brown bunny movie review

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In May of 2003 I walked out of the press screening of Vincent Gallo 's "The Brown Bunny" at the Cannes Film Festival and was asked by a camera crew what I thought of the film. I said I thought it was the worst film in the history of the festival. That was hyperbole -- I hadn't seen every film in the history of the festival -- but I was still vibrating from one of the most disastrous screenings I had ever attended.

The audience was loud and scornful in its dislike for the movie; hundreds walked out, and many of those who remained only stayed because they wanted to boo. Imagine, I wrote, a film so unendurably boring that when the hero changes into a clean shirt, there is applause. The panel of critics convened by Screen International, the British trade paper, gave the movie the lowest rating in the history of their annual voting.

But then a funny thing happened. Gallo went back into the editing room and cut 26 minutes of his 118-minute film, or almost a fourth of the running time. And in the process he transformed it. The film's form and purpose now emerge from the miasma of the original cut, and are quietly, sadly, effective. It is said that editing is the soul of the cinema; in the case of "The Brown Bunny," it is its salvation.

Critics who saw the film last autumn at the Venice and Toronto festivals walked in expecting the disaster they'd read about from Cannes. Here is Bill Chambers of Film Freak Central, writing from Toronto: "Ebert catalogued his mainstream biases (unbroken takes: bad; non-classical structure: bad; name actresses being aggressively sexual: bad) ... and then had a bigger delusion of grandeur than 'The Brown Bunny's' Gallo-centric credit assignations: 'I will one day be thin but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of 'The Brown Bunny.' "

Faithful readers will know that I admire long takes, especially by Ozu, that I hunger for non-classical structure, and that I have absolutely nothing against sex in the cinema. In quoting my line about one day being thin, Chambers might in fairness have explained that I was responding to Gallo calling me a "fat pig" -- and, for that matter, since I made that statement I have lost 86 pounds and Gallo is indeed still the director of "The Brown Bunny."

But he is not the director of the same "Brown Bunny" I saw at Cannes, and the film now plays so differently that I suggest the original Cannes cut be included as part of the eventual DVD, so that viewers can see for themselves how 26 minutes of aggressively pointless and empty footage can sink a potentially successful film. To cite but one cut: From Cannes, I wrote, "Imagine a long shot on the Bonneville Salt Flats where he races his motorcycle until it disappears as a speck in the distance, followed by another long shot in which a speck in the distance becomes his motorcycle." In the new version we see the motorcycle disappear, but the second half of the shot has been completely cut. That helps in two ways: (1) It saves the scene from an unintended laugh, and (2) it provides an emotional purpose, since disappearing into the distance is a much different thing from riding away and then riding back again.

The movie stars Gallo as Bud Clay, a professional motorcycle racer who loses a race on the East Coast and then drives his van cross-country. (The race in the original film lasted 270 seconds longer than in the current version, and was all in one shot, of cycles going around and around a track.) Bud is a lonely, inward, needy man, who thinks much about a former lover whose name in American literature has come to embody idealized, inaccessible love: Daisy.

Gallo allows himself to be defenseless and unprotected in front of the camera, and that is a strength. Consider an early scene where he asks a girl behind the counter at a convenience store to join him on the trip to California. When she declines, he says "please" in a pleading tone of voice not one actor in a hundred would have the nerve to imitate. There's another scene not long after that has a sorrowful poetry. In a town somewhere in the middle of America, at a table in a park, a woman ( Cheryl Tiegs ) sits by herself. Bud Clay parks his van, walks over to her, senses her despair, asks her some questions, and wordlessly hugs and kisses her. She never says a word. After a time he leaves again. There is a kind of communication going on here that is complete and heartbreaking, and needs not one word of explanation, and gets none.

In the original version, there was an endless, pointless sequence of Bud driving through Western states and collecting bug splats on his windshield; the 81/2 minutes Gallo has taken out of that sequence were as exciting as watching paint after it has already dried. Now he arrives sooner in California, and there is the now-famous scene in a motel room involving Daisy ( Chloe Sevigny ). Yes, it is explicit, and no, it is not gratuitous.

But to reveal how it works on a level more complex than the physical would be to undermine the way the scene pays off. The scene, and its dialogue, and a flashback to the Daisy character at a party, work together to illuminate complex things about Bud's sexuality, his guilt, and his feelings about women. Even at Cannes, even after unendurably superfluous footage, that scene worked, and I wrote: "It must be said that [Sevigny] brings a truth and vulnerability to her scene that exists on a level far above the movie it is in." Gallo takes the materials of pornography and repurposes them into a scene about control and need, fantasy and perhaps even madness. That scene is many things, but erotic is not one of them. (A female friend of mine observed that Bud Clay, like many men, has a way of asking a woman questions just when she is least prepared to answer them.)

