Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #71 B.U.S.T.E.D

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or, you can follow in the footsteps of two kind souls and have me write about the entire film careers of prominent filmmakers and actors. I am currently deep into the process of writing about the entire filmography of Sam Peckinpah, great Western filmmaker and horrible human being for a generous patron and I have just begun writing about the movies of David Bowie, whom I, for one, miss and think was great, for another big-hearted benefactor of the site. 

I began my journey through the movies of David Bowie with a somber appreciation of the achingly sad majesty of his breakthrough film and defining masterpiece, The Man Who Fell to Earth. If The Man Who Fell to Earth is Bowie’s most important film, his magnum opus, then the muddled and dreary 1999 crime drama B.U.S.T.E.D is its antithesis, a movie that does not matter at all, that’s so slight and irrelevant that if I didn’t write about it immediately after seeing it it’d undoubtedly disappear from my psyche almost instantly. 

The novelty of a movie I’d never heard of, with a comically inane, idiotic title ostensibly starring drum and bass superstar Goldie and David Bowie was enough to get me to splurge and pay a whole dollar when I found a B.U.S.T.E.D DVD for sale in the bargain bin of a truck stop. 

I’m grateful that this prescient purchase is helping me write the Bowie column but otherwise in paying a buck for this at a Stop and Go on the highway I pretty much got what I paid for, and possibly even less. 

Sure enough, Bowie lent his regal mid-life presence to this muddled, meager little crime drama but despite his prominent billing on the singularly unappealing DVD cover Bowie is probably onscreen for less than ten minutes in the key supporting role of Bernie, an elegantly attired man of honor in the brutal Manchester underworld. Given his limited screen time, it’s entirely possible Bowie spent but a weekend playing Bernie, if that. 

The reason you have almost assuredly not heard of B.U.S.T.E.D, let alone seen it, even if, like me, you are a real Bowie fan, and not one of those posers who know him almost exclusively as the “cat what wrote that bitching Wallflowers song from Godzilla” is because it sucks and it looks like it cost about twelve dollars to make. 

But you’ve also probably never encountered B.U.S.T.E.D because while Goldie and Bowie are the big names it’s actually a stealth vehicle for Andrew Goth, a model handsome young man with a tragically vacant, underwhelming presence who does triple duty as writer, director and lead character Ray, an ex-con who leaves prison determined to change his ways and pursue a straight life, preferably in music. 

This puts him in direct conflict with his psychotic cousin Terry (Goldie), who has his own ideas about how Ray should lead his life. Terry is pathologically obsessed with Ray, and wants him to spend the rest of eternity doing crimes with him, including murder and various lesser transgressions. 

B.U.S.T.E.D is a hokey and dishwater grey variation on a cinematic perennial: the “gritty” street melodrama about very different childhood friends whose antithetical temperaments and ideas about authority lead them to pursue opposite paths, one pulled irrevocably and dangerously towards the illicit allure of the street life and criminality, the other towards loftier, more legal pursuits, often artistic or athletic in nature. 

It’s a sturdy sub-genre that has endured through the decades, from the Warner Brothers crime melodramas of the 1930s with James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson on through to the “hood films” of the 1990s. Terry, in particular, embodies a trusty staple of the crime film: the hot-headed, unhinged, enthusiastically murderous man of violence so ruled by uncontrollable compulsions that he cannot be saved or redeemed. 

Cagney became a legend playing this archetype. So did Joe Pesci in Goodfellas and Casino and Ice Cube in Boyz N the Hood and Tupac Shakur in Juice and Larenz Tate in Menace II Society, and to a much lesser  extent, Cam’Ron in Paid in Full, which is not in the same league as those other films but is cut from the same cloth. 

B.U.S.T.E.D is likewise cut from the same cloth, but the material is cheaper and uglier, polyester or plastic, second-hand and plastic. The movie follows Terry after he gets out of jail and tries to go straight and pursue a career in shitty dance music, much to the chagrin of his cousin and childhood best friend Terry, who very literally wants him to be his partner in crime. 

