BOY GEORGE MICHAEL JACKSON BROWNE

The best thing about “Boy George Michael Jackson Browne” is the title, which suggests a sort of morphing from one thing to the next. That’s kind of what the film does through 24 tedious episodes. People walk into a theater with “Boy George Michael Jackson Browne” on the marquee. One of them leaves for a party, which is somehow happening in the same building. The party’s main amusement is the parlor game Scruples, which doubles as a device for plot and character development. The party bartender emerges as “The Guy Who Knows Everything,” and he has his own television show. And on and on, zipping from vignette to vignette in the most random of digressions.

You get the sense that director Memo Salazar is (1) trying to do Lynchian dream sequences, (2) pitching a lame MTV show (think “Undressed” without the pretty people), (3) trying to make clever pop culture references (Episode IV: A New Soap), and (4) somehow failing miserably at everything.

That’s not to say that there is nothing to like here. When a spaceship lands, the alien is a middle-aged man in a suit and tie raised on television. His critique of American culture is poignant, especially coming after five episodes of inanity. A censor bleeps out every usage of the word “f**k” because the show “has crossover potential.” A series of commercial parodies are dead on. The hand-drawn closing credits are creative and fun to watch. And, in the world’s most obvious show of critic butt kissing, two characters sit for at least twenty seconds reading back issues of Film Threat.

Unfortunately, the good ideas are swallowed by the deficiencies. The acting is poor, the dialogue is wooden, the lighting is uneven, sound glitches abound, and the editing is amateurishly overdone. What “Boy George Michael Jackson Browne” feels like, more than anything else, is a bad cable access show.