When movies were cut on Movieolas, there was a saying that they could be "saved on the green machine." Make no mistake: The Cannes version was a bad film, but now Gallo's editing has set free the good film inside. "The Brown Bunny" is still not a complete success -- it is odd and off-putting when it doesn't want to be -- but as a study of loneliness and need, it evokes a tender sadness. I will always be grateful I saw the movie at Cannes; you can't understand where Gallo has arrived unless you know where he started.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film Credits

The Brown Bunny (2004)

Rated NR graphic sex; intended for adults

Vincent Gallo as Bud Clay

Chloe Sevigny as Daisy

Elizabeth Blake as Rose

Anna Vareschi as Violet

Mary Morasky as Mrs. Lemon

Cheryl Tiegs as Lilly

Directed and written by

• Vincent Gallo

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‘The Brown Bunny’ 10 Years Later: Reevaluating the Target of Roger Ebert’s Ire

On Friday, I had three wisdom teeth pulled out of my skull and was subsequently prescribed Vicodin for the pain. A few days later, I decided to revisit The Brown Bunny, Vincent Gallo’s hugely divisive, deeply weird, and conspicuously bugs-splattered road movie. You could say these things were related.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of The Brown Bunny ’s theatrical release, which occurred 15 months after Roger Ebert called it the worst film to ever play the Cannes Film Festival, more or less sealing the film’s commercial and critical fate. I didn’t realize the anniversary was coming up when I opted to rewatch The Brown Bunny . No, I decided to watch The Brown Bunny just because I had been thinking about it a lot lately. I wanted to see it for fun. Basically, my face hurt and I was compensating by applying a narcotic glaze; The Brown Bunny had given me a similar feeling in the past without the benefit of oral surgery and drugs. It seemed like a natural element to introduce into my headspace at the time.

For the uninitiated, let me recount the plot of The Brown Bunny : Gallo stars as Bud Clay, a melancholic motorcycle driver who embarks on a cross-country road trip in a black van. His destination is California, where he plans to reconnect with his estranged girlfriend, Daisy (played by Chloë Sevigny). Along the way he encounters a young woman in a convenience store; Clay begs her to come with him, but when she agrees he winds up leaving her suddenly. Later, he stops at a rest area and makes out with ’70s-era supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, and then abruptly leaves her too. Finally, he arrives in California and meets Daisy in a hotel room. (If you haven’t seen The Brown Bunny and feel like you’ll want to someday, skip ahead to the next paragraph.) Daisy is nervous and on two occasions leaves to smoke crack in the hotel bathroom. One thing leads to another, and Daisy performs fellatio on Bud. It is not simulated sex and continues for what seems like an eternity until Gallo finishes. Bud and Daisy argue about her infidelity. It is revealed that Daisy was raped at a party and Bud didn’t try to intervene. Instead, he left the party, and Daisy died. Therefore, the encounter in the hotel room didn’t happen at all — it was a manifestation of Bud’s guilt. It’s not clear if the encounters with the other women were also imagined, but that’s how I’ve always interpreted it, and Gallo’s movie is ambiguous enough to support this reading. At any rate, Bud gets up the next morning and heads back on the road. And that’s the end of the movie.

I might have left out an important scene or two; I also included a few plot developments that could be classified as “spoilers.” But, ultimately, nothing that happens in The Brown Bunny matters all that much. The Brown Bunny distills a very specific vibe, and it’s good to know what that vibe is going in, because you either appreciate it or you don’t. (Most people don’t.) I’ve often argued that certain albums need to be heard in cars to be best appreciated — it’s possible to enjoy Japandroids’ Celebration Rock if you listen to music exclusively on headphones while riding on subway trains, but that record reveals deeper dimensions when blasted through speakers with the windows rolled down. Similarly, The Brown Bunny is a movie for people who love the sensation of listening to music in the car. For instance, the film’s most powerful sequence is a series of static shots of rain-soaked highways seen behind a dirty windshield while Gordon Lightfoot’s aching ballad “Beautiful” plays in the background. The scene plays out for far longer than it would in a conventional film (assuming a conventional film would include such a scene at all). I understand that most people will find this description indescribably boring. It might also sound pretentious. It’s not.

It’s possible to attach a lot of Big Thoughts to this film. The Brown Bunny can be viewed as a depiction of the neediness and alienation at the core of traditional masculinity. Its final scene is perhaps best read as a critique of pornographic imagery, and a demonstration of how disturbing real live sex onscreen can be when human feeling isn’t forcibly removed. But more than anything, The Brown Bunny is a movie about a person who spends a lot of time staring out of car windows, and it intends to evoke the feelings one has when spending a lot of time staring out of car windows. It’s the opposite of pretentious — The Brown Bunny is exactly what it purports to be.

If staring at landscapes while listening to sad songs is something you do all the time, then you already “get” The Brown Bunny. This movie might even end up being a good friend that you can hang out with without speaking to all that much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc80u6PLDPk

Since this is the 10th anniversary and all, let me make the requisite case for The Brown Bunny being generally misunderstood and underappreciated. Understand that I’m not here to recommend The Brown Bunny, because it’s not a movie I’d expect anyone to like or even be able to finish. Instead, I’d like to merely acknowledge that it exists, because people sometimes forget that movies like The Brown Bunny can still exist and find an audience.

It’s unfortunate that when Roger Ebert died in April 2013, The Brown Bunny was revived as a comic footnote in the great critic’s career. Ebert’s original review of the film was unequivocal in its intense dislike : “Imagine 90 tedious minutes of a man driving across America in a van. Imagine long shots through a windshield as it collects bug splats. Imagine not one but two scenes in which he stops for gas. Imagine a long shot on the Bonneville Salt Flats where he races his motorcycle until it disappears as a speck in the distance, followed by another shot in which a speck in the distance becomes his motorcycle. Imagine a film so unendurably boring that at one point, when he gets out of his van to change his shirt, there is applause.”

