I don’t like these three guys in this coffee shop either. I can’t help but compare them to the Ghostbox opportunists who were written to be disliked. That much – and a lot more – the movie got right.
* * *
Because we’re packed tight, New York City is the eavesdropping capital of North America. I’d just shimmied my backside between two narrow tables when these guys crowd in beside me. Their conversation is annoying. It’s inescapable. I’m about to schlep my stuff to … oh, I don’t know, anywhere else, when I realize … the movie I just saw – a movie I didn’t like very much – hasn’t ended.
Three misplaced cast members from Ghostbox Cowboy are sipping lattes next to me, running lines. Two of them are trying to talk the third into making a multimillion-dollar investment. It has something to do with micro-loans to individuals and cottage businesses in Bangladesh.
One of these fellows is (loudly) explaining how this works: borrowers will think they’re obtaining small amounts of badly needed capital. But that’s not the real business model. The borrowers are actually products.
What?
* * *
Ghostbox Cowboy is not an easy movie to watch. I sat near the back of a Press and Industry screening, and at least two other critics slithered out in the dark, long before the credits ran.
The good news for Louisiana-born director John Maringouin (whose previous credits include documentaries New Orleans, Here and Now; Running Stumbled; and Big River Man) is that it’s unethical (not to mention impossible) to write a review of a movie you walk out on.
Every second in Ghostbox Cowboy is symbolic in at least eight different ways. It’s so overstimulating that it’s tiring. (Disclaimer: I am old.)
Worse, I didn’t care what happened to Jimmy Van Horn, played perhaps too well by David Zellner (below). Jimmy is pathetic, but not “take me home, I’m lost” pathetic. More like “Please God, don’t let him sit next to me and strike up a conversation” pathetic.
There were moments I felt bad for Jimmy, but he left the Land of Opportunity to go to Communist China to get rich quick.
* * *
I don’t like these three guys in this coffee shop either. I can’t help but compare them to the Ghostbox opportunists who were written to be disliked. That much – and a lot more – the movie got right.
I left the theater not liking Ghostbox Cowboy. I ate lunch, chewing and stewing about Ghostbox Cowboy. I walked to this coffee shop thinking about Ghostbox Cowboy.
So here I am, sipping on a lukewarm latte, when I realize I’m overhearing a sales pitch not unlike Ghostbox Cowboy.
How did we get here, to this movie about hawking a product with no inherent value, to a real world where a potentially exploitative loan is coffee-shop conversation?
Ghostbox Cowboy opens on a bleak montage from “The American Blank Region.” Jimmy VanHorn (Zellner), a middle-aged guy with the aura of a Ford salesman who missed last month’s sales quota, has an epiphany while he loiters in a south Texas dollar store: everything in the place serves marginal purpose, and it’s all made in China.
Jimmy must not have much left to lose (it might have helped the movie to know why that is). The next thing we see, he’s smack-dab in the middle of a Chinese metropolis, where he meets American expat Specialist (played by “Specialist”). Specialist is a grubby, baby-faced self-proclaimed genius who runs a grey-market business where people salute him as he saunters into work. Anyone with a lick of sense would take one look at Specialist and run. But love and greed are blind.
In NYC, the investor learns that these micro-loans are expected to have a high rate of default. “Not immediately, but within the first six to eight months.”
To hell with this movie review. Seriously. Dude. Run.
Instead of being repelled, the investor is rapt. The high default rate of Bangladeshi micro-loans makes him scoot his chair closer to the pitchman. “Okay,” he asks. “How does this work?”
* * *
Jimmy’s dubious consumer electronic product, GHOSTR, needs development, manufacturing, and marketing. Jimmy hooks up with a coke-snorting promoter, played with portly pathos by Robert Longstreet. Longstreet’s performance is the highlight of Ghostbox Cowboy.
What Jimmy really needs, Bob points out between snorts, are naive Chinese investors. Bob hooks Jimmy up, alright. With rusty barbed, bottom-fishing hooks.
Jimmy’s just finished a “rigged-to-fail” sales pitch when – BAM! – Bitcoin takes a bath. “Iced out,” Jimmy loses his money and his dignity … but he still has his Stetson and its awkward hatbox, dammit.
Ghostbox Cowboy has strong elements of a mock-doc. It’s filmed with hand-held cameras and a kick-ass soundtrack. There are moments when the “fourth wall” starts to crumble, but it’s never torn down. It’s clear very early on that Ghostbox Cowboy is scripted.
It’s not so clear the two-hour movie has been edited.
I love layers, but there’s something revolting about an ice-cream -filled frozen doughnut dipped in batter, deep fried with whipped cream, drizzled with chocolate sauce. This abomination actually exists. So does a part of the Asian investment climate that encourages siphon-friendly pond scum. Layers of sweet-sounding stuff can kill you.
Ghostbox is predictable. Sitting next to the sales pitch going on next to me, I’m realizing that might have been the point.
When you bought that fidget spinner, you KNEW you were going to chuck it, right?
* * *
I have to give these NYC pitchmen credit: their data-mining enterprise, disguised as a loan business, using software developed in cahoots with a cellphone manufacturer, with a wink-wink from Bangladeshi banks is much more sophisticated than Jimmy Van Horn’s GHOSTR product.
Business exploitation is the same on both sides of the ocean. Our competitors mimic the worst in us, and we exploit the worst in them.
Ghostbox Cowboy is fiction inspired by fact, a choppy voyeur story about an unlikeable American, and the stuff we want and need and buy and sell. The movie’s message is that manufacturers are predatory, sellers are sick, and consumers are comatose. And a lot of the people inventing stuff, funding stuff, and pimping stuff are, like Jimmy Van Horn, confused, greedy, and helpless.
The guys next to me are setting up their next meeting. Their handshakes are vigorous. “So far,” one says, “so good.”
* * *
All images courtesy of Tribeca Press Office.
