Lost, Lonely, and Vicious

Lost, Lonely, and Vicious centers on the young struggling actor crowd in 1958 Hollywood. "Johnny Dennis" is a James Dean figure with an obvious deathwish who likes fast car chases, fast women, and is quick to anger.

This movie tried to be a mockumentary but inexplicably abandoned that device after like 10 minutes. It does a great job of portraying the disillusioned youth searching for auditions and big breaks. They stand by blankly eating popcorn as one of their friends beats another unconscious. Johnny mopes and pouts and searches for meaning in his life. This is an important difference between Lost, Lonely, and Vicious and High School Confidential. This movie is about a maybe 18 or 19 year old boy confronting his own mortality and what may seem like the usual questions that come with teenage angst, but it is refreshing to see complicated emotions in a teenager rather than the air headed girls and greasers that populated mainstream movies like High School Confidential.

Emily: Oh Johnny Dennis you are so misunderstood. He is just a kid trying to deal with feelings of inadequacy and his own meaninglessness on the scale of the world. He is fascinated by other people who are as fascinated with death as he is. Authors of books about dying and busdrivers who "just keep on going" when they get to the end of their routes. He is this teenage kid who thinks he is such a martyr for walking around with the weight of the world on his shoulders with a pained expression on his face.

Kamala: Most of the dialogue seemed really dated to the both of us, but compared to beach party teen movies I've seen it was covering new territory for teens in the 1950's. He says something about how a teddy bear will eventually lose its stuffing and be thrown out and then no one will remember it. The film presents Helen Preacher, an easily pleased drug-store clerk who cares for her sick father, as a foil to Johnny's despair.

Emily: Their stuffed animal creepily fell on them when they were kissing. I think it is supposed to symbolize mortality.

Kamala: It also speaks with Kandinskean emotional and lyrical volumes expressing an existential sort of dialectics.

Emily: You are a jerk. There is a character called Pinky who also seems, not liberated per se, but more frank about her sexuality and real feelings than other girls in movies we've seen.

Kamala: It still had one of those overly optimistic morals at the end, but the film was surprisingly thoughtful. The cinematography wasn't completely artless either.

Emily: There were several shots that superimposed Johnny's self-portrait (it's a creepy picture of himself half-skeleton) onto his face and it was really nicely done. There were echoing voiceovers ("Johnny...Johnny...JOHNNY!") and faces swimming up out of the water when Johnny is standing at the edge of a lake at the climax but you can't really accuse this movie of being cliche since it was likely breaking new ground when it was released. This was a good portrayal of life in Hollywood and does a nice job with the (now familiar) theme of the disillusioned teenage star