The details of the Ebert-Gallo feud have been rehashed many times: Ebert eviscerated The Brown Bunny ; Gallo responded by putting a curse on Ebert’s prostate and calling him a “fat pig with the physique of a slave trader”; Ebert said footage of his own colonoscopy would be more entertaining than The Brown Bunny. What doesn’t get rehashed as much is that when Ebert watched a new version of The Brown Bunny with 26 minutes excised from the Cannes version, he actually liked the movie. “It is said that editing is the soul of the cinema; in the case of The Brown Bunny , it is its salvation,” he wrote upon the theatrical release . Over the years,  The Brown Bunny seemed to have stuck with Ebert; he referenced the film in his review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master , of all places. (Judging by the star rating, Ebert liked the reedited Bunny more than The Master. )

“I felt like, on a certain level, he wanted to remove himself from calling [ The Brown Bunny ] the worst film ever made,” Gallo told The A.V. Club in 2004. “And the new version gave him an opportunity, because it was different from when he saw it. So he could say, ‘The film got a lot better. You made some really important changes.’ The truth is, those changes could not possibly take the film from that extreme to another extreme. It just couldn’t.”

Already known for general outspokenness and unapologetic assholery, Gallo drifted into the wilderness after The Brown Bunny. He seemed to be actively trolling people during the film’s brief promotional cycle, voicing support for George W. Bush and spouting off on Howard Stern about “fags” in Hollywood and his desire to perpetrate unseemly sexual acts on one of the stars of his Buffalo ’66 , Angelica Huston. Gallo still shows up from time to time as an actor in art films and other, random places (like the 2007 Courteney Cox drama Dirt , which Cox promoted on The Tonight Show by talking about how much she used to hate Gallo .) In 2010, Gallo was cast in an indie quirkfest called The Funeral Director, usurped control from the director, and turned it into Promises Written in Water, his first feature as a director since The Brown Bunny. The movie played two festivals before Gallo announced that he was pulling it from distribution, so it could be “allowed to rest in peace, and stored without being exposed to the dark energies from the public,” as he told a Danish magazine in 2011. Another recent film he directed, April, is listed on Gallo’s Wikipedia page, but that hasn’t been screened, either.

I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened to Gallo’s career if Ebert had been a little more charitable early on to such an obviously deliberate, uncompromising film. Make no mistake: I don’t blame Ebert for the implosion of Gallo’s career. Gallo is a narcissist, and Ebert calling The Brown Bunny the worst film to play Cannes fed that narcissism. It encouraged Gallo to embrace the worst, most bombastic sides of himself in the press, which ran contrary to (and played a primary role in suffocating) the slow, meandering movie he made.

Maybe this is just an impossible movie to talk about. Merely describing it sounds like criticism. Just trust me when I say that The Brown Bunny is a comfort when you’ve been maimed and drugged, and I mean that as a compliment.

Filed Under: Movies , Vincent Gallo , The Brown Bunny , Cannes Film Festival , Roger Ebert , Chloe Sevigny , The Master

Steven Hyden is a staff writer for Grantland. His first book, Your Favorite Band is Killing Me , will be released in May.

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The Brown Bunny Reviews

What was missed amid all the Ecclesiastical accusations of vanity was Gallo's bold exploration of a damaged male psyche.

Full Review | Jan 6, 2021

This film will not appeal to everyone for not everyone can maintain comfort through this much silence, this much emotion and this much stillness.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 4, 2020

I couldn't appreciate Gallo the director's Cassavetes-like taste for the realism... But Gallo films locations with a stranger's lucidity and an impressive commitment to natural sound and undoctored images.

Full Review | Oct 18, 2018

Singular focus on failure, and a male rage so constrained, so constipated, you can't help but admire its concentration... Its powerful study of pathology is hardly cathartic. There's cumulative languor... sure to aggravate whatever following it finds.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 21, 2018

You certainly don't want to spend 90 minutes watching Vincent Gallo drive, shower, brood, and weep, which is almost all this movie is.

Full Review | Aug 23, 2017

When every other scene looks like a cola, jeans or motorcycle commercial -- perfectly unposed with hair proudly mussed -- Gallo's motivations seem too compromised.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 3, 2008

As a truncated work, it stands as a road movie tone poem.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jun 21, 2007

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 1, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

A humorless self-indulgent and self-loathing mess that is saddled with an uninteresting story and arty pretensions.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Sep 15, 2005

Personally, I think there's a haunting and fairly poignant story here; too bad it's surrounded by so many damn driving scenes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 11, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 26, 2005

Vincent Gallo is probably a much more interesting fellow than Bud Clay, the inarticulate motorcycle racer he portrays in The Brown Bunny.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Jan 2, 2005

Is it good? Not really. But as was the case with his Buffalo 66, Gallo once again shows himself to be a fascinating enigma and possibly his own worst enemy.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 19, 2004

If this is a 'feature film,' then so are your old home movies, or videotapes from a convenience store's security camera. ... It's not just one scene; the whole movie blows.

Full Review | Original Score: F | Oct 31, 2004

For all its anti-action, The Brown Bunny gets its teeth in you and shakes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 19, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 19, 2004

a pretentious, silly bore of a would-be existential art film

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 19, 2004

A passable, if often dreary, evocation of those '70s road movies in which disillusioned young men (and the occasional woman) took to the highway in search of America, the meaning of things or maybe just a hamburger.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 15, 2004

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FILM REVIEW

FILM REVIEW; The Narcissist And His Lover

By Manohla Dargis

• Aug. 27, 2004

Remove self-love from love, wrote the 18th-century French aphorist and revolutionary Chamfort, and not much would be left. Remove self-love and self-serving outrage from the already notorious ''The Brown Bunny,'' a minor scandal of a movie that opens today in New York and Los Angeles, and not much would be left, either. Which isn't to say that this artful road movie from the director, narcissist nonpareil and most excellent huckster Vincent Gallo should be avoided, especially if you like your art-house exercises tarted up with some good old-fashioned, hotel-room smut.

