AMBER BENSON
 
Reviews: Comics | Prime Gig | Chance | Taboo | Astray
Portrait
Interview
 

"The Prime Gig" (2001) A very brief encounter with Amber Benson, movie actress
I bought this DVD because she’s in it, and also because both the always interesting Ed Harris and a guy named Vince Vaughn – whom you may remember as a slightly befuddled but courageous investigator in "The Cell" – are in it as well.
So was I right? Is she in it?
Just barely: this is a film about turbo-capitalism, about the speculative mindset, big money, fraud over the phone, obvious and not-so-obvious twists and turns of plot, but there’s just one important woman in this picture, and it’s not her, because, these people in Hollywood, they’re blind, you know, and I believe deafness, not paying attention and possibly brain-rot are also matters of some concern here, but never mind. The film, directed by Gregory Mosher and overall nicely done, finishes with an appropriate downer for an ending, although the audience is allowed to perceive some flicker of hope or at least the hero’s apparent readiness to finally start taking control of his own life instead of waiting for unearned riches to fall into his lap. Vaughn’s that hero, named "Penny Wise", and he, just like Amber Benson’s character, a "batty girl" (as in: slightly unhinged but effective at what she does), gets hired by a broker with a cirminal record, Kelly Grant (Harris) and associate Caitlin Carlson (played by Julia Ormond) to sell shares of a (suspected? imaginary?) gold mine to assorted "investors" ranging from professional speculators to old ladies with sufficient savings.


So is there a payoff for Amber’s fans in watching the film? Well, sort of. You see, once, we get "the grin", which is always worth waiting for, and then there’s another scene that we’ll talk about shortly, but batgirl’s a very minor role, which is a disappointment, naturally. She looks like a comic book character from DC’s Vertigo line: very colourful sweaters, goth-make-up, hair that’s sometimes braided; moves around on her seat a lot, uses her arms like a duck on drugs would use its wings, gets very agitated while talking customers into spending their hard-earned cash on a dubious dream. All this you have to catch with your peripheral vision, because she’s hardly even there. But then there’s that special scene – it’s short, but it’s massively charming because of what she does with it.
In that scene, set in the giant shared office where all these not-so-strictly-legal telephone merchants sell their shady stuff, Vaughn loses his temper because of the boss’s CD player which annoys – one presumes – them all with classical music at an irritating volume. Vaughn gets up and screams to turn it down. The boss looks at him curiously. The leading lady looks at him funny. Yet he screams again, this time even louder, to turn it down. And so we suddenly see the batty girl, crazy hair, glasses down on her nose, a lollypop in her hand which seems to have just come out of her mouth, and she’s staring at this crazed rebel like she’s either a.) his grandmother who is just shocked, young man, veddy veddy shocked, or b.) mildly interested in a person apparently even more out of it than herself, or possibly both, and then she says two words to sum it all up: "Holy shit".
The superiors actually turn the noise down. Stuff resumes.
See? Told you it was charming.
Dietmar Dath

> back to top