I would have walked out of a recent screening of the film “Glow Ropes” but for the fact I was watching it in my home.
And it was raining.
The film — full title: “Glow Ropes: The Rise and Fall of a Bar Mitzvah Emcee” — is transcendentally bad. It fails on an astonishing number of levels. My old high school history teacher used to offer a full score to any student who could manage to register a zero on one of his tests. That’s a lot harder than you might think, but this does come close.
The movie, which never can seem to settle on whether it’s a comedy, farce, mockumentary, adult film or kiddie fare, traces the ascent of Taylor James from chintzy New Jersey bar mitzvah emcee to Manhattan’s most sought-after “Mitzvah Man” before he spirals into life as a tousle-haired vagrant.
Actually, actor Tim Peper’s hair shows incredible range: When he’s meant to look sad, downtrodden or naïve, it slumps down like John Boy Walton’s. When he’s the suave bar mitzvah emcee, his blonde coiffure is a dead ringer for Val Kilmer’s in “Top Gun” to the point where I half expected Peper to don a towel, waddle over to Tom Cruise and utter “I’m sorry about Goose (sniff). Everybody liked him (sniff).”
I’m not going to belittle the overall talents of the performers involved in this production, even actor George Valencia, who also wrote and directed this war crime of a film. And yet many of the actors took bad material and made it worse.
The No. 1 offender is Judy Reyes, which is an unpleasant surprise as she’s so good in “Scrubs.” Portraying ruthless party planner Vanessa Dupree, her faux-French accent could be characterized as cartoonish, but that’d be an insult to Mel Blanc’s voicing of Pepé Le Pew and the Quebecois Blacque Jacque Shellacque.
Reyes’ accent is as kind to the ear as French people are to geese.
Reyes, Valencia and especially Bob Greenberg as corpulent, kippah-wearing, two-bit party promoter Harry Kauffman turn in broad, physical performances one might expect in movies aimed at young children; think of how a villain in “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” might act.
And yet this film doesn’t seem to fancy itself a kiddie flick. Characters malevolently tell each other to “get the f..k out of here” and bandy about sexual and profane dialogue of an R-rated nature.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that per se, but this isn’t worthwhile profane dialogue of the sort the Coen Brothers or, most famously, David Mamet might produce. The enraged, inarticulate characters in “Glow Ropes” trade insults like a couple in a 2 a.m. stupor at the Hotsy Totsy tavern. It’s not clever, it’s not entertaining — it’s not anything.
Well, there you go: That’s the rap on this whole movie. Valencia, himself a former bar mitzvah emcee for a dozen years, probably has countless war stories to tell, stories that could have made quite a funny little movie.
But that’s not what he wanted to do. He wanted to make a film in which an emcee — himself, of course — steps off of a Learjet, slips on his Ray-Bans and struts down the tarmac with a pair of silicon-chested stewardesses in tow. This is a film in which emcees live in hardwood-floored luxury flats with park views and hold international press conferences regarding their upcoming bar mitzvah bashes. That kind of wish fulfillment hits a level of indulgent filmmaking that even Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Smith can’t touch, and Man-Oh-Manischewitz is that saying something.
This is the film that has it all: Abysmal writing, bad acting, clunky directing and, worst of all, it’s too long: At 90 minutes it’s paced less like a bar mitzvah than a Catholic wedding.
“Glow Ropes” ($19.99) is available on the Web.