TONGUES ON FILM – MAY 2009

“LET THE RIGHT ONE IN” (2008)

Everything you may have heard about this film is true.

SEE IT.

It is not a horror film. That is to say, it is not a catalogue of “kills” carried out by some lunatic fucker scuttling about in the dark with a knife or whatever. It is the anti-“Saw”, the anti-“Hostel”. And that is a good thing.

It has traditional horror elements in it, yes, but these are not the story. The story is the telling of the tenuous and tender relationship that begins to develop between bullied 12 year old Oskar and his mysterious neighbour, the “girl”, Eli, who is an “other”.

And that is all I will say, for others have said it far better than I. I blogged about the book a while back, over here. There’s a trailer there that you can watch. Off you go.

An American remake is in the offer. God help us. I think I shall smite them before they fuck it up.


“TWILIGHT” (2008)

Only joking.

I haven’t seen this film.

What, do you think I am insane?

I’d rather stick pins in my fucking eyes.


“MARLEY & ME” (2008)

The last 15 minutes of this movie made me a little puddle of wet.

Look, you make a movie where a central character is a dog (a real dog, that is, not one of those squeaky rat-like things), and you show the dog growing up from a puppy into old age and then dying, I’m gonna have a little eye dribble going on when that happens. Okay?

Deal with it.

And I like Owen Wilson. I like his funny-looking mashed up nose and his stoner drawl and I’ve liked him since I first saw him in “Bottle Rocket” years ago, “Bottle Rocket” being an excellent little movie. He strikes me as the type of guy you could have a quiet beer with and just generally chill out around. Unlike this wanker, for example.

And Jennifer Aniston actually looks like a real woman still, a 40 year old woman whose face can still move when she talks. Unlike, say, Meg Ryan, who looks like she’s taken the labia from a 400 lb female Sumo wrestler and had them stitched to her face where her lips once were.

And Alan Arkin’s in it. Briefly. So.

You’ve got a movie with a boofy dog in it and Alan Arkin.

What’s not to like?


“THE PROMOTION” 2008

John C. Reilly. And some other people. I like Reilly. He acts, he sings, he dances. I wish I had his life, the life of Reilly.

Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-rah, too-rah-loo-ra-laiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii …

… So I come back from the pub after 3 beers on a Sunday afternoon, and start working my way through a bottle of wine and then I decide to watch this.

Ten minutes later, I was fast asleep.

And I had to take the movie back, because it was a one night rental and I should have watched it the night before.

I hate it when that happens.


“THE LOST” (2006)

Portrait of a teenage narcissistic psychopath who kills two people just to see what it feels like. By the end of the film, he’s well over the edge, a full-fledged fruit loop on a rampage who wants to be Charles Manson. Thankfully, the film-makers resisted the urge to show his ultimate act of horror toward the end. That would’ve been well beyond the pale.

This is good. It’s not bad, that is. It’s okay. It has a few major flaws (it is, after all, a very low-budget independent U.S. production), and it’s taken its time getting a release here (straight to DVD), but you could do worse. I mean, you could rent “Twilight”, for example. But then you’d have to stab yourself in the head after.

The only actor I recognized here was Ed Lauter in a minor role as an old guy having a fling with a woman about a third his age. And I have no idea what that storyline was supposed to achieve as every time it popped up, I thought I was watching another movie. The whole silly subplot could easily have been left out and you’d have a much tighter film, as “The Lost” runs a little too long for what it is and what it deals with. Also, I didn’t really buy the idea that the central character would be so popular with girls and others of his own age. He’s quite the preening little fuckwit, a guy who shoves crushed beer cans in his boots to make himself taller. I mean, if you were a woman who knew a guy like this and you were in possession of half a brain, this is the type of guy you’d throw your used sanitary pads at.

What else?

The sound transfer sucks. It’s as if the boom operator thought shoving the microphone up the arse of an elephant might add some depth. It doesn’t. Try it and see.

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See? Told you.

You should move away from the elephant now. You’ve aggravated his anal warts.

You bastard.


“STUCK” (2007)

HALLELUJAH!!!

Now this, this is the type of movie that makes it all worthwhile …

Stephen Rea plays a character down, and almost out, out of work and out of welfare, with no hopes on his horizons, and about to find himself spending his first night on a park bench or in a hostel …

Mena Suvari plays a nursing home carer on the brink of a promotion who, after a night of booze and pills chooses to drive home, only to collide head on with Rea’s character who becomes firmly wedged in the windshield of her car.

And then drives all the way home with him still stuck there, doing nothing to help.

Inspired by an actual event, but not a replication of it, this is one right out of left field, but not in a “leftist” sense. (It could be out of the right field, but not in a “rightist” sense, though I guess it depends whereabouts in the paddock you’re standing and who’s throwing the balls. If you’re standing in a paddock and some bastard’s throwing balls at you, just shoot them in the fucking head, okay? You shouldn’t have to put up with that type of malarkey.)

