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‘S.F.W.’ lives up to name with futile attempt at Gen X trauma

By Daily Bruin Staff

Jan. 19, 1995 9:00 p.m.

‘S.F.W.’ lives up to name with futile attempt at Gen X
trauma

Angst-filled film explores world of instant celebrity

By Michael Horowitz

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

S.F.W. is one of the most aggravating cinematic experiences of
the year. Jeffrey Levy’s humorless film tries to define our
generation with half-assed, one-note characters, but slicing your
face up with a "My Sharona" CD single would be more pleasant than
this exercise in screen masturbation.

Cliff Spab (Steven Dorff) is just one of this film’s annoyingly
snide characters. Hell, he’s so snide his name is sarcastic! Spab
walks into a convenience store one night with a friend and ends up
getting kidnapped along with a few other victims.

Here’s where the filmmakers ask for a leap of faith, the last
we’ll give them, in that the terrorists demand the hostages be
shown on network TV for months as the situation progresses. The
networks comply.

When we meet Spab, the hostage crisis has ended. Unwittingly,
he’s a celebrity of O.J. proportions, but unfittingly, he’s just a
twentysomething asshole with a network of disaffected friends.
These friends needn’t even be explained, because we all can relate
immediately to their Gen X attitudes. They’re cut from real life
and they listen to Radiohead’s "Creep" again and again, just like
us!

And they’re sooo angsty! S.F.W. must have gone straight to the
federal government to get the monopoly on this emotion. It’s
everything Spab feels for the entire movie while he tries to sort
his life out. The only person who can truly understand what it was
like to be videotaped for hours on end is Wendy Phister, so they
find each other and seek solace. If this sounds like a slack
Fearless, that’s because it is, except without Peter Weir’s
spiritual talents, Jeff Bridges’ and Rosie Perez’s acting
abilities, interesting cinematography or good dialogue.

In fact, the only eye-catching scenes in S.F.W. are in the
flashback footage, the washed-out whites of a desperate liquor
store standoff. If this stuff was in a video, it would be
enjoyable. But this isn’t a video. It’s a feature-length film that
falls short of even the most lenient standards of story
quality.

The initials S.F.W. stand for So Fucking What, Spab’s catch
phrase and attitude. Levy and his cohorts probably felt it was both
intrinsically hilarious and intellectually appealing. They are so
exasperatingly wrong. Spab’s disaffection as played by Dorff is
torturous; he’s a guy you’d never want to meet, much less worship.
The pseudo-hip remarks he mutters do little to convince you of his
worth.

Dorff deserves to be slapped for wanting this part, on second
thought, he just deserves to be slapped. Highly touted and
over-watched since he was hailed "Star of the Future" years ago,
Dorff won’t break out because his performances can’t back up his
ego. A better acting job could have redeemed S.F.W., but Dorff
sends it straight to hell.

FILM: S.F.W. Directed by Jason Levy. Starring Stephen Dorff,
Reese Witherspoon. Opens everywhere today.

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