Most of their conversations go something like this: 

Ray: Innit great being out of prison? It’s the freedom do crimes like murder I like best. What say we do some murder-crimes, old pal? No better way to celebrate your newfound freedom than by killing people for your old gang! 

Terry: Dunno, man. I’m not really into doing crimes anymore, let alone murder. I think I’m going to give music a try. It seems less dangerous than murdering people. 

Ray: Your loss! More people for me murder then, I suppose! 

But seriously, Ray isn’t about to let his cousin, who he is unhealthily obsessed with to a psychosexual extent, get away with filling his days with non-murder, and non-crime so he nags and nags and nags until he becomes part of his gang’s bloody gang war with the Chinese Triad. 

Ray begins the movie a wild-eyed sociopath ready, even eager, to kill anyone and everyone to protect his family and his gang. Over the course of the film he grows increasingly unhinged and unglued as his always shaky hold on his own sanity begins to slip away. 

It’s a hammy if engaging star turn from a performer with a lot of natural charisma and a distinctive look—signature gold teeth, sinewy, muscular frame and icily intense eyes radiating danger—that lends itself naturally to the big screen but Goldie’s brooding magnetism only serve to make Goth seem even more forgettable by comparison. 

Usually when the writer-director of a vanity project is wildly inappropriate as a leading man as well it’s because they look weird and creepy and wrong, like Tommy Wiseau or Neil Breen. Goth looks the part of a movie star but there’s a blank deadness at his core where personality and energy should be. He looks like a movie star. He unfortunately does not act like one in more ways than one.

Goth is a stiff in a forgettable crime movie that seems to take place exclusively in overcast weather, under grey skies among forgettably dressed men with guns in a particularly hopeless and crime-ravaged section of Manchester. It’s so joyless that I actually found myself missing the “attitude”, second-hand style and cheap pop culture jolts and references of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie knock-offs. Those movies were almost all terrible but at least they had a pulse and some energy, which is more than can be said of B.U.S.T.E.D, which was released everywhere outside the United States as Everybody Loves Sunshine, an even weirder, possibly even shittier title that similarly says jack-shit about the turkey it’s tethered to. 

Bowie is, unsurprisingly, the best part of the film, giving his aging underworld functionary a certain battered dignity and bruised pride that stands out in this sordid and underwhelming milieu but even he can’t do anything with lines about how he used to hand out turkeys to the poor but nowadays “the fucking turkeys” are the younger generation of disrespectful, blood-thirsty career criminals. 

Why did Bowie appear in B.U.S.T.E.D? I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to act alongside Goldie, a giant of drum and bass and an artist he’d collaborated with on a song the year before this film’s release but I can think of better ways to engage with the world of electronica than making a shitty movie with Goldie. 

Goth would continue making movies but he took the universe’s hint and stayed behind the camera for 2005’s Cold and Dark, the 2012 Wesley Snipes vehicle Gallowwalkers and 2015’s Mindgamers.

According to B.U.S.T.E.D’s trivia section on the IMDB, David Bowie kicked in thirty thousand pounds of his own money when financing ran out. Judging from the movie’s production values, or rather lack thereof, that appears to have happened several hours after filming began. 

That was entirely too kind, and unnecessary, in that this garbage monster of a movie has no reason to exist except to waste some of the limited, precious time on earth of a beloved musical legend, and Goldie as well. 

Bowie’s participation in this self-indulgent nonsense isn’t just generous considering his God-like status in the society and the arts and the film’s negligible creative worth; it’s a goddamn act of charity/pity on par with, if not beyond, kicking in some of his own money to ensure that this tedious sub-mediocrity would get finished and rightly ignored by a culture that reveres him, if not all of the sometimes bewildering, wrong choices he made, like acting in this worthless little trifle of a movie. 

Support independent media and or choose a film for this delightful column by pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace