Saturday, 16 May 2020

The Real Cancun (2003)


Director: Rick de Oliveira
Screenplay: Brian Caldirola
Cast: Benjamin "Fletch" Fletcher; Nicole Frilot; Roxanne Frilot; David Ingber; Jeremy Jazwinski; Amber Madison; Paul Malbry; Marquita "Skye" Marshall; Laura Ramsey; Matthew Slenske; Alan Taylor; Heidi Vance; Casey Weeks; Sarah Wilkins; Jorell Washington; Adam Miller
Ephemeral Waves

Ephemeral Waves is for everything, from big films to scrapping at the back of the DVD rental shelf, all that exists in this strange world of moving images. Today, a curiosity in Reality TV's attempt at dominating the theatrical box office...

To my surprise, this was released by New Line Cinema, a detail I might have merely forgotten finally getting to this obscurity, but nowadays provides a perverse delight upon realising this, with their logo represented as a necklace above a faceless bikini bust on the DVD menu just cementing their claim over this project. Never was there a studio, even when the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise made them a lot of money and the Lords of the Rings trilogy bolstered them to a respectable award winning company, which indulged in projects that are strange to hear of or eventually killed them, as many were not financial successes in the slightest. This particular project is neither fiction nor a documentary, but a "reality" film produced with Bunim/Murray Productions, the creators of the early reality television show The Real World and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. "Screenwriter" Brian Caldirola worked on The Simple Life (2003-7), a multi season reality show where Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie slummed it as socialites put into the real working world. So yes, this is the kind of film that was ahead of its time, would have induced fear in critics when it was first made, and yet flopped at the box office.

Released only a month after principal photography, this cast a group of young adults and films them in scripted events at a spring break event in Cancun, Mexico. In the current day, since it was birthed fully into the 2000s, reality TV is everywhere but, not watching television on a regular basis since my early twenties, it is a culturally alien format to me when it is all intrusive for anyone else. Part of The Real Cancun, where we see a wet t-shirt competition to massive drinking sessions, are caught as transpired, but it would be delusional to not see that the editing and how the footage is constructed is also manufactured.

It begins with the casting interviews three weeks earlier. The cast for the most part are, honestly, indistinguishable from each other with a few exceptions. Two guys, buddies and played as a comedy duo, stand out with having wisecracks before one will be attracted to a girl nicknamed "Skye", where the relationship will not necessarily be successful. There are a pair of male and female friends who have a clear chemistry which creates tension between them. There is a pair of female twins whose brazenness makes them stand out. And there is Alex, who manages to become the most interesting figure from being the awkward nerd in the midst of this group. Then we get to Cancun, where barring the natural wildlife we never see any of the culture of, the only indication of Mexican culture we ever see being a mariachi band hired to wake up everyone. As a result, it does feel like a Mexican coastal town has been invaded by a mass of Americans with the intentions of drinking, fucking and twerking before leaving a mess to clean up afterwards.

In terms of an actual plot, there really isn't one. Reality TV usually follows some major plot or a series of events for dramatic tension, emphasised with extensive editing and didactic music cues which are meant to keep a viewer distracted like a cat with a toy. The Real Cancun, despite its structure, is a prototype of this with many of these details not existing here. The little plots I have mentioned - the will-they-won't-they of the male and female friends, the romance with Skye that will go nowhere - never progress to anything. The only aspect which does grow significantly is Alex, who is a nerdy guy who never drinks, causing one to wonder how someone who practices straight edge philosophy (i.e. no drugs or alcohol) would handle being there, getting out of his shell eventually. Partially it's awesome, because he enters a male "Hot Bod" competition where he dances in a thong, only to win it over more hunky muscular men out of charisma and bravery, getting the interest of many ladies in Cancun as a result. However he is also peer pressured to drink by everyone, which is uncomfortable in the modern day, a difference between the courage to do a shot with knowledge of one's limits, and having an arm bent and being forced to do a tequila salt lick off as a woman's bust even if he's into that.


Beyond this, not much happens and no one here is particularly interesting. This is without any malice to the cast either. Barring some obnoxious bro-speak about women in a gym, everyone is naive and has not really thought about anything meaningful even about the art of partying. Even in the DVD extra about the premiere screening, one of the guys in that gym scene feels embarrassed about the talk but defends it as male speak, which is telling about human behaviour as is Alex being pushed into drinking because it makes the guys especially uncomfortable he stands out like a sore thumb. This is a group without any real sense of individualism, barring Alex, so it feels even pointless to use names as no one really stands out. The only person who did in real life was Laura Ramsey, who got a small career in film and television into the 2010s.

There is no progressive or melodramatic turn in The Real Cancun, just a vague world of partying which is barely covered. The most dynamic scene is a girl getting a jellyfish sting from an above-water bungee jump, which involves a trite attempt at replicating the intense pre-attack mood of Jaws (1975) with a mere single jellyfish and a terrible music cue, and a romance sparking for her with the guy willing to pee in a cup behind a wall and pour the fresh urine on the wound to heal it. It is also, in a time where amateur porn flourished afterwards and covered many college dorm parties as their subject, completely tame as a film nowadays. The sex when it happens takes place under bed sheets, the more alarming thing that they were happy to have secret cameras in the bedrooms able to film it in the dark. This becomes less a proud Dionysius rampage of free libido and the power of wine, but a lame corporate created voyeurism.

In the time that transpires, many of the major events are in the middle of the film, like the wet t-shirt scene or Alex's triumph, leaving The Real Cancun to dwindle in momentum when it gets to the Spring Break celebrations winding down. Even a potential lasting romance introduced by the end feels like an afterthought, the result as it stands ahead of its time in context, but a flat production which does not fully commit to its promise. It also becomes another example which causes me to ask about New Line Cinema and how they managed to sustain themselves as long as they did. Between this, the notoriety of The Island of Doctor Moreau (1996) and various bizarre projects they yet managed to survive in the late 2000s until The Golden Compass (2007) has been said to have finished them.

If I had ever had the chance to see this film in an American cinema at the time, I would have gone but just out of curiosity of who went to it, as it only grossed $5.3 million from a budget of $7.5 million1, and how they reacted to it. The best symbolic way to describe The Real Cancun is to compare it to its own soundtrack, one foot in the new trends but also very much to be subsumed in its time. Surprisingly there is no nu-metal outside the DVD extras, where it is inexplicably scoring a full version of the wet t-shirt contest, as apparently there is nothing more erotic than down tuned guitar riffs and post-Taproot angst lyrics. That genre would soon vanish as a "New Wave of American Heavy Metal" came about and the mainstream took an interest in other music.

Beyond this, it is a time capsule of the era, as whilst there are song from the likes of Gorrillaz and Basement Jaxx on the soundtrack, there are songs by bands like Simple Plan, pop punk that would soon morph into the emo grew whilst Green Day, who helped popularise this type of music, got serious and released the huge hit album American Idiot a year later in 2004. The growth of pop rap and RnB was present but barely touched upon, befittingly represented in the fact that the closest thing to any of it is very sexually suggestive songs and Snoop Dogg performing in concert, a scene only a few minutes long that it qualifies as a cameo, long before he ever considered reggae or a Gospel album. The world depicted here, the trends and habits of the young adults here, changed eventually, and especially so a decade later when you consider most of the people starring in this like Alex are approaching their forties and may have reflected back on this time in thought. Likewise, reality television would shift and change, evolving as it went along for new trends. Bunim/Murray Productions did not stop working back in television when this failed, whilst New Line Cinema has not survived the 2000s. The Real Cancun as a historical document is interesting, but like a really bland song from that era that no one bought, it's not particularly memorable.   


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