To dispatch with the obvious: as movie newshounds and numerous Los Angeles drivers know, ''The Brown Bunny'' features a sexual act between the director and his co-star Chloë Sevigny that's generally found in bedrooms and wherever else people have sex as well as in those disposable entertainments shelved in the back room of your local video store. Earlier this month, a blurred image from the scene in question, branded with a lurid (and spurious) XXX rating, loomed in a billboard above Los Angeles's Sunset Boulevard, causing a teapot media tempest during an otherwise slow movie-news month. The sign was taken down after several days, but its provocation lingers, principally because a budget-conscious movie like ''The Brown Bunny'' needs manufactured controversy as much as the entertainment media does.

''The Brown Bunny's'' path to public ignominy began in earnest at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, where it received a hostile, noisily rude reception from the press at its premiere. Merit aside, the larger trouble with that fateful screening wasn't Mr. Gallo's artistry or his ego, both in evidence and subjected to attack, but context. Shown in competition rather than in one of the festival's less prestigious, less visible programs, ''The Brown Bunny'' was savaged by a media all too happy to give the dregs of Hollywood and official art-house cinema a free pass. The hullabaloo did furnish the bored press comic relief, always a good thing during a lackluster festival. And now, many months later, it has inspired Mr. Gallo to claim that the much-derided version presented at Cannes was, in actuality, unfinished.

Neither an atrocity nor a revelation, ''The Brown Bunny'' is a very watchable, often beautiful-looking attempt by Mr. Gallo to reproduce the kind of loosely structured mood pieces that found American and select foreign-language cinemas of the 1960's and 70's often at their most adventurous, with Monte Hellman's 1971 ''Two-Lane Blacktop'' the most obvious touchstone. Like Mr. Hellman's laid-back masterpiece, ''The Brown Bunny'' begins with a race (Mr. Hellman's driver wins, Mr. Gallo's motorcyclist loses) and quickly tries for an air of cool detachment. But while Mr. Hellman's directing remains consistently detached no matter how hot the cars or emotional entanglements, Mr. Gallo is happy to lavish his lead performer with love, perhaps because in addition to serving as the director, writer, producer, editor and director of photography on ''The Brown Bunny,'' Mr. Gallo is also the film's star.

Mr. Gallo plays Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer (and the title's symbolic bunny) on his way back home to Los Angeles from a New Hampshire meet. As Bud racks up miles, he stares moodily at the road, visits a childhood haunt, eats a lonely meal, sleeps a lonely motel sleep, takes his motorcycle for a spin and exchanges small talk with a few women he meets along the way.

The women, all of whom have the soft, bruised look of chronic disappointment, are Violet, Rose (played by nonprofessionals, Anna Vareschi and Elizabeth Blake) and Lilly (the former top model and 1970's pinup Cheryl Tiegs). Eventually, Bud hits Los Angeles, where he checks into a hotel and where yet another flower of femininity, Ms. Sevigny's Daisy, gives the film its back story and furnishes what the porn industry calls, in rather more direct language, its economic raison d'être.

Despite its sensationalistic deus ex machina there isn't really more to ''The Brown Bunny.'' Unlike ''Two-Lane Blacktop,'' which wrests meaning equally from its laconic style and an encounter between three young wanderers and a middle-aged square, Mr. Gallo's film doesn't build to anything significant. The barely there story meanders pleasantly enough, but the denouement dissolves in a maudlin puddle of tears. More problematically, much as Sofia Coppola did in ''Lost in Translation,'' Mr. Gallo seems to have discovered someone else's visual style and applied it, complete with swirling grain and documentary vibe, to his narrative. Mr. Gallo doesn't have the technical support Ms. Coppola enjoyed and needless to say he's no Bill Murray. But like Ms. Coppola, he comes across less like an original than a very smart art student with a jones for cinema's past.

Asian and European directors periodically dabble in hard-core imagery, but few feature filmmakers in this country have gone that route for understandable commercial reasons. Ms. Sevigny solved one of Mr. Gallo's problems when she agreed to have actual sex with him on camera. (He solved some of his other problems by cutting the film's unintentional laughs after Cannes.) Even in the age of girls gone wild it's genuinely startling to see a name actress throw caution and perhaps her career to the wind. But give the woman credit. Actresses have been asked and even bullied into performing similar acts for filmmakers since the movies began, usually behind closed doors. Ms. Sevigny isn't hiding behind anyone's desk. She says her lines with feeling and puts her iconoclasm right out there where everyone can see it; she may be nuts, but she's also unforgettable.

Although ''The Brown Bunny'' is not rated, no one under 18 will be admitted.

THE BROWN BUNNY

Written, directed, photographed, edited and produced by Vincent Gallo; released by Wellspring. At the Landmark's Sunshine Cinema, 139-143 East Houston Street, East Village. Running time: 92 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Vincent Gallo (Bud Clay), Chloë Sevigny (Daisy), Cheryl Tiegs (Lilly), Elizabeth Blake (Rose), Anna Vareschi (Violet) and Mary Morasky (Mrs. Lemon).

The Brown Bunny Review

28 Sep 2005

NaN minutes

Brown Bunny, The

If nobody had ever heard of Vincent Gallo and his egocentric posturing, and if this, his second feature, had never been shown as a flabby work-in-progress at Cannes in 2003, The Brown Bunny would be proclaimed a milestone in US indie cinema, not a laughing stock. Superbly shot with a deliberately abstract, ’70s sheen, it finds Gallo’s racing biker Bud Clay on the road home to true love Daisy (Chloë Sevigny).

