Traditional Christmas Movies: Go

It's Christmas, and over the course of one single night in Los Angeles, the lives of grocery store clerks, soap opera stars, and drug dealers converge wildly.

After Swingers first made him a name, and before the Bourne Identity turned him into an action movie director, Doug Liman made Go. Written by John August, Go is one of those films where I wouldn’t say that it couldn’t have been made without Pulp Fiction, but you definitely can’t watch it without hearing about that film. This is mostly because Pulp Fiction exists, because Quentin Tarantino exists, and also because both films feature multiple stories that overlap. There’s really no other reason. And yet, whenever you mention Go, Pulp Fiction inevitably comes up.

And that’s too bad.

It’s too bad, because it’s a pretty good movie, one that was barely noticed at the time, and is mostly forgotten now, lost beneath the massive shadow thrown by the Post-Pulp Fiction era of Hollywood, and all its ugly bastard children and wannabe pretenders to Tarantino’s crown.

But then, that’s just a variation of an old familiar song in Hollywood, right? Whenever the next big thing happens to come along, it becomes a bright light that draws all the moths, and that light quickly becomes blinding. That’s not to say that Pulp Fiction isn’t great, it is. And that’s not to say that it doesn’t deserve all of its accolades either, because it does. It’s just, other than his movies, almost everything about Quentin Tarantino sucks. He’s just… so fucking tedious. Now, obviously, this includes little things like him talking shit about Matthew Lillard, and worse things, like his on-set behavior, his support of problematic figures, and his obvious issues and presumptions when it comes to race, but all that shit aside, the most annoying thing about him has to be a toss up between the absolute deluge of garbage cinema that’s been inflicted on us due to him having inspired literal legions of total weak sauce disciples, AND… the way he dominates every conversation when it comes to certain genres, or the way that, if a movie has elements that might seem similar to something Tarantino has also done, then suddenly, somehow he becomes the sole inspiration and influence for everything, eclipsing all others.

And like I said, that’s too bad, because there’s films like Go out there, good films, fun films, films that deserve accolades based on their own merits, and definitely deserve much better than to be lumped in with, and dismissed as being the same as, derivative crap like Boondocks Saints, Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead, or 8 Heads In A Duffel Bag.

But what’re you gonna do? Tarantino casts a big annoying shadow.

So…

Ronna is working as many shifts as she possibly can at her supermarket job, because Christmas or not, she’s going to be evicted at the end of the month if she can’t make up her back-owed rent. After taking her coworker Simon’s shift, so that he can go to Vegas, she is approached at her register by Adam and Zack. They want to buy 20 hits of ecstasy, and explain to her that they usually buy from Simon.

Desperate for money, with a vague outline of a plan in her head where she can double her cash with one quick sale, Ronna agrees. After work, Ronna has Manny, a friend and coworker from the Grocery store, take her and Claire, another friend and coworker, over to Todd Gaines’s apartment, Simon's dealer, to see if she can buy the pills directly from him.

Todd is shocked by the audacity, and after checking to see if she’s wearing a wire, he agrees. But Ronna is unable to pay the full amount, so, with a promise to return with the rest of the money after the sale, she leaves Claire with Todd as collateral.

And that’s when things go bad.

When Ronna meets up with Adam and Zack, they have Burke with them, and he seems really strange, so Ronna flushes the drugs down the toilet and leaves. Now panicking, as she no longer has the drugs, does not have the cash, and still needs to pick up Claire, Ronna steals over-the-counter pills to replace the flushed pills with, hoping that Todd won’t notice, all so that she can get Claire back, AND hopefully a refund too. Somehow, she manages to pull it off, despite Todd being annoyed and Manny being super high, because he took two hits when Ronna wasn’t looking.

With that now behind them, Ronna, Claire, and Manny decide to go party at the big Christmas rave, because what else can they do at this point. While there, Ronna hits on the idea of making some extra cash by selling the leftover over-the-counter pills as fake ecstasy to naive suburban kids.

