
When Alan's not around, The Real Cancun isn't quite as entertaining. The other guys, except for Paul and Jorell, are Abercrombie cookie-cutters without distinctive personalities (they also try to out-party and out-WOOOOHHH!!! Casey and can't come close) and most of the girls, save Sky and Heidi (a non-drinker whose phone conversations with her mom are funnier than the movie in which they're contained), are equally indistinguishable. You almost need the full set of sixteen reality trading cards to keep them straight... well, except for the twins. I have no problem remembering them.
I was expecting to spend a good chunk of my review focusing on the decline-of-culture issue. Then I saw the movie and realized how thematically tame it was - you can lament the younger generation's preoccupation with alcohol and empty sex, but free love has been around for decades and drunkenness for millennia. The particular combination of hedonism contained during Spring Break has also been mythic at least since the Jackson 5 were popular in the '80s. It just didn't surface in the public eye until Joe Wusshizname started the Girls Gone Wild franchise. And, honestly, one of those GGW infomercials on late-night cable would better serve as whacking material than The Real Cancun. I'll be reviewing those separately as soon as I stock up on lubricant. A gallon or so should do.
I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone looking for a brain or libido workout, but The Real Cancun does have sociological time-capsule qualities. When it's not entertaining, you want to blame the cast more than the filmmakers. Well, okay, I do blame the filmmakers for the ridiculous sequence that has a coed being stung by a jellyfish and nearly in tears while her wound is washed away by another spring breaker's urine, said by a grinning Mexican paramedic to be therapeutic. There are orchestral swells and everything. It's horrible.
Where I come from, alcohol not only lowers inhibition but fuels quality conversation. You'd think there would be more than "Real World" melodrama to focus on amidst all this footage, but I suppose the level of disclosure and familiarity in drunken conversation would have skyrocketed had these people actually known each other beforehand. A better idea would be to follow a smaller group of friends, not a hoard of randomly picked auditioners, through the oblivion and excess of Cancun.
One final note - since this is my first time off the bench in a couple of years, I actually did a little homework. Scoured the Internet Movie Database, a few other Cancun reviews and cruised by the movie's official website. Bad idea. It killed the one bright spot of the movie for me, the Alan character. Granted, it was somewhat enlightening to visit Alan's profile page and find out his favorite movie is Forrest Gump, but when I read his daily diary I realized just how much cutting-room manipulation had gone into the creation of his subplot. There's no mention in the movie of Alan having a girlfriend back home, actually drinking every day of the trip and taking a shower with three girls before meeting his Celtic Cancun sweetheart. The filmmakers also cut a few events out of sequence and manipulated other shit to fit the predetermined narrative. You'd expect more from a $7.5 million budget and a month of editing time.
© Copyright CultureCartel.com 04/30/2003
