The Last Big Thing

Like its protagonist, this feature debut by Dan Zukovic is a painful, grating mass of pseudo-intellectual narcissism that makes you long for a way to scrub those neurons with some psychic steel wool. Alas, our consumer-oriented society has yet to come up with such a tool, and so, like Zukovic's pained anti-hero, your head throbs from all the rants. Taking a tremendously wide broadside at the pop zeitgeist and pre-fab culture, Zukovic plays Simon Geist, a whiny, pompous Los Angelean intent on defacing and exposing the shallowness of pre-millennial society. His chosen method for this war on mediocrity is The Next Big Thing, a fictional magazine he claims to write for in order to lure prospective interviewees into an escalating series of verbal and intellectual bitch-slaps. One by one, he skewers such unremarkably easy targets as bad bands, unemployed actors, and Seventies-referencing stand-up comics. While he appears to be enjoying his “agenda,” it's actually not nearly as challenging as shooting whales in a barrel: There's no sport in hunting the previously maimed. Setting himself up in a suburban sprawl 30 miles outside of L.A., Geist moves in with trust-fund groupie Darla (Heimbinder), a neurotic mass of tics and spastic speech impediments that may or may not be the director's one desperate attempt at comic relief. It's hard to tell if Zukovic meant his film to be taken seriously or whether it's just some elaborate gag on the audience. If Zukovic is arguing against our society of botched entertainment and crass commercialism, he shoots himself in the foot by making a movie at all (I'm not even going to go into the ramifications of his placing himself in nearly every scene). Or perhaps The Last Big Thing's sting relies on the fact that it's not nearly as entertaining as you would like it to be. Who knows, and, more to the point, who cares? Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent covered this same ground and did it with flair, zeal, and no trace of the irritating mental scabies that Zukovic's film engenders. And while The Last Big Thing does actually succeed on technical levels -- it looks good, flows from scene to scene, and doesn't stoop to any hideous visual tricksterisms -- all of its marginally redeeming features are eclipsed by both Zukovic's and his on-screen persona's flip sermonizing. Whatever solid theses Geist promulgates (and there are a few) are mangled by his incessant nihilistic whining. For all its salient points on the downfall of art, life, et cetera, The Last Big Thing is one long extemporaneous hissy fit, a high-pitched squeal of a film that makes you long for the trenchantly indifferent relief of the Fox network.