Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 181 Hairshirt (1998)

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 be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.

Always be wary of low-budget independent films where struggling young actor/screenwriter/whatever types play struggling young actor/screenwriter/whatever types desperately trying to get a foothold in the exciting, crazy-making world of low-budget independent films.

These glib, self-indulgent exercises in navel-gazing take the directive to write what you know way too literally. They are almost invariably the product of a toxic combination of narcissism and laziness. 

It’s similarly smart to skeptical of movies where a more or less unknown actor/screenwriter casts himself in the lead role of an aspiring actor/screenwriter whose biggest problem is that he’s just so damn handsome and smooth that he just can’t stop getting laid. 

So what are we to make of 1998’s Hairshirt (AKA Too Smooth), an insufferable romantic comedy devoid of comedy and romance, in which screenwriter-director-star Dean Paraskevopoulos casts himself as, you guessed it, a struggling screenwriter/actor in Los Angeles who just can’t seem to keep the sexy ladies from hurling themselves at him?

We learn through narration that Danny Reilly (Dean Paraskevopoulos) is a disgusting piece of shit whose loathsome existence revolves around lying to women in order to trick them into having sex with him.

Danny’s signature move is to pretend that his Aunt Edna is sick, then crassly exploit a conquest’s sympathy for casual sex. Like Colt .45, this gambit works every time even though the film’s almost perversely unlikable protagonist doesn’t even have an Aunt Edna. 

All this creep apparently needs to work his magic is to pretend briefly to be sad about the imminent demise of a fake relative and then, boom, he’s enjoying oral sex from a beautiful young woman too naive to see through his schemes and scams. 

Danny is the kind of guy who pretends to be a Senior Editor at Details in order to “nail” an instantly forgotten sexual conquest. Yet we’re inexplicably supposed to root for him and find his need to screw and screw over every woman he meets charming rather than repellent. 

I like to think we’re seeing a major shift in romantic comedies, a genre with a horrifying history of depicting stalking, lying and sadistic manipulation as the essence of romance, rather than its antithesis. 

Danny pulls the old Aunt Edna routine on Corrinne "Corey" Wells (Katie Wright, who also cowrote the story), only to second-guess his tomcatting ways once he begins to develop feelings for her. 

It’s never remotely apparent what makes Corey different from any of the other conventionally attractive women Danny tricked into having sex with him, then callously abandoned at the first opportunity. 

Hairshirt is inexplicably a romantic comedy instead of a grim psychodrama about a callous misogynist who deserves the worst life has to offer so even though Danny has all the charm and warmth of Patrick Bateman we’re supposed to root for him to find true love as a reward for displaying a mere modicum of emotional and spiritual growth. 

We’re also supposed to give Danny a pass on being a woman-hating habitual liar because he’s at least somewhat less disgusting than his puppeteer pal Peter Angelo (David DeLuise of the Hollywood Deluises).

Fun fact: this poster has literally nothing to do with the plot or premise of the film.

While out on the town one night Peter leers at a waitress and gushes to Danny, “DAMN! Those legs go right up to her ass!”, a bizarrely phrased acknowledgment of basic human biology. I like to think that DeLuise gave the director and editor a lot to choose from by also praising the way the waitress’ arms are connected to her torso and her feet are at the very end of her legs.  

Despite being prominently billed, Gayheart doesn’t even show up until the film is half over as free spirited waitress Jennifer Scott. The troubled starlet steals the film not because she has anything interesting to do (she doesn’t! Nobody does!) but rather because she is such a magnetic onscreen presence.

The Urban Legend star isn’t just beautiful: she’s incandescent. She’s luminous. She absolutely burns up the screen. She looks like she smells like lilacs and angel’s breath. The camera loves her with the sweaty, single-minded obsessiveness of a stalker. She’s fresh. She’s sexy. She’s exuberant. I fell in love with Gayheart all over again despite Too Smooth giving her absolutely nothing to do beyond be impossibly gorgeous. 

Corey is a hopelessly bland romantic lead under the best of circumstances. Compared to Gayheart she’s not only comparatively plain, she’s downright homely. 

Gayheart is so electric and alive in a DOA vanity project otherwise lacking a pulse that she throws Wright’s egregious shortcomings as a romantic lead into even sharper relief. 

Hairshirt unsurprisingly failed to launch its charmless, charisma-impaired star as either a leading man or a motion picture auteur. Wright, meanwhile, retired from acting a few years later, right around the time she married the exceedingly wealthy Hank Azaria. 

These days Hairshirt is just barely remembered not for its under-achieving leads but rather for the surprising number of future stars in bit parts. 

Adam Carolla made his feature film debut in Too Smooth and Marley Shelton, Dax Shepard and Adam Scott all show up as well in tiny roles. Just as Gayheart’s dazzling star-power makes Wright seem hopelessly inadequate by comparison, Scott does more in his forty-seven seconds of screen time to create an indelible character than Paraskevopoulos and Wright do over the course of the entire film. 

The presence of these future stars and producer Neve Campbell in a thankless supporting role as yet another woman erotically obsessed with our crappy, hate-worthy “hero” lend an air of professionalism but this is otherwise strictly amateur hour. 

Yes, you would be wise to be suspicious of a movie like Hairshirt because it is EXACTLY the self-indulgent nonsense it very much appears to be.  

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