A tight, taut (80 minutes), blackly comic, toe-curling little thriller that perfectly captures the blindly self-absorbed amoral cruelties, the (as Jules Feiffer put it) “little murders” of the soul that we and others casually commit every day in the name of our own self-preservation until all trace of our basic humanity is stripped back to the raw and chalky bone. The one-ply tissue veneer of so-called “civilised” behaviour flushed effortlessly away to sleep the sleep of the dead with the fishes.

You’ll feel every scrape, every cut, every puncture on Rea’s body ache and howl with pain as he desperately tries to extricate himself from his horrific situation, and, as Suvari’s character gradually reveals her true nature to be that of a shallow, unthinkingly vicious cunt of the first order, by the closing moments all you will want to do is grab her head by its expensively braided ‘do and slam it into a fucking anvil.

This is truly marvelous stuff, one of the best low budget indie films (Canadian) I’ve seen in quite some time, simply because it was so unexpected.

Also, there’s an instructive little sequence about the proper use of pens and pencils when you’re in a fix, and a heartwarming scene with an adorably fluffy little canine.*

… From Channel 4’s Anton Bitel, “Stuck is disturbing in all the right ways, turning an incredible real-life story of human callousness and suffering into a tawdry entertainment that makes guffawing, sociopathic rubbernecks of us all.” …



Directed by Stuart Gordon, scripted by John Styrsik, if your local store don’t have it for rent, go out and buy it. It is that good, and hats off to Suvari for choosing to play such an (ultimately) unsympathetic and irredeemable character.

Bloody brilliant.

* Warning – Irony.


“FEAST II: SLOPPY SECONDS” (2008)

Henry Rollins was in the first “Feast”, albeit briefly.

I think Rollins toured Brisbane earlier this year. Or maybe it was earlier last year. I forget. Once you get to a certain age, all the years look the bloody same. I’ll be dead before I know it. “Hey, Ross! You’re almost dead!” “I am? Shit, and I never got around to seeing Henry Rollins. Caaaaaark.”

I only found out he was touring at the last moment and it was a week before payday, so I was flat broke as per usual. Pfhhhhht.

And now I’m expected to work until I’m almost dead thanks to this shithead. Christ, I started working at the age of 17, back in 1976 and now I’m supposed to stick at it until 2026? Get fucked. I’d like a few years of comfy retirement just generally farting about and taking it easy before I’m shuffled off to some cockroach ridden rathole to be given methylated spirit baths by a bunch of Nurse Ratched types. Wipe my arse, will you? I shit in your hand.

This movie has lots of goo in it.

The acting is crap, but, aside from some lousy effects work, the film improves a little the last 15, 20 minutes. It would bloody well want to.

One thing I hope I won’t be doing in comfy retirement while I generally just fart about is wasting what’s left of my life watching shit like this.

Maybe I should’ve rented “Twilight”. I could’ve rented “Twilight”, but then I would’ve had to dip my face into an acid bath and hammer nails into my testicles with a hacksaw blade afterwards.

And I’d rather not, thank you very much.


“ACOLYTES” (2008)

Teenagers discover a body, identify and locate the serial killer responsible, and then attempt to blackmail him into killing a thug who abused them when they were children.

Elements of “Stand By Me” and “River’s Edge” with psychopaths added for that extra zing.

The only recognisably Australian elements are the accents and the suburban topography, those red tile roof, red brick houses. I wish there more Australian films like this and less of the, “This is an AUSTRALIAN film! We gotta have colloquialisms and flannelette and men in big hats and some fucking bush, NO, not that type of bush, you cock, I’m talking shrubbery out to fucking buggery out there!” variety. I know there are some dangerously deranged freaks wandering about the fucking desert, the so-called romantics of the land, salt of the earth blah, they’d hump your leg if it had a hole in it, but you ought to see some of the people up the local mall on a Saturday morning.

This is a very well made, very (unselfconsciously) stylish psychological thriller, eschewing most of the tired and tiring clichés that bore me to tears in so many films of its type, headache inducing rapid cut editing and zoom in, zoom out, bang crash cinematography and sound that makes you know what it might feel like to be in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease and have someone smashing cymbals over your head for ninety minutes.

There’s none of that here, the three teenage actors are excellent and completely believable as characters, and Joel Edgerton avoids stereotypes altogether in his chilly and nicely restrained portrayal of the serial killer as average suburban family man.

