Thoughts on Go

     On Criterion, I watched Doug Liman's 1999 film Go, as part of their 1999 film showcase. I had seen this movie way back in college circa 2002, in a dorm room with other kids, and re-watching it now, it brought me back to when I was a teen in the late 1990s. My teenage life was nothing like this movie, but I remembered aspects like Katie Holmes' teen TV stardom from Dawson's Creek, late 90s rave culture and electronic music, Timothy Olyphant being a scene-stealer and somewhat unknown at the time (aside from playing one of the killers in Scream 2), Sarah Polley's breakout as a mainstream star (only to prefer small indie films and Canadian dramas and ultimately becoming a director), Scott Wolf being a TV star with Party of Five and often compared to Tom Cruise, and songs like No Doubt's "New," Len's "Steal My Sunshine," a remix of "Macarena," Massive Attack's "Angel," Fatboy Slim's "Gangster Tripping," and DJ Rap's "Good to Be Alive" setting a whole late 1990s pop-electronic music dance soundtrack.

    The film's setup of three interconnected segments owes a lot to Pulp Fiction, with an ensemble cast broken up into three story acts where events loosely connect with each other, as well as the popularity post-Quentin Tarantino fame of wise-cracking characters making pop culture references (The Breakfast Club, the Family Circus comic strip, Tantric sex as popularized by Sting and Trudie Styler), and drug culture being very casual with various pills being bought and dealt all over the place. And it's set on Christmas Eve in L.A., so it adds to being an unconventional Christmas movie with no snow but Christmas lights all over the place.

    The basic setup is that Ronna (Polley) is a checkout girl in a supermarket who is going to be evicted fast if she doesn't pay the rent, so she agrees to cover for her co-worker Simon (Desmond Askew) to handle his drug-dealing for the weekend so she can make extra cash and he can go party in Las Vegas with his friends (Taye Diggs, James Duval, Breckin Meyer). She finds the drug dealer (Olyphant) to be sketchy, but has to deal with him, and leaves behind her other co-worker Claire (Holmes) to stay with him in his apartment as collateral while she does the business, dealing out pills to club kids. Simon ends up having a crazy weekend with his friends, involving strippers, a gun, and a pissed-off bouncer. And soap opera actors and couple Adam (Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr) are looking to score some pills while working with a cop (William Fichtner) to avoid some trouble. It's all a messy, weird Christmas Eve for young Angelenos looking to score some drugs and have some fast fun.

    One of my personal favorite moments was with a pre-fame Melissa McCarthy as a roommate of a friend of Adam and Zack's. She had a little scene-stealing moment of seeming like a more normal person amongst all the fast-paced antics, and had this cheeky mischievous look to her face that made her funny and charming. I had heard of her name later from Gilmore Girls, but had remembered this little moment in the film.