Unfortunately, Todd realizes that the pills are fake and follows Ronna to the rave. Ronna has to hide the super high Manny in an alley, promising to return with her car, but Todd is waiting for her in the parking lot, and he’s just about to shoot her when Ronna is suddenly hit by a car, which then speeds away, leaving her lying unconscious in a muddy ditch.

The story then restarts from the perspective of Simon, Ronna’s coworker from the grocery store. He wakes up in the trunk of a car. The car stops and the trunk opens on to the bright sun off a desert highway. His buddies, Marcus, Tiny, and Singh, shoved him in the trunk as a prank, after he passed out drunk as they were leaving L.A., and now they are almost to Las Vegas.

Unfortunately for Tiny and Singh, they eat too much shrimp off a buffet and get food poisoning. Now the night belongs to Simon and Marcus.

While there, Simon loses all his money, crashes a wedding, ends up having sex with two of the bridesmaids after exaggerating his Irish accent, and has to leave their room in a naked hurry when they accidentally set their hotel room on fire, due to a reason that is so stupid, it has to be based on a real person. Deciding that it might be best to vacate the hotel premises for a while, Simon and Marcus steal a Ferrari, after the owner mistakes Marcus for a parking valet due to his ugly yellow jacket.

The two of them head to the Crazy Horse, one of the many strip clubs mentioned by Vince Neil in the Mötley Crüe classic “Girls, Girls, Girls.” Unfortunately, after Simon gropes a dancer, Victor Jr., the bouncer starts kicking the crap out of Simon and Marcus, and Simon shoots him in the arm with the gun that they found in the Ferrari. They escape in the ensuing chaos, and rush back to the hotel to rouse their sick buddies and get the hell out of Las Vegas. But before they can, Victor Jr. and his father, Victor Sr., the strip club’s owner, manage to track them down, and a car chase ensues through the streets of sin city. The boys eventually manage to shake the mobsters and drive off, back to L.A., back to safety, obscurity, just another freak, in the freak kingdom.

Unfortunately, Todd Gaines let Simon borrow one of his credit cards to use to get the room at the hotel, and the group forgot it in their rush to leave. Victor Sr. uses his old school mob connections to find Todd's address…

The story then resets again, and starts over from the perspective of Adam and Zack. They are both actors in a daytime soap opera, and are secretly boyfriends, kept in the closet by the demands of their work and their fandom.

They were also recently busted for drug possession.

In order to get this arrest wiped off their record, they agreed to work for Burke, a police detective, and help him to entrap their dealer, Simon. Adam is fitted with a wire, and the two are driven to the grocery store. On the way, it is revealed through coded language to the detective, that their relationship is in trouble, as they’re both cheating on each other. But when they get to the grocery store, Simon is absent, so they ask Ronna instead. But when Ronna arrives to make the deal, the pair have a change of heart, and Zack secretly warns her, so she flushes the drugs down the toilet and leaves.

After the unsuccessful bust, Burke invites Adam and Zack to Christmas dinner, where Burke annd his wife Irene are super weird, and seem like they might try to coerce Zack and Adam into having group sex with them, but really they’re trying to rope them into joining a multi-level marketing company. In the end, Burke signs their papers, freeing them from legal entanglement. Relieved, the pair make their escape, and while discussing each other’s infidelities, they discover that they’re both sleeping with the same guy.

It’s Jimmy from Hair and Makeup, that slut.

They decide to get revenge, and find out from his roommate that he’s at the Christmas rave. They confront Jimmy there, and all is right in the world, or at least, in their relationship, for the time being. But then, while trying to find their way out of the parking lot, they accidentally run over Ronna, and then panic and drive away after they see Todd with a gun.

