The Last Big Thing - A Review

Dan Zukovic's The Last Big Thing is one of those independent movies that should probably be bigger than it is, but remains obscure to the point that I was lucky enough to catch it on FLIX this month, where it apparently played at least three times.

To summarize, a caustic, LA outsider tries his hand at anti-Art, skewering pop-culture and its many minor figures, and branding America a "culture going down on itself." While this angry rant against the culture is today a trite oversimplification (or is it?), and was certainly nothing new in 1996, The Last Big Thing succeeds because of Zukovic's massive insight; in fact, The Last Big Thing is even more relevant today than ever because of its prescience:

The Last Big Thing literally (and specifically) predicted blogging and the Blogosphere, in general.

One of the characters amended Andy Warhol's "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" to "In the future, everyone will have their own magazine." The two discuss how these magazines will be completely self-referential and largely dedicated to the pop-culture around them (ahem)... that's blogging!

And the movie is actually filled with these insightful - to the point of prescient - observations, many of which you really have to be thinking to catch. But the real brilliance lay in the fact that, aside from pointedly copious bursts of references to "sit-coms from the mid-70s," the movie creates almost all of the brands, bands, products, and celebrities it skewers. No doubt some of this was due to the fact that Zukovic wanted to avoid the possibility of lawsuits, but he was certainly aware of the fact that he was creating a microcosm mirroring LA's reality (and the reality of the Web today), and to this extent, The Last Big Thing succeeds marvelously by showing just how superficial and self-referential the culture it is mocking really is.

Unfortunately, the comedy is sparser than it should be, with confusing scenes that border on drama (or outright psychological horror!), and the continuous confrontational atmosphere becomes too heavy for the script to bear about midway through. This is also about the time when the ending becomes predictable (but, in all fairness, whether due to heavy-handed foreshadowing, the datedness of the film, or just super-intellect, you will probably get the gist of where it's going far sooner).

It's hard for me to tell what is "Art House" and what is "independent," but when The Last Big Thing was made, it fit both definitions well - this was a few years after Clerks, after all, and right around the time of Mallrats. While low-budget and somewhat plodding, The Last Big Thing is one of those movies all pop-culturalists, Americanists, artists, and creative types should sit through at least once.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008