Big Nothing
(Pathe! Region 2 PAL DVD)
(2006)
review by Died with Boots On

Jean-Baptiste Andrea is well on his way to being the next big thing.  The horror-comedy is gaining popularity (‘Shaun of the Dead’, ‘Dead & Breakfast’, ‘Slither’, ‘Severance’), and ‘Big Nothing’ is one of the better, funnier, bloodier contributions to the genre.  Simon Pegg is of course legendary for his comedy crossbreeds, and David Schwimmer plays the same funny, ambiguously gay character he played on ‘Friends’.  In fact, the two are teaming up again for Schwimmer’s directorial debut, ‘Run, Fat Boy, Run’, which should be coming to theaters this Fall.

Charlie (Schwimmer) is a starving author/ex-teacher who can barely provide for his wife and daughter.  No publisher wants to pick up his Stephen Hawking biography, and his wife is making a very modest living as a sheriff’s detective.  In spite of his PhD, he finds work at a call center doing technical support.  He is assigned the new name “Stephen,” and must sit with all of the other and “Stephens” and “Jennifers”, because customers like to think they are talking to the same representative.  He finds his desk and sits next to a man named Gus (Pegg).  “Welcome to hell, dickhead!”  Charlie watches as Gus puts a particularly difficult woman on hold and tells her off.  They go on break and Gus shows Charlie a picture of his ex-wife and daughter, who has a problem with her eye-pressure and will go blind if she doesn’t receive a cornea transplant within the year.  When they come back from their break, Charlie answers a phone call from a customer, and doesn’t quite know how to answer his question.  Following Gus’s lead, he puts the guy on hold and tells him that his wife goes into chat rooms and engages in vigorous masturbation, except he didn’t actually put the guy on hold.  The customer sobs that his wife has been dead for three months, and that he would like to take this up with his supervisor.  Horrified, Charlie puts him through to her and is fired.

Chasing after him to his car, Gus apologizes to Charlie, saying that it’s his fault that he was fired.  He feels as though he needs to make it up to him, asking Charlie to meet him that night at a local bar to discuss a business opportunity.  Not knowing what else to do, Charlie meets up with him.  Gus explains that while working at the call center, he stumbled across the online history of each and every member of Centel Online.  He then produces a list of everyone in the last three months that logged on to an illegal porn site.  He figures that there will be someone willing to fork over some coin to keep things hush-hush, in particular, a man of the cloth, he just needs Charlie to be his alibi.  Once Charlie accepts, a young attractive girl named Josie jumps on Gus and asks how he would feel about bringing in a third.  Gus says no, but Josie reminds him that they need someone to make the call, because if the preacher goes and records them on his answering machine, the first thing they’re going to do is try to match it up with the voice records from the call center.  They take her on.  She calls the Reverend, tells him that they know what he is up to.  Gus and Charlie tell her to ask for 100,000$, but she pulls an out-of-the-blue, candy-ass stunt and asks for 200,000$.  Their simple, compact, nonviolent plan spirals out of control as everything they didn’t take into account comes to pass.  Meanwhile, a psychopath serial killer nicknamed the Oregon Undertaker is terrorizing the countryside.

There were so many great things about this movie!  First and foremost is the writing.  Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Billy Asher have written a brilliant screenplay.  The dialogue is my absolute favorite part.  Here is an example of the brilliance of it: (a character gets an axe buried in her skull) “Well I’ll be, I haven’t heard Pink Floyd in years.”  Not only that, but the ending is a stroke of genius.  It was perfectly appropriate in every way.  The only thing comparable to the writing is the acting.  Every single actor and every single actress in this movie is perfect for their role.  Even a part as small as the Reverend’s wife was typecast and given to Mimi Rogers.  Simon Pegg is a delight, as always, and does a very good American accent, especially when he says “okie-dokie”, though there are a few words he still pronounces with a slight British influence.

The camerawork is very cool, too.  Sometimes the angles are on a slant, sometimes upside-down, and sometimes the screen is divided into three or four parts.  In addition, when Gus is plotting their alibi, the plan plays out in sketchy penciled storyboard animations, a subtle nuance that gives the film a gritty, artistic feel.  In fact, the grizzly high-intensity movement mixed with the dizzying camera angles reminded me of Guy Ritchie.

The only thing left to comment on was the musical selection.  With songs like “Blinking Lights (For Me)” and “Love of the Loveless” by Eels and “Engle” by Rammstein and “Fin De Siecle” by Noir Desir and the fitting classical piece “Stabat Mater,” there is never a dull, unaccompanied moment.  Sometimes the French just do it right.  I recommend this movie to horror-comedy fans and fans of Simon Pegg.