Beach Bum Fights 3

I didn’t give a shit about the movies coming out this weekend. Instead I went off the board and decided to see Beach Bum, the newish Harmony Korine movie starring Matthew McConaughey about a wealthy aimless, well, beach bum in Florida. I’m not a Korine fan; his movies are mostly self-indulgent and pretentious horseshit, like the products of junior college videography classes where the students get pissed at everyone for not understanding how brilliant and outrageous they were for filming their own dicks for five minutes.

At least Beach Bum would be colorful and have boobs in it. I looked in the paper for showtimes and was reminded the fucking newspaper doesn’t list those anymore. They can’t even bother to publish Luann or my letters to the editor, so why the hell would they list movies? I went online to see if it was showing at one of the theaters on a bus route from my apartment but ended up stumbling upon Beach Bum Fights 3. What a discovery!

According to its blurb, this movie picks up where Fights 1 and 2 leave off with “a lot of aggression, pissed-off people, head-pounding and jealous lovers in this eye-popping, bone-cracking, ball-crunching and flesh tearing film.” Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but these are the exact words Jon Huston used to describe The African Queen.

Beach Bum Fights 3 does not star Matthew McConaughey. Instead it’s full of up-and-coming talent, and it’s refreshing to see a movie where they didn’t use number of teeth as a criteria when selecting actors. It is not directed by Harmony Korine. I suspect many of those same junior college video students found work here, and based on the quality, before they even finished their first semester. Keep an eye on some of the people behind the cameras; some of them may someday produce spectacular vape pen unboxing epics for Youtube.

I was initially hesitant to watch this movie. I hadn’t seen Beach Bum Fights 1. Neither had I seen what some call the masterpiece of the Beach Bum series, also known as Beach Bum Fights 2. I worried I’d struggle understanding the characters, their histories and motivations. “Wait, why did that fat guy just bite her?” and “Who is Choochie and why did the girl with the Juggalo tattoo say she wanted to kill him?”

Despite my apprehension, though, I couldn’t resist the siren call of ball-crunching and flesh-tearing. After all, it was right there on my computer screen for free, and I didn’t have to get up, put on pants and have the correct bus fare to see it. Plus, I could pause it if I needed to puke, a luxury no theater has ever been willing to give me.

I expected little and I emerged a changed man, a man in search of his own beach story, his own heads to pound and eyes to pop. I was reminded of how Akira Krosawa reinvented Shakespeare’s King Lear with his movie Ran. While there are many threads and, as promised, much balls popped, at its heart, Beach Bum Fights 3 is a Shakespearean tragedy and a retelling of King Lear for our times. Think of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, but with more drunk and stoned people in ill-fitting bikinis and a lot more public urination.

Threaded through the many clips of hair-pulling and “Fuck you, bitch!” is the story of Julius, perhaps the oldest and wealthiest of the bums living near the Santa Monica Pier. While many bums live handout to handout, Julius has a shopping cart full of filthy blankets and an old milk jug filled with a mysterious brown liquid. Whenever he drinks it, Julius gains the strength of a million Popeyes and the fury of a billion Blutos. He is able to shake off descending cops, shatter barroom windows with his face and, in a thrilling scene, rip a pier fisherman’s freshly-caught mackerel in half then take a bite while singing “Oh, My Darling.”

However, Julius knows his days are numbered. As he says in an eloquent monologue right before being brained by a toothless woman high on bath salts, there are helicopters following him and secrets in his mind the government wants kept there, mostly about nuclear gonads. He devises a plan to distribute his blankets and brown juice to other, younger beach bums, but first they must prove themselves worthy through a series of bum fights.

I can’t remember most of the other bums’ names, suffice to say that each is a rich character carrying his own tragic tale of how he got to living rent free on the beach and eating corn dogs from the dumpster behind the Eight Ball lounge. Despite their frequently poor health and obvious chemical dependencies, the bums see these battles as a way to transition from the self-loathing creatures they are and become kings of the beach, homeless but with a shitload of brown juice and a blanket that may or may not have lice on it.

Plus, the challenge gives them what every beach bum dreams of: an opportunity to let assholes just one rung up the social ladder like me feel superior for not living under a pier. There are few feelings greater than knowing that your own misfortune gives comfort to strangers who like to know you're suffering.

Only one bum refuses to fight, saying that no single fight could ever express his respect for Julius. The old man banishes him to the south side of the pier where there are more cops and fewer tourists with dollar bills. Later, Julius realizes he was wrong about the loner, and that many of the bums who have come for his challenge are faking their fights.

This is where I struggled most with Beach Bum Fights 3. I got the sense that, perhaps, some of the fighting was gratuitous. Sometimes there is a fight and a bum’s only pair of board shorts get ripped off him, leaving the frail, sun-leathered figure shivering and curled up on the boardwalk exposed and shamed while a woman in novelty sunglasses laughs. Instead of exploring the man’s pain, though, Fights 3 skips right to a fat man high on crack running into a light post, or a woman nodding off in a gutter while a hobo shits nearby.

Also, I was troubled that the Shakespearean subtext is buried so deep among the clips that there really is no Julius and no clear reason for why the bums are fighting at all. I just made all that shit up to make myself feel better about exploiting humanity at its worst for two hours just to distract myself from the ongoing stream of burning diarrhea that my life is.

It worked, though. Probably better than anything Harmony Korine and Matthew McConaughey play-acting could have done. Well done, bums, and thank you for your service. Three Fingers for Beach Bum Fights 3.