Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2015.1

I just saw this. I’m still in pain. That was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life.

Filmed in black and white. And the title is just perfect. He doesn’t say the title, but you can hear him saying it.

Religion, racism, adoption, helicopters, euthanasia, what else?

He hit 55 minutes and could have walked off on that joke. It was brilliant. Beautiful build-up. Perfect ending. Just drop the mic and walk off.

Not Bill.

He does 20 more minutes of material and just knocks it even further out of the park with guns, relationships and unrealistic sex positions in movies.

Positively unreal. Surreal.

I listen to his podcast and he has some good material there, but sometimes he’s a moron and phones it in. But holy crap can he just *hone* that material to a goddamned knife-edge and squeeze an absolute diamond out of all of it.

Here’s a taste, on God:

“I actually resent the fact that I’m going to get judged some day. Like if that’s true? That somebody’s gonna judge me? It doesn’t even make sense. It’s like, dude, you made me. So, it’s your fuckup. Let’s not try to turn this around on me. Jesus Christ. You gave me freedom of choice. You made whores. You made me suck at math. And you you don’t think this thing’s not gonna go off the rails?”

This is a quirky, contract-killer movie starring Emile Hirsch as a guy in trouble and Matthew McConaughey as cop/killer-for-hire who’s hired to get him out of that trouble. The plan is to kill Hirsch’s mother in order to collect the insurance money. The movie starts off in a rainstorm with most of the characters in their underwear. Well, Gina Gershon, the new Mom, isn’t wearing underwear. But Thomas Haden Church, the Dad, is, even though it has some holes in it.

Killer Joe requires money up-front, but insurance payments only show up after a death, so he suggests collateral, in the form of Emile’s younger sister, an innocent he’d met the day before. It’s uncertain how old she is, but the girl—played by Juno Temple—looks quite young, so it’s quite a creepy courting. Oh. Now we find out how old she is. The answer is not encouraging. Nor is it particularly believable, but we’ll leave that. Overt sexuality plays a pivotal role. Gina Gershon contributes considerably. Even the cartoon playing in a diner shows a cartoon dog bouncing up and down on a motorcycle while another pumps and pumps up a tire.

McConaughey, Haden Church and Gershon are very good together, although the main, long scene is extremely uncomfortable. Killer Joe is absolutely off the rails. And he planned the whole scene with the chicken leg from the very beginning of their last meeting. McConaughey’s savagery is nearly unbelievable. What the hell just happened? Recommended?

This movie starts off quite slow and then slows down. The main character is shot and dies in the first half-hour. Johnny Depp plays a brilliant scientist, Will Caster and Rebecca Hall his nearly equally brilliant wife Evelyn Caster. Paul Bettany is his best friend Max Waters and “third smartest person [Will] knows”. Their research is into consciousness and digital consciousness. After Will is shot with a radioactive bullet, they risk uploading him into a computer. Morgan Freeman hangs around as another scientist/voice-over guy. As with most science/tech movies, they really say stupid things. They’d just given up on saving her digital husband, thinking that the upload had failed when Evelyn says, before leaving, “wait, we have to wipe the drives”. Why? Because you need an excuse to walk back to the computer? And why does Will Caster slur and speak with hesitation when he comes online? His processing power is gigantic and the artificial personality that he overwrote had no such problems.

Paul Bettany raises the question of whether it is Will. And here we have yet another movie where the woman has to be a hysterical idiot who’s the smartest person in the world (Will’s dead) but can’t think straight about anything serious because she’s a frail woman who’s in WUV. I’m fucking sick of it. And why does the digital Will choose a sickly picture of himself as his avatar? He could choose literally anything he wants and he portrays himself as the gray-faced cancer patient who’s just expired.

Kate Mara plays Bree, a one-named terrorist who’s also quite one-dimensional, probably because she’s a woman and couldn’t handle more dimensions. She and her band of merry men are right in their fears, but they act like thugs, beating the Christ out of Max and then demanding that he join up with them. More could have been done with this script, but they just hurry everything in order to make it an action movie. And the downfall of the world is due to a stupid woman’s frailty in letting a digital copy of her husband loose. I’m not buying it.

I’m also not buying the high-volume trading way of making money: the algos haven’t been making money for years. Just because Will is “in the machine” doesn’t mean he could suddenly make money in a dead market. It’s also nice to see how Evelyn has zero qualms about having her super-powered husband make a shit-ton of money and turn them instantly rich. No moral questions, no doubts. Ridiculous.

And of course the machine is better than everyone at everything. It’s fine, but then isn’t it super-far-fetched to imagine that they could “fool” it with a virus? Is this Independence Day all over again? And there is no interesting discussion of motive: what would the motive of the machine be? Does it still have the motives of Will? Does it care about humanity? Why is it helping people? Why does it care? Because Will’s still in there somewhere? Unchanged? A ridiculous, boring and unsatisfying answer.

Even the action is lazy. Will makes one of his minions chase down a truck. The guys in the back of the truck wait for the guy chasing the truck to catch up to it and climb in before they even pull their guns. I’m insulted. Of course they die.

In the end, he miraculously saves the planet despite humanity’s stupidity. I feel like this movie could have been much better in other hands.

This is the story of a young girl who moves to a cabin on a lake for the summer, in order to write a book. The local idiots take notice and harass her, constantly buzzing her peaceful hammock or canoe with their droning, annoying outboard-motor–equipped boat. They lasso her and drag her canoe to shore, then chase her through the woods. She is terrified. They are idiots. But they are strong idiots and they overpower her and rape her.

