Dharma Bum

Pauly Shore, the Shia LaBeouf of the late 80s, made a movie in 2004 where he faked his death in order to get attention, which ponders his legacy. In spite of all expectations a rational mind would have, it is not a terrible, terrible movie. Essentially an hour and a half of B and C list cameo appearances, it might as well have been an excellent episode of Family Guy without the Griffins. Which is damning it with faint praise, but it is a Pauly Shore movie, so it could’ve been a really horrible episode of Family Guy with Pauly Shore in it.

I did not sit down to this with masochistic tendencies. I watched "Pauly Shore is Dead" because it was on at one in the morning and I’ve got a cough that won’t let me sleep. So I watched a bunch of big name celebrities, many of whom I hate, half ass act like they miss Pauly Shore. Rubbing salt into the wound, there is a subplot that allows Pauly to dress like the unibomber, wave a very obviously plastic squirt gun around as if it were real, all while he snickered and spazzed his limbs in odd directions.

After the whole damn movie inevitably goes down the drain, Sam Kinison makes an appearance as Pauly’s guardian angel. The scene might have been a little deeper than what I got out of it, because I only know who Sam Kinison is because most of my friends are twenty years older than me. In fact, Britney Spears comments on how dated every joke in this movie is during her cameo, by calling someone to find out who Pauly Shore is and commenting, "Oh, he was on MTV before I was born." This moment with Kinison still kind of drives home the point of the film, in an all caps "THIS IS THE POINT OF THE FREAKING MOVIE" kind of way: dried up, shitty actors are not just walking non-sequitors that will be forgotten very soon, they are also train wrecks that haven’t happened yet, but nobody is stopping. All throughout the movie, I was picking out random faces and saying to myself, "Hey, there’s that guy I vaguely know who just went to jail," or "Hey, there’s that random chick from some thing I kinda remember who is dead now," or "Ooh, hey, some jerk on the E channel said that guy is dying from hepatitis b."

So Pauly Shore is not dead. But he will be, probably soon, and he’ll probably die a sad millionaire who nobody understood, exactly as he put it in his movie. He’ll either get two minutes of mourning between stories on bioluminescent cats and someone getting tazered, like James Brown and Jimmy Carter, or he will get a month or two of MSM weeping, like Anna Nicole Smith and Randy Newman. The twist to the whole movie, is that apparently he’s aware of this, and is pretty much resigned to his station. That idea, which exists inside and outside of this really bad movie, makes "Pauly Shore is Dead" not terrible to sit through. In fact, it offers a gut twisting message about this miserable existence. Or maybe I’m just depressed from coughing up green phlegm while watching a filking Pauly Shore movie.