Today’s Young Cookie Tossers

The Color Wheel
directed by Alex Ross Perry

The Color Wheel is, thankfully, not about ghetto teens or suburbanites discovering a multicultural world. In fact, the nerdy brother Colin (Alex Ross Perry) comes right out with his racism (“What am I going to do with this black-man-sized erection?”). A notice is served –– you don’t have to like this movie. And I didn’t.

Co-writers Perry and Carlen Altman cast themselves as Colin and JR, a pair of bickering siblings who take their insecurities, long-term resentments and sexual frustrations on the road, predictably accompanied by bad music and bad camerawork, all held together by that opiate of the masses, “Desaturate” and “Film Grain” filters. JR recruits her brother, who is suffering his own icy rejection from his girlfriend, to confront her lover, her former acting professor. JR’s hope for patching up the relationship falls apart when she is greeted by a blonde girl emerging from her professor’s bedroom. Following an obligatory crying-behind-sunglasses-in-a-park scene –– during which the talking is replaced by more bad music –– the pair do more confronting: first, Colin’s racism (“To me a beautiful black woman or a beautiful Asian woman is like a beautiful guy”), then JR’s shambling aspirations, and ultimately –– drumroll –– their high-school peers.

Perry and Altman are good as the incessant-talking duo. But of course, they are the writer-producer-directors; they had no choice but to believe in their material. They are surrounded by a truly amateur cast representing the banal-est America has to offer: Bible-quoting motel owner, aggressively dismissive TV anchorwoman, high-school cliques and bullies.

A series of clichés –– JR’s heart-stopping encounter with the TV anchor she worships; bullying sending Colin into the arms of his school crush –– delineates the siblings’ psychological baggage and brings them together, culminating in an incestuous intimacy. Oh yes, why not? We’re all liberals, right? You should have known. That Bible-thumper warned you about it. The next morning, they are better people for it: Colin even hugs his girlfriend tenderly upon his return.

Each individual’s young-adult angst is his/her own. But just because you can talk about it for two hours nonstop doesn’t mean you should make a movie about it. What matters, and what ultimately makes a movie, is how you show your angst. After all, stitching thin substance together with what passes for style has been hammered into us by Perry and Altman’s predecessors, the early Jim Jarmusch school of filmmaking which borrowed so feebly from the early Wim Wenders school of filmmaking.

Oh, by the way, there is also an abundance of vomit. That’s probably what the title refers to.
–– Rika Ohara