Paparazzi
(FOX Region 1 NTSC DVD)
(2004)
review by Head Cheeze

I don’t know what it’s like to be famous, and I’ll go against the grain here, by saying I’ve really no desire to. I mean, I’d certainly welcome the money, and would appreciate the occasional adulation, but I don’t think I could handle putting myself out there so much as to make even the most benign action in my life front page news. It takes a special breed to welcome such rabid spectacle, and, even then, the welcome is always worn out eventually. Perhaps the biggest pitfall of celebrity is the ever-present shutterbugs that shadow the famous through airports, hide in their bushes, and hover above nude beaches in helicopters. This is the paparazzi; the yin to the celebrity’s yang. Without the celebrity, the paparazzi have nothing to sell, and without the paparazzi, a celebrity is only as popular as their last film or television series. It’s a carefully balanced relationship of parasite and host. However, when the parasite takes more than its share, watch out; that’s when the Sean Penns, Chris Martins, and Jack Nicholsons of the world come out swinging.

In the Mel “No Hidden Agenda, Here!” Gibson produced Paparazzi, this breach of press/celebrity etiquette is taken to new extremes when new superstar Bo Laramie (Hauser) confronts Rex Harper (Sizemore), a pushy paparazzi, at his son’s soccer game. When Bo kindly asks Rex to stop snapping photos of his kid, Rex decides to bait Bo into hitting him, and it’s all captured on tape, thanks to Rex’s cadre of equally twisted and evil paparazzi (Baldwin, Tom Hollander, Kevin Gage). Rex sues Bo for a half-million dollars, as well as a request for a public apology, which Bo refuses to give. This sets Rex off, and he decides that he is going to not only ruin Laramie’s career- he’s going to destroy his life. He very nearly succeeds when he and his cronies ambush Bo and his wife (Tunney) and child (Blake Bryan) as they drive home from a party, causing an accident which costs Bo’s wife her spleen, and puts their son in a coma. This, of course, pushes Bo over the edge, and, when the police can’t find any witnesses to the accident, Bo takes the law into his own hands.

Paparazzi is an enormously stupid film, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it, at least on the purely primal level, where men root on the demise of other, more evil men. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out if this film was meant to be taken seriously, or if it was a thinly veiled parody of the old school revenge flicks of the 70’s and 80’s, but either way it’s chock-full of laughs, intentional or otherwise. Whether it be Tom Sizemore’s over-annunciating paparazzi kingpin Rex, the little Zach Laramie’s “coma” (which had my wife and I in stitches), or the filmmakers grim determination to paint all paparazzi as just one step up the evolutionary ladder from primordial ooze (each of Rex’s peers has a shady criminal past, from rape to drug dealing, as if to say a life of crime leads to celebrity photo-journalism), Paparazzi is as satisfying a comedy as it is a terrifically over-the-top revenge schlock-fest.

The DVD from Fox Home Entertainment presents the film in both widescreen and fullscreen transfers, and features a commentary track by director (and former Gibson hair-stylist) Paul Abasacal, a short making-of featurette, and some mercifully deleted scenes.

Paparazzi isn’t a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it is entertaining in the same low-brow, mullet-sporting way those goofy 80’s action films it so skillfully imitates were, and features a bunch of cameos from people whose well manicured coifs suggest they were probably clients of Abascal at one time or another.