But although controversy surrounds the sexually explicit finale, the early scenes are the film’s real triumph, showing Clay’s conflicted torment — seducing a string of women then abandoning them — with a beautiful economy. But that doesn’t mean that Gallo’s sane, mind.

"KEEP BUSTIN'."

The Brown Bunny

Gallo plays Bud Clay, a streetwise motorcycle racer who has just finished a fierce competition in New Hampshire. Now he has to get back to L.A. to have his bike tuned up by Renaldo (sort of his Q or Whistler), and only one thing can stop him: pining. He misses his former girlfriend Daisy (Chloe Sevigny) and he’s on a mission to find her. The mystery leads him on a deadly trail from Daisy’s parents house, to a pet shop, to a gas station, to a hotel, to another hotel, to Las Vegas, to another hotel, etc. Mostly down streets though. When I say “deadly,” by the way, I mean “boring.”

There’s one scene where he does a little gumshoe business. Daisy’s parents say they haven’t seen her in years and don’t know where she is, but they have her pet bunny. He throws his weight around in a pet store and finds out that a bunny can only live for 4-5 years. The bunny proves that Daisy has been at her parents’ house within 4 or 5 years, probaly less. The trail hasn’t gone cold.

I guess I’m exaggerating to make it sound more Hollywood. He’s not exactly pulling a Charles Bronson on this pet shop, he’s just politely asking some questions about bunnies. The dumbest question: “Are these the bunnies?” I mean come on Bud, I think you can figure out whether or not these are the bunnies. There are ways of looking at different types of animals, examining their characteristics and discerning whether or not they are bunnies.

And by the way, yes, Daisy’s pet bunny is brown. That’s the brown bunny. It’s not some shit like he is the world’s deadliest bounty hunter, on a cross country trip to the edge of the world. Those who know him call him Bud Clay, but those who cross him know him only as… THE BROWN BUNNY.

I mean, we’re not talking a situation where this guy passed out on the salt flats and discovered the brown bunny was his spirit animal. There is a pet bunny in the movie, and it’s brown. (Though Mike D’Angelo of New York, USA swears that in an earlier cut of the movie he crashes his van and it blows up and a bunny hops out. No shit.)

I kind of liked Gallo’s first movie as a director, BUFFALO 66. In that one he played some asshole who just got out of the joint but has to piss real bad, and then you can imagine where it would go from there. Some of it’s real pretentious and I could understand why people would hate it, because Gallo’s character is such an asshole and it’s a good performance because, let’s face it, playing a whiny, sleazy, egomaniacal asshole is not the hugest stretch for this guy. In that movie there’s a ridiculous scene where he’s pissing at a urinal and some guy starts looking at his dick and freaking out saying “it’s so big!” That was the most embarassing scene in the movie and in this one Gallo takes his “I have a big dick” tendencies to the next level by actually showing his dick being sucked in the movie. (There are some theories that it’s a prosthetic johnson, because he keeps his pants on and clutches onto the thing the whole time, but I think if it was fake he would’ve gone for more of a John Holmes size. In fact, considering who we’re talking about here, he probaly woulda had it three feet long with the girth of a tree trunk.)

Gallo’s whole schtick could be called Asshole Chic. He’s always gotta be unshaven and scraggly haired and dirty lookin with an oversized belt buckle and ’70s shirts, getting in arguments and whining and shit. In fact the whole movie is made to look like the ’70s except that they have modern Coke bottles and McDonalds wrappers and shit. So it doesn’t take place in the ’70s, it just takes place in a world where everybody likes to dress up like they’re from a different era, like that dude from the Stray Cats.

In BROWN BUNNY you’re probaly supposed to feel sorry for him too, although in this one he loses sympathy right at the beginning when he convinces the young clerk at the corner market to drop everything and go to California with him, then ditches her while she’s packing. The poor girl has already abandoned her post at the family store and left a note to her aunt and uncle explaining why she decided to run off with a stranger. Now you gotta figure she has to explain herself without even getting to go on the trip.

The movie is basically a series of awkard encounters with women like this. It is probaly only a coincidence that the writer of the movie is also the actor who gets to make out with Cheryl Tiegs and get a blowjob from Chloe Sevigny. I’m sure he probaly wrote it figuring some other actor would play Bud but then there was some mix-up and at the last minute he had to fill in. Anyway, in between the encounters you mostly get driving shots with an occasional hotel stop. Then he combs his hair or lays around on a hotel bed in his tighty whiteys. There’s not alot of dialogue. The only real back and forth conversation is with Chloe at the end, and half of that she has to talk with his dick in her mouth. (A cinematic first I’m pretty sure, at least for an oscar nominee.)

At one point you’re watching an extreme closeup of Gallo as he’s driving, looking intense, his long bangs blowing around in his eyes. And it occurred to me, I mean just as one possible theory, that this motherfucker is pretty fond of himself.

The Asshole Chic aesthetic extends to the actual filmatism of the movie. Gallo’s character spends most of the movie being sensitive and mopey, so it’s the movie’s duty to be an asshole to the audience. The very first shot of the movie is faded and handheld, a motorcycle race as seen from the stands. At first it seems like kind of a cool shot, and then you realize that it is gonna show you the whole damn race. Like somebody’s expensive home movie. Even if it was your home movie, you would never go back and watch it. This guy actually put it in a movie released in theaters. At least half of the shots in the movie are like this, specifically designed to test your patience and taunt you. Picture a camera sitting on the dashboard of a car, filming the highway through a dirty windshield while a Gordon Lightfoot song plays. The whole Gordon Lightfoot song. That is alot of this movie.

