Quick NON-Review: I'm Still Here

We all became familiar with the story of Joaquin Phoenix and his apparent meltdown -- saying he was quitting acting to pursue a career as a rapper, gaining weight, growing a scraggly beard, acting bizarrely on the Late Show with David Letterman, etc. Some suspected it was a hoax because Casey Affleck was following him around with a camera, documenting everything.

Then it was announced that a documentary called "I'm Still Here," telling the story of Phoenix's seeming descent into madness, with scenes of drug use and hookers included, would be released. Still, there were doubters who were sure that it was a put-on of some kind, but everyone involved kept insisting it was not a hoax.

Until they decided to tell us it was a hoax. With the film now in theaters, Affleck just came clean to the New York Times and Phoenix is slated to return to the Letterman show next week, in a presumably more coherent condition. (Oddly enough, it seems that one of Letterman's writers did an interview in August 2009 in which he said that it was all a hoax and that Dave was even in on the joke. Only now is anyone paying attention to that interview, it seems.)

I wasn't all that sure I wanted to see "I'm Still Here" to begin with. If it had been a true documentary it would be pretty sad, it seems, to see such self-destructive behavior, especially with no apparent end in sight, since Phoenix has done nothing since then. It would have been much more interesting had he been playing a character (hell, even if that character were named "Joaquin Phoenix" -- Olivia Newton-John played caricatures of herself twice on "Glee") and let us in on the joke from the beginning. Done right, it could have followed in the footsteps of Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" and "Bruno" films. No one, other than the easily duped non-actors who were in those films, thought that Cohen's characters were real people.

Now, knowing that the whole thing is an act, I think I want to see it even less. (Not to say that I definitely won't see it, but I'm less inclined to make the effort, especially since in this area it's only showing on the Ritz screens downtown. I get no points towards free stuff on my AMC Moviewatcher Card account at a Ritz theater!) This feels like an attempt to dupe the audience, and it apparently didn't work: the film opened on 19 screens and earned $96,658, for a per-screen average of $5,087. Normally a film with lots of buzz like this that opens up on just a few screens has a much higher per-screen average. I'm not sure the box office will improve as the weeks go by.