Vincent Gallo and I have a history. In May 2003, I called his "The Brown Bunny" the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival. Then he put a hex on me to give me colon cancer. Now we're about to meet for the first time.
It was a little tense in the Lake Street Screening Room, following the screening recently of the re-edited, shorter version of "The Brown Bunny." I heard Gallo was in the elevator. I heard he was in the hallway. I heard he was around the corner. Then there he was. The atmosphere lightened after he explained he had never wished colon cancer on me in the first place. He was misquoted. He actually specified prostate cancer.
"You know how that happened?" he asked. "I have prostatitis. I go to this guy doctor in California. He doesn't want to put me on antibiotics or whatever. But I get these things called a prostate massage."
"Are you taking flaxseed?" I asked him.
"I know all my nutritional things," he said. "I had been battling this prostatitis, and a reporter who I didn't know said 'I'm doing a story on Cannes and I want to know if you read what Roger Ebert said about your film.' I said, yeah, I read all about it. 'Well, do you have any comment?'
"And I said something like, 'Tell him I curse his prostate.' I said it in a joking way. And then the reporter converted it into a curse on your colon. At that point, I had become the captain of black magic."
"I don't believe in hexes," I said. "Besides, if I can't take it, I shouldn't dish it out."
"Right."
"Maybe by saying you made the worst film in Cannes history, I was asking for it."
"But I thought your response was funny when you responded with the colonoscopy line."
That was when I said the film of my colonoscopy was more entertaining than "The Brown Bunny."
"I felt we were now on a humorous level," he said, "so I apologized. To tell you the weirdest story, I started getting these letters from cultist people criticizing me for going back on what they thought was like a genius thing I did. There was this guy in L.A. who approached me in a club and he was like, 'We're really disappointed in you.' And I asked why. And he said, 'Because we heard that you removed the curse from Roger Ebert.' I took one look at him and I thought, well, I did the right thing."
"Anyway, your aim was bad," I said, "because I had salivary cancer."
Read the rest here [lots of SPOILER-y stuff].
posted by Linus |
2:20 PM
