Highway (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

We split on this one. Scoop thought it had some engaging elements, even though it was exceedingly weird and seemed to be written by someone who smoked as much dope as the characters. Tuna lost patience with the weirdness, and found it essentially pointless.

Scoop's notes in white:

What can I tell ya? I can see the film's flaws and I think most of you will agree with Tuna, but I liked the film, and admired the way it maintained consistency in its odd characters. Highway is a road picture targeted at a very specific group - those in the grunge/punk scene when their God, Kurt Cobain, said "sayonara" to existence. It's a film for a small and specific market, and you will enjoy it far more if you have a taste for grunge and some nostalgia for that era not long gone.

The primary target market is people in their mid- to late- 20s, and the secondary market is younger females, because underneath its grungy surface and bad haircuts, it has a sentimental and romantic world view, perhaps excessively so. The film plays far better for women than for men, with an IMDb male/female score differential that approaches the all-time record (1.9, Dirty Dancing).

Jared Leto plays the God of Fuck, a pool boy whose only talent is obvious from his nickname. One day he was delivering the goods to a wife of a Vegas mobster when the mobster walked in. Oops. He barely made it out of the wiseguy's house, but knew that the mob guy's goons would not rest until they could do some serious damage to his body. His only choice was to flee Vegas. Enlisting his best friend for a road trip was simple enough, but trying to find out why the friend wanted to go to Seattle was a challenge. It seems that the geeky friend spent a night with a girl back in high school, and she went away ... to Seattle, of course, and he never got over her. So it is when you're 19.

Along the way, the two friends made pit stops at a legal brothel and a drug dealer's office, stopped to see an "alligator boy", and picked up a runaway hooker and an aging hippie. As they made their way to Washington State, they became aware that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide, and every grunge/punk geek in the country was making the same Seattle pilgrimage.

Unfortunately, the heavy-muscled mob thugs also figured out the Seattle plan, and their route started to intersect with that of the God of Fuck.

This film has some strong positives.

• The cast is excellent. Jared Leto and Jake Gyllenhaal take the leads, while the supporting cast includes John McGinley, Jeremy Piven, and Selma Blair.
• The photography is slick and the locales are interesting. The outdoor shots during the road trip look like a travelogue. One Vegas scene is shot in a neon graveyard, which looks like the Nevada equivalent of those parks in Eastern Europe which have been created by collecting old statues from the Communist era. Of course, the outdated statues of Lenin have been replaced in the Vegas version with outdated 50s and 60s neon signs from the strip.

The positives have to be balanced against some drawbacks.

• The dialogue is sometimes realistic, but long scenes consist of bizarre magic realism, in which characters deliver long stoned monologues in the form of poems. This may not be a negative, depending on your tolerance for such excesses. Both Jeremy Piven and John McGinley do these monologues, and do them brilliantly, but you have to decide if you want to see the kind of movie where characters lapse into long speeches which sound like the poems of Allen Ginsberg.
• The movie also walks an uneasy line between black comedy and sentimentality. I didn't even know those two things had a border.
• It is sometimes just plain strange. I liked it, but I can see why most people would not.