Review by Tory G. Geller

A typical exercise in Hollywood bombast, Gregory Tell's Fatal Activities (making this explosionfest sound like a dour afterschool special) is the hopelessly tangled tale of Victor Baltz, former editor of a defunct radical lefty zine, Spleen (based on the real journal Glean and its gutsy, Estonian editor, Zorba Tvilct) and his unlikely lover, buxom playgirl, Lydia Timmons (a deservedly unflattering caricature of Ms. Symmonia Datil, eternally drug-addled heir to the Datil hotel fortune). These two proxies strike weak sparks in a nightclub while listening to the real jazz stylings of clarinetist Curtis West (who later betrays his true art for the millenium's worst acting performance as the appropriately named Wurstest Ci, a Slovenian freelancer spying for a Japanese automaker). Lydia, it turns out, has many lovers, including the White House Press Secretary, a relationship which the hot and bitter Baltz—a kind of tonic for Ms. Timmons ailing soul (effecting his healing in several boring slow motion sex scenes)—leverages into an opportunity to expose the criminal hypocrisy in the hawkish Administration's position on torture, winning a political coup for the previously ineffectual opposition and the ultimate return to prominence of his revived Spleen, its savage scrutiny turned glossy now thanks to the newly enlightened Lydia's millions. (Her liberation is signified by an SLA-style black beret a la Patty Hearst.) Worst of all, perhaps, is that Mr. Tell seems completely ignorant of Fatal Activities' truly fascist bent and pro-torture rhetoric underlying its sermonizing surface.