There’re a lot of overtones of crazy, immoral hillbillies here, with a harmonica instead of the banjo from Deliverance[1]. The scene is brutal and violent and seemed—though this is hard to judge—realistic. It makes you question whether we really are descended from apes rather than ascended. Their savagery and persistence is terrifying; it’s hard to figure out why they hate her so much. But maybe that’s the point. It’s hard to imagine watching this movie in a drive-in theater…on a date.

That’s act one. Act two is her prolonged revenge-taking. There are really long, long segments here in which nothing really happens. There isn’t really even any tension built-up either. The mentally handicapped member—ain’t there always one—of the gang-rape quartet, who was supposed to have killed the victim instead becomes her first victim, bizarrely, by hanging. The next one she seduces into a bathtub at her house, makes sure all of his blood is in one place, then slices that place off. Two down; two to go. The next one she chops down with his own ax as he tries to swim to shore. And the last she toys with, driving past him multiple times before she kills him with his own outboard motor when he injudiciously grabs onto it for support. The droning of the boat motor is like a needle in the brain. Not recommended.

This movie is about plague-time France during the reign of Cardinal Richelieu. Oliver Reed is utterly brilliant as the debauched priest Urbain Grandier. Now I know why Greg Proops thinks he was so good, despite his nearly criminal drunkenness. He’s really a very powerful actor. He is trying to save his city of Loudun from the church but mostly he’s trying to bed as many nuns as he can. Vanessa Redgrave is the mother superior, also in love with Monsieur Grandier but remains unrequited because of her extreme scoliosis that twists her head around by 45 degrees or more. The church is depicted as full of madmen and madwomen, their visions interspersed only occasionally with reality. The city itself looks like Bosch designed it, straight from the Garden of Earthly Delights. The story is from a book by Aldous Huxley called The Devils of Loudon.

This movie was originally rated X, probably because of blasphemy. There’s a cut-down version that ruins director Russell’s vision but even the R-rated parts are pretty lascivious. There’s a scene where Redgrave fantasizes while leading prayers, about Grandier as Christ and herself as Mary Magdalene but instead of just wiping his feet with her hair, she kisses Christ deeply, then proceeds to lave his wounds with further kisses. When she comes back to her senses, she finds that, in her passion, she’s drilled a stigmata into one hand with the end of her rosary cross.

Oliver Reed positively oozes his libido on-screen; Redgrave makes her frustration palpable. But when you hear that there’s a Ken Russell movie with an orgy scene where a dozen naked nuns rub themselves all over a giant Jesus statue, it’s hard to settle for less. I found a high-quality version without that scene and the scene is, surprisingly, available on YouTube or in lower-quality versions. The other cut scene features Ms. Redgrave pleasuring herself with the sooty shinbone of her now-deceased and unrequited paramour Grandier, whose death she’d brought about with an accusation of witchcraft she’d made in the throes or her own delirium-induced ecstasy.

And yet, to speak of deleted scenes is to do this film a gross injustice. If Oliver Reed exudes confidence and charisma in the fullness of health and freedom, his quiet refusal to confess to crimes not his own is even more powerful. The condemnation of a church and power structure gone utterly wild and mad with its own lust, drunk on its own power, could hardly be better rendered on film. Perhaps that is thanks to the source material, I cannot say. But Russell, Redgrave and Reed do a fantastic job with this. Redgrave is relentlessly off the rails, repenting nothing for her accusation, her mad laugh beautiful and terrifying.

It’s that kind of movie. Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist is arguably more difficult to watch[2] but this is up there. Great movie, though. Really well-made: good acting, good direction, wonderful sets—just really hell-on-Earth and pure surrealist insanity, but high-quality—and a good script, though there are those that will judge it poorly because it’s “dirty”, whatever the hell than means. Highly recommended, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This is an almost completely silent film about a man whose entire career was in silent film. He straddles triumphant over a film world in which he can do no wrong when a tsunami named “Talkies” washes away everything he has. That and the stock-market crash. It reminded me only very slightly of Singin’ in the Rain which was also about the transition from silents to talkies. But I like this film much, much better.

There are some very slow bits, but there are bits that reward you immensely for sticking with it and for paying attention. You see more detail when you’re not constantly listening. The scene in his dressing room where Peppy Miller puts her arm through his coat and pretends to dance with him. The scene where he dreams that objects make noise. The final scene of his self-made silent film in which his character disappears into quicksand, so symbolic of his career. That Peppy Miller’s movie—a Talkie—is playing to standing-room-only shows in a theater named “La Reine”. She says “I want to be alone” at one point, echoing Garbo. The shadow of the rain running down the windowpane looking like tears on his face. He crosses a road after his estate auction, in front of a movie theater called the “Lonely Star”. When he leaves his room at her mansion for the first time after setting his old films on fire in the depths of despondence, what do we see? His shadow, which had abandoned him right before the fire.

It’s no wonder Jean Dujardin made this film: he’s a wonderful physical actor whose talents have already been on display in other French movies, notably the OSS 117 movies. Bérénice Bejo as Peppy Miller is also very good (and she was actually in one of the OSS 117 movies as well). John Goodman and James Cromwell have smaller roles. And how can I not mention his faithful sidekick, the Jack Russell Terrier? Not a word spoken and DuJardin’s slow decay is one of the sadder things on film. He makes his melancholy palpable, helped by an excellent score (vital for a silent film). And especially when compared with his easy smile and laughter throughout the beginning of the film. Recommended.