By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: David Cross
Country: united_states
Year: 2015
Running time: 96
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3697626/combined
Kyle says: “Two thirds of the running time of HITS has passed when Katelyn (Meredith Hagner) declares, ‘This is insanity!’ and leaves home with her father’s shotgun. HITS is a comedy about cultural chaos, its title having dozens of different meanings, from visits to a web page or results of a search engine, to inhaling drugs, to having sex, to receiving messages, to having success on YouTube or cable TV, to multiple injuries from tasering and beating, and so on. David Cross’s scattershot comedy references all of these and more, including memorable urbandictionary.com definition of hit inadvertently referenced by a clueless white boy attempting to imitate a rapper – ‘To smack a bitch’.
“Katelyn’s father Dave (Matt Walsh) is the local troublemaker at City Council meetings, taking photos of unrepaired potholes, cataloguing endless bureaucratic grievances, and demanding his presumed constitutional rights to speak longer than the allotted three minutes. Dave is the local buffoon, but also the voice of countless small-town radio broadcasters who rail against the U.S.A. being stolen from its citizens by the contemporary equivalent of Hitler and his Nazis. In what passes for the ‘real world’, this is the lunatic fringe that quotes Fox News nonsense like holy writ, and cheers Donald Trump when he describes the wall he will build to keep out Mexican rapists and drug mules. The media mavens who descend upon Dave’s home are total lunatics, seeking instant fame with laptop or smartphone, knowing plenty about current technology, but nothing at all about history, politics, culture, sociology, or good manners.
“Katelyn’s life is all about fantasizing an appearance on ‘The Ellen Show’ while looking for a hit recording, for which she exchanges $300 and getting laid, which is of course taped surreptitiously. When she arrives home and discovers media people everywhere, she wonders why. Media goon – ‘Because of your Dad: They’re doing a story on him. And us!’ In answer to her question, ‘And who are you people?’ we learn, ‘I don’t presume to speak for everybody, but I’m with Brain Box. We’re an advocacy group out of Brooklyn’. Katelyn is genuinely alarmed: ‘My Dad isn’t really equipped for this, okay? He doesn’t have the personality. He’s a little off. Do you understand?’ Media goon’s cheery response: “That’s why we’re here: He needs us. We’re here to help!’ This is the point at which Katelyn gets locked and loaded. And expends the most passion in the entirety of HITS, smashing two smartphones with a hammer.
“At the climactic City Council meeting awash with media coverage, Dave refuses to leave the podium after his three minutes, cheered on by local citizens, until he starts attacking Jews, homosexuals, and ‘the socialist nigger in the White House’ at which point all the air is sucked out of the City Council room. Brawling breaks out, Katelyn’s white rapper wannabe BF pulls out shotgun and gets tasered, Katelyn sings song, Dad looks on proudly, Katelyn is beaten by cops, and a mash up of song and sex tape is reported to have gone viral on the internet. The final shot is Katelyn, beaten and bandaged in a hospital room, smiling as she reads the email invitation from a producer for ‘The Ellen De Generes Show’. As the end titles commence, we hear Lily Allen’s ‘The Fear’: ‘I want to be rich and I want lots of money, I don’t care about clever, I don’t care about funny. I want loads of clothes and fuck loads of diamonds, I heard people die while trying to find them. I’ll take my clothes off and it will be shameless, ’cause everyone knows that’s how you get famous’. In the Age of Kardashian, these lyrics and those that follow say much more about contemporary America than anything in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’.
“David Cross is a funny comedian and an able satirist. He is unfortunately a terrible director: the acting is amateurish and/or smug, the sense of rhythm and momentum nonexistent. Hopefully he will know to hire a director in the future. The funniest bit of writing comes in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it end title thank you list: ‘Edward Snowden + Glenn Greenwald’. 3 cats
“Seen Friday, August 28, 2015, on Netflix, New York.”