(2000. dir: Matt Palmieri) Here's a hypothetical situation: you live a quiet life in a mellow, surfside town with your beach-bum pals. Two cokeheaded, trailer-trash douchebags (John Hawkes and Rodney Eastman) show up from the desert and try to rape your beloved sister. You take the toughest of your beach-bum pals, find the malefactors and fuck them up, really humiliate them. Then, once recovered, the aforesaid douchebags catch you alone on the beach. They pull a couple of Glocks (maybe not Glocks, but some kind of badassed weaponry) on you and, just as they're getting ready to dust your sorry ass, your surfer buddy Trip (played by Emilio Estevez) shows up swinging a piece of driftwood and knocks them both cold.
This is my question: what do you do next? Do you
A) take their guns to the cops and tell your story, trusting that you'll get the benefit of the doubt over these obvious criminal low-lifes, or
B) take their guns and destroy them? perhaps you might throw them in the ocean, or bury them someplace unobtrusive, or even disassemble them and distribute the pieces throughout various dumpsters in town, or
C) have a laugh with your friend Trip and leave the lethal weapons lying next to the now-twice-humiliated, violence-prone douchebags, assuming they won't bother you anymore?
If you chose option C, you're of the same mindset as Jack (Norman Reedus), which is really kind of sad for both of you.
Sand looks like it wants to become a love story, but it doesn't, and the eponymous girl (Kari Wuhrer) actually turns out to be a lesser character. She has a few good scenes in which she comes to life, but in the end you might be forgiven for mistaking her for a gussied-up plot device. In truth, this is the story of how men kick the bejesus out of each other while citing women as the excuse, and how you can tell the bad ones from the good because the bad blame women for their problems, whereas the good blame the fucked-up male side of their family.
Whoever this Matt Palmieri guy is, he has some friends in the business. (And now that I'm looking at his bio on IMDB, I can see why.) He gets people like Harry Dean Stanton to take tiny non-roles. He hires Denis Leary to do his motor-mouthed jive-talk thing, depending on it to carry too many scenes. There are way too many endless partying improvisations, his cameraman doesn't know when it's appropriate to pull in for a close-up, and there's a protracted near-rape scene which was probably majorly improvised or it wouldn't have gone on so long, as if the director, and then the editor, got really impressed by what the actors were coming up with and didn't want to cheat us out of a single moment. There's also Jon Lovitz and Julie Delpy who are just plain awful as bickering motel-owners. There's so much wrong with this movie, it's hard to know where to start and how to proceed, how to rate what's most important in the wrongheadedness.
But it carries a heap of refulgence, as well. Lots of good music playing while the camera watches an old Ford drive down Highway 1, and the colors of the whole thing are vivid and lovely, stunningly lit. David Baerwald (remember that one-hit-record band David & David? Alright, you're probably too young) is in charge of the music, and that works to the good. In fact, Palmieri leans too much weight on that, too, expecting it to carry long segments and segueways and one particular b&w memory sequence which he just LOVES and sticks on perpetual, annoying repeato-loop mode.
Jack is the kind of role a lot of actors would have suffered some difficulty over, having to reconcile that he truly is a nice, good-hearted kid with his switchover (well-motivated, granted) into a ferocity of violence. Not Reedus, though. This is the kind of apparent contradiction at which he excels. His vastness easily encompasses this dichotomy; in fact, he specializes in it.
Rating: one and a half stars
Reedus Factor: three stars
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