Fred Durst off of Limp Bizkit is a film-maker now. You might have let this pass you by because it’s so hard to consolidate the idea of Durst as a 49-year-old arthouse-leaning film-maker with the 30-year-old singer who experimented with every single signature of soul patch and once released an album called Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water. His upcoming thriller The Fanatic, starring John Travolta in a haircut last seen at the South Bank skate park in about 1995, is his third feature – so someone should watch all of Durst’s significant works to date and try to trace his evolution as a director, shouldn’t they? And that someone might as well be me.
Limp Bizkit – N 2 Gether Now ft Method Man (1999)
Durst’s directorial debut sees him and Method Man play video games so aggressively they get into a sort of Warner Bros x The Matrix knife fight then join forces to beat up a pizza delivery boy, intersected by shots of Durst in a backwards baseball cap making spread-fingered gestures into a fisheye lens, which is all music videos were legally allowed to be for a five-year period from 1999 onwards. You remember that Star Wars Kid video that was the first real meme? It’s basically that, but Fred Durst is in it way, way more. It did not win any MTV awards.
Fred Durst – Sex Tape (2005)
Weird one, this: starts out as a simple Nokia-captured video and ends with an arthouse edit of some intimate moments that borders on the memorial. Durst’s sex tape is one of the more sophisticated of the celebrity skin era and, like a lot of his works, lacks any real Act 2 jeopardy. Still, some emergent themes: astonishingly bad dialogue (“Yeah, you’re touching my balls and my ass”), a fairly decent soundtrack (Urban Species’ Blanket featuring Imogen Heap) and, it could be argued, with the phallus-centric point of view that puts him front and centre, Durst pioneered a movement of amateur pornography that’s still being felt today. We should technically categorise everything on the PornHub homepage right now as “Durstwave”.
The Education of Charlie Banks (2007)
A coming-of-age story about a nerd (Jesse Eisenberg, obviously) making uneasy friends with an intimidatingly charismatic street tough (Jason Ritter) and, groundbreakingly, their dual difficulty fitting in among the rich kids at an elite-level college, The Education of Charlie Banks hardly says anything new, but it’s fine enough. Some shortcomings, obviously: Ritter’s Mick Leary primarily communicates through graffiti and aggressive pats on the shoulder; absolutely none of the characters are likable at all; some of the dialogue, especially during key dramatic moments, is genuinely atrocious; the opening shot, a close-up of a young woman’s backside in jeans walking slowly up some stairs at a house party, is a noticeable hangover from Durst’s music video background; nothing, really, happens. It does make you wonder what Fred Durst – a man who spent the early aughts in a baseball hat perennially trying to seduce Britney Spears – saw in a period collegiate drama script that made him go “WOW! I REALLY HAVE TO MAKE THIS!”, but it’s probably better than any debut film you and I could ever make.
The Longshots (2008)
A coming-of-age story about a grumpy abandoned teenager (Keke Palmer) making an uneasy alliance with her failed footballer uncle (Ice Cube) until he agrees to have a shower and teach her to play quarterback, The Longshots shows a more mature director at the helm, as well as a few emerging Durstian themes: the down-and-out nobody railing against kids from a richer school; a drama with that spiky-edged, late-childhood/early-adulthood era at its very core; unpopular kids can make friends through sport; hot girls are bitches. It’s corny and saccharine and a little heavy-handed, but it’s a fine enough uncle-niece heartwarmer if you want to have a cry on a hangover.