He stops to get gas and it’s pretty suspenseful because you’re really not sure if he’s gonna squeegie the windshield or not. It turns out he doesn’t, because then the driving shots wouldn’t have all those bug splatters on them and it would really cut down alot on what makes the movie so interesting. In Roger Ebert’s famous review of the movie he talks about how at one point Bud pulls over and gets out of the van to change his jacket, and the audience applauded. That scene must’ve been cut out of this version though because I didn’t notice it. Not sure why he’d cut out a real INDIANA JONES type crowdpleaser like that.

A reasonable person, specifically me, could also argue that BROWN BUNNY has kind of an anti-porn style. You ever see that cool ’70s style movie poster they had, with the old fashioned XXX logo on it? I’d like to think some perv somewhere watched this really thinking it was an old porno. If so, that perv got Punk’d. It’s got this amateurish blown out ’70s look to it, and this greaseball goes around hitting on cute girls he never met and they are always into him. Every one of these scenes could lead to wah wahs and erotic moaning, but they don’t. It’s just one interuptus after another. At the end it finally turns into hardcore porn but as soon as he cums he calls her a whore and then rolls up into a fetal position and starts crying.

You know what it is, it’s a fictional porno you’d see a poster for in a movie, but somehow it’s crossed over into our world.

You might remember back when I reviewed LAST DAYS OF DISCO I maybe had sort of a thing for young Chloe Sevigny, in some people’s opinions. Of course I never figured I would see her doing hardcore sex, so, you know, Merry Christmas to me. On the other hand you gotta wonder how the poor gal got talked into doing this one. It’s not like he’s taking a risk. He gets one free blowjob (and you fucking know this prick insisted on lots of rehearsals) and you know, nobody’s gonna blame him. The double standard is in his favor. Or at least, it’s not gonna lower people’s opinions of him. Put it that way. But poor Chloe, in addition to having to perform the act and put it on Superbit DVD for all eternity, was putting her career and reputation on the line for a small and purposely annoying movie. I’m not sure what she was thinking but luckily she seems to have made it through. Since then she’s worked with Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch and David Fincher. And not one hardcore sex scene was required.

I don’t think the blowjob is important to the story, but it is important to the movie. Because it’s the carrot at the end of the stick of the Brown Bunny. Everybody knows about The Blowjob and without its golden promise alot of people aren’t gonna sit through all this god damn driving. Without The Blowjob, we probaly never would’ve even heard of the movie. The same critics still would’ve hated it but they wouldn’t have been interested enough to make a big deal about it. Without The Blowjob all they can say is “It’s so boring! He keeps driving!” With The Blowjob, people want to listen.

I forget which review I read where it mentioned that all the critics would’ve walked out, but they kept watching just to find out how bad it would get. Yep, that’s the reason you kept watching. For informational purposes. Nothing to do with The Blowjob.

Oh, this was the– BROWN BUNNY was the one with The Blowjob? Yeah, you’re right, I knew there was some talk about a movie with that, I didn’t make the connection that it was– I mean, ha ha, I just wanted to find out how bad it would get.

Why the fuck would a guy lie in a movie review? You’re not on trial here. We don’t blame you. Be honest.

On DVD the carrot at the end of the stick adds a new dimension to the endurance test. Because now you don’t have to sit through the whole thing to “find out how bad it gets.” There’s even a handy chapter menu, you can skip to “Fidelity” and you’re just about there. But if you’re really tough, if you’re really disciplined, you can watch the entire movie in order without even pausing. And I got no way to prove this but I swear to you, with my right hand on the Bible and my left hand on a biography of Steve McQueen that somebody gave me but I haven’t read yet, that I actually passed the BROWN BUNNY gauntlet. I got all the way to the end in one sitting, without cheating. And it actually wasn’t nearly as hard as I expected. Of course I am a veteran of GARFIELD but still, BROWN BUNNY is better than advertised.

I’m really not gonna recommend the movie to anybody, not as art and not as porn. But I cannot tell a lie and personally I did not think THE BROWN BUNNY movie was all that bad. Sometimes egomaniacal assholes can make good movies, and this sort of in a way almost is one. It takes a unique approach, it stays completely commited to its goals, it has a blowjob scene at the end, etc. And seriously, it does come to a, uh, climax that makes some sense out of the rest of the movie, it doesn’t just fizzle out. THE BROWN BUNNY is an experience I will always remember. Well, mainly the part at the end, but still. I regret nothing.

Suggested alternate title: THE LONELIEST MOTOR BIKE RACER

Man, I didn’t expect that SIXTH SENSE style twist ending. But I gotta say it worked pretty good to tie the movie together. Of course, I got no idea why this dickhead didn’t do something when he saw those junkies raping his pregnant girlfriend. But overlooking that it sort of redeems what comes before. One of those movies where you can imagine it would have a different meaning if you watched it a second time, even though you wouldn’t watch it a second time. Anyway, another alternate title, considering the ending: HEAD OF THE DEAD . Think about it.

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2 Responses to “The Brown Bunny”

September 21st, 2009 at 6:15 am

OMG, this movie!!!!! I thought this movie would kill me. At one point it cut to black and I thought perhaps it had. The driving, and driving, and driving, and the “are these the bunnies” and the Cheryl Tiegs and holy shit the GORDON LIGHTFOOT, by the time it got interesting I JUST DIDN’T CARE ANYMORE! Cut the first hour and 20 minutes and it could have been an interesting short. But as it was– jesus, was like being stuck on a long dreary road trip with a tool who wouldn’t even let me pick the radio station.

March 26th, 2010 at 9:58 pm

This movie is beautiful.

