DVD Satin

Tiny in scope but big in heart this wasn't half bad. A film about a washed up Vegas act, Satin, who though way too young wants to be Joey Bishop and Dean Martin all rolled up in one – but has forgotten what is means to love the music and not just the money.

When he rolls up in a small desert town on the run from knee cappers in Vegas he encounters a motley mob who remind him what it means to love music.

I actually kind of liked this – it's funny, it's got heart, it has a little indie feeling to it, it's well made, well lit, and the cast work well together.

Kind of silly. kind of fun, it's a good pizza movie when you want something a little kookie and it all just kind of works….

Satin is one of the most schizophrenic stories I've ever watched. From scene to scene and almost moment to moment, it changes its mind on what it's about and why the viewer should care. It's a satire of a hopeless loser with delusions of grandeur. Then it's a tale of a fallen star trying to rediscover his inner spirit. It switches back and forth from miming sports movie clichés to echoing tropes from kung fu flicks. The main character seems like he belongs in a completely different movie and there isn't one reason offered up for why any other character or anyone in the audience should give a damn about him. There are two plot holes so massive the meteor from Armageddon could pass through them with enough room on either side for a herd of overweight elephants. The love interest of the main character must be constantly snorting meth to stay awake because she's portrayed as working at least 16 or 17 hours a day. The main character's rival for her affections goes from being a karaoke god to someone who can barely carry a tune. Oh, and you know how a lot of films skip the dénouement and just come to a stop right after the climax? Well, Satin goes one better than that and actually ends before it gets to its emotional high point. Imagine if Star Wars had faded to black just as the assault on the Death Star began. That's what it's like. Crimeny.

Jack Satin (Hamilton von Watts) is a ratty looking Vegas lounge singer with a failed career, a wardrobe straight out of a 1970s dumpster and a personality from a bad Saturday Night Live skit. When a couple of leg breakers come to collect on Jack's debts, he flees for a series of gigs in Atlantic City. Let me stop right here because there's no better example than this of the schizophrenic nature of this film. Jack is presented to the viewer as a sad joke. He dresses like a joke. He acts like a joke. He's working on the bottom rung of the Vegas entertainment ladder and immediately loses that job. When Jack tells his girlfriend that he's leaving town to perform in Atlantic City, I assumed it was a lie so he wouldn't have to tell her he was running from loan sharks. I assumed that because it's the only logical thing to think, given everything presented about Jack up to that point. Later on, however, it turns out Jack was telling the truth. He does have an agent who has booked him to work in Atlantic City, but what agent would represent this pathetic wretch and what club would ever hire some neverwas nobody from halfway across the country? Jack is simultaneously both a deluded hack and a struggling talent who just needs somebody to bring out his inner greatness. He has both a mental block that sabotages his own success and is completely fooling himself about being good enough to succeed in the first place. These filmmakers put Jack Satin through two diametrically opposed character arcs at the same time. I've never seen anything before where the writing was this fundamentally screwed up.

Anyway, Jack's car breaks down in a desert town where, of course, the hottest chick in town (Melissa Joan Hart) completely falls for him and, of course, he meets a mentor (Robert Guillaume) who strives to teach him the true ways of karate…er, I mean music. Will Jack Satin get the girl? Will he become the kind of singer he was always meant to be? Who hell knows? The movie concludes before we find out.

Melissa Joan Hart is adorable and Robert Guillaume is a treasure. Both are utterly wasted here. Hamilton von Watts paradoxically gives a good performance but does so in the wrong film. This is a fairly broad and unrealistic tale, the sort where someone getting bashed in the head and abandoned in the desert to possibly die is treated like a school yard prank. Von Watts, however, gives Jack Satin a much more realistic edge, like he's playing a supporting part in some hip, indy crime drama. Co-writer von Watts also commits the cardinal sin of writer/actors. He writes a big, fat starring role for himself and then forgets to make the character at all sympathetic, appealing or engaging, assuming his own awesome charisma will win the viewer over. Bad assumption.

The direction of Christopher Olness is okay and I can't say this motion picture is boring. I'm not going to get into the two enormous plot holes because if you've seen Satin, you know exactly what I'm referring to and if you haven't and go watch it after reading this review, you deserve all the misery coming to you.

If this disaster could have somehow been cinematically medicated and focused on being one kind of story all the way through, who knows? It might have been decent. As it is, Satin should be bound in a straitjacket and left to rot in a rubber room.