“Images are the essence of cinema and Hewitt's cinematographer Mark Pugh, delivers some exceptional material, which is sometimes manipulated for extra effect. The sound scape is well worked into the fibre of the film and the end result is a superior piece of genre filmmaking.” - Andrew Urban from Urbancinefile

There are two alternate endings provided on the DVD. I thought the first one of these was a better choice than the one they finally went with, though that one is perfectly fine, just that the other seemed more plausible given all that had gone before and what we had come to know along the way.

You could rent this and “Stuck”, buy some booze and get some cheap Thai or Indian takeaway, and you’d be sure to have yourself a fine ol’ time in, I reckon. Or you could watch “Twilight”, swallow some Drano and wash it down with paint stripper and watch your own stomach explode.

Spoilt for choice, really.


“THE LODGER” (2009)

Man (Simon Baker) rents a room in boarding house. Quiet type, likes his privacy, charming though.

Meanwhile, someone’s killing prostitutes in the exact same manner as Jack the Ripper.

Will Alfred Molina, our burnt out, troubled cop with the burnt out, troubled marriage stop the bloodthirsty fiend before he commits yet another in his gruesome series of dastardly deeds?

Meh.

Just ordinary and all over the place, it goes over here, then it goes somewhere else and forgets about where it’s been and why it was there in the first place, then it comes back and goes somewhere else and loses its keys and has to walk all the way home.

I’ve no idea what the thing with Molina’s wife was supposed to be there for, to make me understand what a complex set of situations his character has in life? His wife is troubled you see, she is in an institution being cared for because of her troubles. The fuck do I care? What does it add to the telling of the story? Why do I need to know this? What does it have to do with anything?

Anyway, “The Lodger” mostly limps along, finally coming to a “well gee what a big surprise I didn’t see that coming” cod Hitchcock conclusion, nod to “Psycho”, throw in a curly one the last few minutes, roll credits, end. Turn off player. Goodbye.

The soundtrack was good.

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Soundtracks have music on them.

TONGUES ON FILM – APRIL 2009

Depending upon I-don’t-really-know-what, I shall endeavour once a month to provide a brief wrap-up of all of the films I have watched during that time …

Isn’t that sweet of me? …

“DELIVER US FROM EVIL” (2006)

Academy Award nominated documentary concerning the exploits of one Father Oliver O’Grady, a Catholic priest who, over more than two decades during the 70’s and 80’s, abused dozens of the faithful, leaving nothing but shattered childhoods, abandoned trusts, and deep emotional trauma in his wake.

Then, of course, there is the hierarchy to whom O’Grady was, or should have been, accountable, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Despite knowledge of O’Grady’s behaviour, the extent of it, and how long it had been going on, next to nothing was done, next to nothing acknowledged. In more than a few cases, the only action taken was to move O’Grady to another parish and, on these occasions, this rarely amounted to more than a move some scant fifty miles away. They may as well just have spat in the eyes of the parents and raped their kids all over again for all the good that did.

More than once while watching this, I had to punch the pause button to spend some time muttering darkly at the walls, a fairly inefficient way of expending some of the rage I felt over the way these people had been, and were still being, treated by the church, that faith in which they had placed such significance, such meaning.

There is one couple who welcomed O’Grady into their home as a friend, had no doubts or qualms about his behaviour (had no reason for any such doubts), and entrusted their daughter to his care. This is a couple who have been together so long that they have grown into that quaint habit of being able to finish off each other’s sentences. As the father comes to recall the time, the number of times, the moment when O’Grady’s betrayal became fully known to him, his voice, choked with anguish, blurts out that he should have known, that he was the one who trusted this man, and how could “he have let it happen?”

Imagine … To be a father who thinks himself a “failure” at his responsibilities because a pedophile abused his daughter.

Thus does a parent’s prime, primeval, duty of care to their children, that is, to protect, come to be shabbily thrust aside and trampled upon as one selfish other chooses to indulge and inflict it’s penchant for furtive spurts of sexual subterfuge with no regard, no sliver, no glint of understanding as to the consequence to anybody of their actions. And then to scuttle behind a church pew and be assured protection simply because you are clothed in the dark rags of this absurdly popular cult.

O’Grady spent some time in prison for his crimes, but that is due in no part to any action from the church. Today, he is free and living in Ireland, the country of his birth. He willingly takes part in this documentary, where he speaks freely of his actions, his desires, his (so-called) motivations.

Remorse eludes him.

When one considers that many of the most devout proselytisers of this faith consider the “evils of homosexuality” to be the frontier most worth fighting on, and then one considers the subject matter of this superb film and the seeming insignificance of it to the architects and defenders of this belief system, one could be forgiven for thinking the whole Catholic Church is not just out-of-step with reality, but so far out of time they make the Amish look like The Jetsons.


