The Last Big Thing Reviews

Pretentious, shallow and so unhip it hurts, this satirical look at L.A. pomposity and the evils of consumer culture is crammed to bursting with blinding glimpses of the obvious. Models and TV hunks are pretty stupid. Bands are full of dimwitted poseurs. Magazines thrive on trashy trends. The level of discourse in coffee bars is fairly low. The '70s are overworked. Popular culture is disposable. Stand-up comics are frequently not as funny as they think they are. Lots of starving performance artists are looking for a chance to sell out. Music videos are seldom great art. All meaning is produced by difference, but what it means depends on who's looking. And? These non-insights come via creepy eccentric Simon Geist (director Dan Zukovic), a dyspeptic misfit holed up in a desolate L.A. suburb, where he claims to be putting together a high-concept magazine called The Next Big Thing but isn't: It's just a pretext to gain access to unsuspecting celebrities so he can make fun of them. Geist is idolized by Darla (Susan Heimbinder, who bears a startling resemblance to Suddenly Susan sidekick Kathy Griffin), a suburban screw-up in search of an abusive guru and harboring both a secret stash of '70's TV-tie-in lunch boxes (Geist preaches that pop culture detritus is evil) and an Eve Harrington streak. Geist rants about popular culture, infers great meaning from the fact that his reflection in a cylindrical steel garbage can looks uncannily like Edvard Munch's "The Scream," makes dire predictions about the millennium and terrorizes everyone who crosses his path. Zukovic's performance is admirably conscientious in its unrelenting unpleasantness, but damned near unwatchable. Come to think of it, that just about sums up the whole project.