Jim Jones

Jim Jones’s new DVD, A Day in the Fastlife, has a whole lot of problems, but maybe chief among them is the misleading title. Rather than chronicling a typical day in Diplomats honcho Jim Jones’s life, the doc’s rambling, incoherent footage is not grounded in any discernible chronology. But hey, that makes some sense — when you’re as busy as Jones apparently is, days bleed into nights into days. Unfortunately, the concert footage is handled much the same way: poorly recorded live performance clips are played over montages of Jones performing various songs at various venues. A Day in the Fastlife is good, however, if you’ve ever wanted to see "behind the scenes” footage of Jones and his huge entourage fucking around on tour. Watch as Jones goes shopping in Harlem for a new jacket and tries to screw the shopkeeper out of a couple hundred dollars, while calculations pop up onscreen so the viewer can see just what kind of a deal Jones has managed to finagle. While some of this should be pretty funny, Jones is so generally dislikeable and belligerent it’s hard to watch and not feel bad for the poor jerks left in his wake. A Day in the Fastlife ultimately illustrates — partially by the fact that it exists at all — that Jones is a more talented businessman than artist. And as he explains in front of a shaky hand-held camera how he won another transaction, one can’t help but feel like this DVD is just his latest swindle