But after a crisis of conscience at the gas station, the two return to deal with Ronna's body and discover that she isn’t dead, just unconscious. They leave her on the hood of someone’s car, setting off its alarm, and watch from a distance as the same suburban ravers Ronna sold fake ecstasy to call an ambulance.

As the sun rises on a new day, Claire goes to the diner where she and Ronna and Manny often meet up if they get separated at a party, and instead encounters Todd. Unaware that Todd had intended to murder Ronna, and then abandoned her in a ditch only an hour or so previous, Claire gets a little antsy-in-the-pantsy for Todd, and ends up going home with him.

But while they’re making out on the stairs of Todd’s building, they are confronted by Victor Sr. and Victor Jr., and soon after Simon arrives, hoping to hide for a few days at Todd’s. There’s a scuffle and guns are drawn, but Claire reminds everyone that she is a witness, and things come to a halt. Simon agrees to be shot in the arm by Victor Jr. and Claire ends up leaving in disgust.

Ronna wakes up in a hospital, battered and bruised and beaten, but otherwise alive. Then, in a clear indictment of both American society and hustle culture, she checks out and immediately hobbles to the grocery store for her next shift. It’s only when Claire asks from the next register that she realizes that she left Manny in an alley behind the rave.

Ronna and Claire return to the venue to find Manny still in the alley, pale and shaking and confused, but at least no longer so high. They get in the car, where we find out Ronna managed to make enough cash selling fake drugs to pay her rent, so there’s that at least. And thus, Christmas is saved.

Manny asks what their New Years plans are.

Originally, Go was a short film script called X, by screenwriter John August, that focused on Ronna‘s story only, and was apparently inspired in part by the people and going-ons at the Ralphs on Sunset in Los Angeles. But after getting feedback that asked about Simon and Adam and Zack, he added their stories too, and the short film script became a feature.

After director Doug Liman's success with Swingers in 1996, he was looking for something more mainstream, more of a big studio project, but after almost taking a couple of big budget studio comedies, he met up with August, and read his script. Liman apparently liked Go, with it’s multiple stories jumping around in time, its “edgy” darker comedy, and its high energy, because it had more of an “indie spirit” to it than a lot of the big studio comedy scripts he was seeing.

Liman reportedly shot a lot of this movie utilizing more of a guerrilla style of filmmaking, dashing from location to location, which were often public places, where they filmed without permit, while using handheld cameras. And apparently Sarah Polley now credits Go for giving her the desire to become a director herself, and that, as a result of watching August and Liman collaborating on the film, she decided to become a filmmaker.

But Sarah Polley isn’t the only big future name in this film. Like Dazed and Confused, Go is one of those films with a large cast of people, early in their careers, who are either nostalgic 90s faces, or they’re now very famous.

Scott Wolf of Party of Five fame appears, as does a very young Katie Holmes, just one season into Dawson’s Creek and long before Cruise and his Cult got his hooks into her. Taye Diggs appears, as does Jay Mohr and Breckin Meyer too. A young Timothy Olyphant is still years from Deadwood and Justified fame here, but it’s clear in his performance that something like that is coming his way. Meanwhile, William Fichtner is not only absolutely iconic as the creepy cop and MLM sucker, Jane Krakowski absolutely steals the big dinner scene, clearly demonstrating how amazing and hilarious she is in just a handful of scenes. And that’d maybe be the most noteworthy performance too, if it wasn’t for Melissa McCarthy also showing up, this being her first film, and still a year away from her big break in Gilmore Girls, and then doing the same thing, but with only one single scene.

More than anything else, Go is one of those films where, between the energy and the cast, it’s able to capture the feeling of a moment in Gen X time perfectly. It’s a film that so perfectly portrays the feeling of that time, when we were all still on the cusp of a Y2K world and doing drugs at shitty raves to shitty music, even if the events of the film are all most exaggerated fiction. It still feels real, without having to be real. It’s good stuff, funny and fun, and still holds up.

If you haven‘t seen it, Go is definitely worth checking out this Christmas.