In a “Big Picture” column piece about how Gridiron Gang director Phil Joanou has put demons and career disappointment behind him, L.A. Times guy Patrick Goldstein mentions that Joanou’s Entropy, “an autobiographical film” that was finished in ’99, went straight to video, implying it was a piece of shite.
What Goldstein perhaps should have mentioned is that this low-budget effort, in which Stephen Dorff plays a smart, obsessive, emotionally torn filmmaker precisely modelled on Joanou, is an above-average, not-half-bad film. People on the skids tend to take any work they can get, and there’s no doubt that six or seven years ago Joanou was grappling with a cloudy rep and having trouble getting choice film-directing jobs, and yet he made a fairly interesting piece about his own screwed-up career and love life, in what seemed to me like extremely frank terms.