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What could have possibly driven Vincent Gallo? What could have possibly driven a man who created the film that Roger Ebert called "the worst film" he'd ever seen at Cannes Film Festival? What could have driven Gallo, who writes, directs, scores and stars in "The Brown Bunny" to swallow his pride and take this film back into the studio to reshape and edit and re-arrange pieces of this film AND to break his loud statement that he would "never make another film?" Was it humility? Anyone who knows or has read anything about Gallo knows that humility doesn't typically enter the picture...perhaps, then, it simply is that Gallo, through the loud booing of Cannes and the criticisms and the taunts and tortures KNEW, ABSOLUTELY KNEW that there was a film of beauty within the chaos of "The Brown Bunny." Gallo knew what nobody else could see...that crying out to be seen here was a film of substance and power and emotion that is seldom seen in cinema today. "The Brown Bunny" is NOT a cinematic masterpiece. However, I will remain eternally grateful that Gallo re-entered the studio to redesign his vision and edit his film because the final film released to art-house theatres this month is a film of unique power and vision. It is a film about one man's journey, not just a journey across the country, but a journey through loss and grief and loneliness. Gallo's courage in making a film that goes directions that are non-commercial, unpopular and not cinematically viable is admirable and awesome. Even when this film doesn't work the idea behind it works. As motorcycle racer Bud Clay, Gallo creates a character that speaks volumes within silence as he travels from a race in New Hampshire to a race in California over a five-day period. With extended periods of little action, Clay is left alone with his emotions and his brief, at times shallow interactions with women along the way...all the interactions winding into sad, often pathetic attempts at coping with an emptiness and loneliness inside that simply will not be soothed. It is challenging and uncomfortable to watch, and yet so hypnotic that it is impossible to not watch Gallo during encounter after encounter. The now famous oral sex scene is, indeed, quite graphic...yet it brings to mind Bertolucci's graphic sexuality of "The Dreamers." It is a vital piece of this man's journey and unless we see it we cannot understand it. This encounter between Gallo and Chloe Sevigny is as sad as it is beautiful. This sort of balance is true throughout the film as the likes of Sevigny, Cheryl Tiegs and Elizabeth Blake enter and leave Clay's life...each interaction authentic, honest and intimate...yet ultimately ending in dissatisfaction and yet another loss. The film is simply photographed yet often hypnotic in its formatting...the production values also simple, yet uniquely effective. This film will not appeal to everyone for not everyone can maintain comfort through this much silence, this much emotion and this much stillness. Gallo trusts this story, trusts these characters and trusts this vision and that trust is evident throughout the film. "The Brown Bunny" is not a cinematic masterpiece. It is much like loneliness and despair...there are moments of great self-indulgence and frustration. There are moments of awkward, extended silence and emptiness...yet, in these moments a film of rare power and beauty unfolds. "The Brown Bunny" is a rare film that deserves to be seen.

© Written by Richard Propes The Independent Critic

The Brown Bunny

Vincent Gallo (Bud Clay) Chloë Sevigny (Daisy) Cheryl Tiegs (Lilly) Elizabeth Blake (Rose) Anna Vareschi (Violet) Mary Morasky (Mrs. Lemon) Jeffrey Wood (Featured Racer) Eric Wood (Featured Racer) Michael Martire (Featured Racer) Rick Doucette (Featured Racer)

Vincent Gallo

Professional motorcycle racer Bud Clay heads from New Hampshire to California to race again. Along the way he meets various needy women who provide him with the cure to his own loneliness, but only a certain woman from his past will truly satisfy him.

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Film review: the brown bunny (2003).

Adrian Halen 04/22/2012 Cult Films

Professional motorcycle racer Bud Clay heads from New Hampshire to California to race again. Along the way he meets various needy women who provide him with the cure to his own loneliness, but only a certain woman from his past will truly satisfy him.

REVIEW: Technically and narratively “ The Brown Bunny ” is somewhat of an extremely poor film. Though like many films that produce controversial material, “The Brown Bunny”has gone onto a cult status for its racy scenes and documented sexual inclusions.

Produced as an art house film, the movie follows character Bud Clay (Vincent Gallo), a cycle racer over a cross country trek to the destination of a California race. All the while Bud is plagued by his memories of his former love interest Daisy (Chloë Sevigny). While in route he encounters 3 women, all of who he fails to make an emotional connection to due to his prior connection with Daisy.

He meets Violet (Anna Vareschi), Lilly (Cheryl Tiegs), and Rose (Elizabeth Blake). Each encounter is fleeting and brief. While stopping at a rest stop, Bud approaches the distressed Lilly, which instantly elevates into a sudden make-out session. The moment ends in tears and then Bud off on his way. This role for actress Cheryl Tiegs appears almost more as a “cameo” than as a main component presented in a quite bizarre fashion that seems way outside performances we have seen her in. It also is not a very flattering moment for this one-time super model.

The movie seems to serve to Gallo’s narcissistic relation with himself being nothing more than a self-serving pseudo biography. A biography with a few odd twists along the way. We “tend” to understand the character even though he grows incredibly tiring to watch which makes for an odd experience.

Chloë Sevigny received alot of press over this film of which she defends for it’s artistic merit. The extreme sexual display she exhibited resulted in her being dropped from her agency, William Morris. It was reported that the display of onscreen p*rnography was extremely detrimental to her career even though at the time she reported having a relationship with the director himself. Since its controversy Sevigny has found recovery by avoiding such explicit roles of which she admits to regretting in the past.

“The Brown Bunny” while slow, lethargic and self obsessed, alludes to one final break thru moment.. the performing of live un-edited fellatio upon Vincent Gallo by actress Chloë Sevigny .While this act should not identify the film over any standard p*rn event performed on camera, its claim to its throne is the presentation of a “supposed “legitimate” film that ends on a highly sexual graphic note. It has gone on world wide since debut to be known as the infamous “blow job” scene. It’s worthy to note that no props were used for this scene unlike other relative moments in film.

The film actually serves a purpose in its final reveal that brings a culty ending to the whole mess. You have to wonder why you needed to sit thru most of this to get to the point made. However when you lump it into a art-house classification it seems to gel a bit better.

The film was received poorly and banned by critics for its extreme sexual inclusion. It also received attention for being cited as one of the “worst films ever made”.It was later re-edited by Gallo which was said to had tightened the storyline,. Though I will have to say that even in its tightened form it’s damn lethargically-paced playing more to a crawl than a bang. The film was cut down from its 118 minutes leaving out 26 unneeded minutes for re debut.Original harsh critic Ebert saluted the film upon seeing its new edit which change the tone a bit deeming it as a “sad but effective”.

“The Brown Bunny” is by far not actor / director Vincent Gallo’s best work, though it is a unique piece of work that finds it fitting nicely into a cult film category in presentation and controversy. It is recommended for obvious reasons to adults but does has some merit for its rejection of traditional film style opting for a more personal journey that will leave you scratching you head. I believe “The Brown bunny” is so simple that it almost requires its viewers to react for “lack of” content while carrying it up to its final act purpose. As a product, I would not call it extreme, while it does contain a few extreme moments. It might quite be the most interesting boring film I’ve ever had to sit thru. Because of this, it has a special place for cult viewers.

The Brown Bunny (2003)

Tags Anna Vareschi Cheryl Tiegs Chloë Sevigny Elizabeth Blake Mary Morasky The Brown Bunny Vincent Gallo

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The Controversial Movie Roger Ebert Named The Worst In Cannes History

The Cannes Film Festival may be one of the world's most prestigious celebrations of cinema, but it's not some stuffy, staid event. A single screening — where booing and hollering are the norm — would debunk that assumption. Furthermore, Cannes is the home to some  notable cinematic controversies and publicity stunts, whether it was Jean-Luc Godard getting pied in the face in 1985 or Belgian director Felix van Groeningen and his actors cycling nude down the Croisette in 2009.

Of course, some scandals play out on the big screen. For every "The 400 Blows" and "Easy Rider," there are maligned films inspiring hisses and walk-outs. In 2003, "The Brown Bunny" drew the ire of hundreds of attendees.  Roger Ebert  deemed it "the worst movie in the history of the Cannes Film Festival."

Directed by and starring Vincent Gallo, an independent filmmaker who had previously impressed critics with his 1996 debut, "Buffalo '66," "The Brown Bunny" was a much more polarizing work. Gallo plays Bud Clay, an aimless drifter driving across the country who can't get his ex, Daisy (Chloë Sevigny), out of his head.

The film has gained infamy for an unsimulated sex act between Sevigny and Gallo, though for Ebert, that wasn't its biggest flaw. In his review , he called "The Brown Bunny" "Tedious ... unenduringly boring ... amateurish, narcissistic, self-indulgent, and bloody-minded," to name a few choice words.

The Brown Bunny incited a feud

Roger Ebert's criticism of "The Brown Bunny" launched a fiery back-and-forth with Vincent Gallo. The filmmaker responded by calling Ebert a "fat pig with the physique of a slave trader" (via Far Out Magazine ). Ebert clapped back with a mic drop of his own. "It is true that I am fat,"  he wrote , "but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of 'The Brown Bunny.'"

The barbs didn't stop there. When Gallo jokingly put a hex on Ebert's colon, implying he hoped the critic got cancer, Ebert clapped back, "I am not too worried. I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than 'The Brown Bunny.'"

Ebert wasn't alone in his critiques of the film. Variety called it "this year's definition of navel-gazing cinema," and A.O. Scott remarked upon the Cannes crowd's "unrestrained hostility" in the New York Times . However, others lauded the film. Les Cahiers du Cinéma named "The Brown Bunny" one of the top 10 movies of the year, and Jean-Luc Godard, John Waters, and Werner Herzog  praised it.

Even Ebert came around on "The Brown Bunny." When Gallo made edits to the film, cutting 26 minutes from its runtime, the critic reevaluated it and gave it a three-star review. "Make no mistake: The Cannes version was a bad film," he wrote in his 2004 reassessment . "But now Gallo's editing has set free the good film inside."

The Brown Bunny

The brown bunny review.

By Aaron Lazenby

Facts and Figures

Year : 2003

Run time : 93 mins

In Theaters : Wednesday 7th April 2004

Budget : $10M

Distributed by : Wellspring Media

Production compaines : Kinétique Inc., Vincent Gallo Productions, Wild Bunch

Contactmusic.com : 4 / 5

Rotten Tomatoes : 43% Fresh: 39 Rotten: 51

IMDB : 5.0 / 10

Cast & Crew

Director : Vincent Gallo

Producer : Vincent Gallo

Screenwriter : Vincent Gallo

Starring : Vincent Gallo as Bud Clay, Chloë Sevigny as Daisy, Cheryl Tiegs as Lilly, Elizabeth Blake as Rose, Anna Vareschi as Violet, Mary Morasky as Mrs. Lemon

Also starring : Chloe Sevigny

• The Brown Bunny Movie Site
• Rotten Tomatoes

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The Brown Bunny

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