“TOKYO GORE POLICE” (2008)

Utterly incoherent, yet oddly compelling. Makes no sense whatsoever. Blood gushes from severed limbs like water from a fire hydrant. There’s an English dub that sounds like it was performed by graduates of the Ed Wood school of vocal technique back in the ‘50’s. Some of the prosthetics are quite good.

You could try drugs. Some drugs and beer. That might work.


“QUARANTINE” (2008)

Jennifer Carpenter (from “Dexter”) is in it …

The next time I see a movie shot like this, I’m gonna go out and buy a fucking tripod and send it to the fucking director as an act of fucking charity. I’m fed up to the fucking back teeth with this fucking shaky-cam shit.

Just fuck off.


“FINDING AMANDA” (2008)

Dialogue, for example …

- “How you doing?”

- “I’ve got no legs, I’ve got no balls, and I piss through a tube, how the fuck do you think I’m doing?”

And …

- “She’s probably at the Thaiger Club. It’s not spelt “tiger” but. It’s Thai, like the food.”

- “Like the country?”

- “There’s a country too?”

Good, yes?

The eternally youthful Matthew Broderick plays a “reformed” alcoholic and gambling addict who finds out his niece (Bettany Snow) is a hooker in Las Vegas and, to prove to himself, if not least to his long-suffering wife, that he has the stamina to resist the temptation to drink and gamble there, he pops off to Vegas to find her and drag her to rehab.

Very funny, very sharp, no soap or sap. Think “After Hours” and “Something Wild” and ignore the horrid poster art and byline which seems to indicate some sort of sexual thing may arise from Broderick and Snow’s relationship. There’s no such theme, and nothing of the sort happens.

“DANCE OF THE DEAD” (2008)

Another bloody zombie movie. Is there anyone who isn’t making another bloody zombie movie? You probably shit another bloody zombie movie for breakfast. Even I had an idea for another bloody zombie movie. And someone actually expressed an interest in making the bloody thing.

I should probably get around to writing something resembling a bloody script. YA BLOODY RECKON????? Bloody oath.

Anyway, this one is set in a bloody high school.

And there’s a bunch of bloody zombies about.

What a bloody surprise.

Fuck off.


“END OF THE LINE” (2007)

Independent Canadian horror film.

The leader of a religious cult, a Rush Limbaugh lookalike, gives the word and his acolytes scoot about in a righteous frenzy attempting to “save” the souls of non-believers by stabbing the shit out of them. Takes place in a subway.

Very well done, no CGI (hooray!), good story, quite effective jolts. Ends well, too. Original. Good. Yes.

Yes, you may watch this. It has a brain and there was talent involved in its making.


“DYING BREED” (2008)

“Your testicles are tacos!”

That’s not a line from the movie, but I wished it had been.

Inbred cannibals in Tasmania.

Who’d have guessed?

“Deliverance” … meet “The Hills Have Eyes”.

Animal traps. Teeth. Retards.

Full of surprises, this one.


“THE WACKNESS” (2008)

“Quirky”.

In that “I’m so quirky!” way some independent films irritatingly insist on being at times ...

- “Hey, Brent! I took all these QUIRKY people and put them in a movie together!”

- “That’s brilliant, Gavin! We’ll call it “WHEN QUIRKS COLLIDE!”

Ben Kingsley plays a pot-smoking psychiatrist who offers counseling sessions as payment for dope to his emotionally constipated young dealer who then ends up falling in love with Kingsley’s daughter.

Life lessons are learned.

Gee, I didn’t see that coming.

Mary-Kate Olsen’s in it. I thought she was a “tween” phenomenon, not a legit actress.

So. You see? I have learnt something. She turns up here as a zonked out bar and party slut. She’s not too bad at it either.

Fancy that.


“DONKEY PUNCH” (2008)

There’s a cover blurb that quotes a review something like this, “The Most Sexy, Shocking Thriller of the Year!!”

No, it isn’t. There’s some sex scenes in it. Big fucking deal.

A bunch of girls join a bunch of guys on a boat and have a party. A girl dies. Everyone tries to extricate themselves from being implicated in her death and ends up turning on one another.

As you do.

Half way through watching this, I began to think, “I’d really like to see “Shallow Grave” again”.

So I did.

“THE WAVE” (2008)

German film. Based on a true story, or parts of one.

Firstly, you have to accept the premise that a group of well educated senior students would, in the space of only five days and as part of an experiment on autocratic society, enthusiastically transform themselves into a bunch of robo-fascists at the behest of a rather uncharismatic lecturer.

I didn’t.

Ay, there’s the rub.

‘Cause there ain’t no “secondly” if that don’t happen.


“DEATH PROOF” (2007)

Tarantino’s contribution to the “Grindhouse” experiment didn’t work for me the first time around but after reading this re-evaluation on Bright Lights recently I thought I’d take another look.

As the reviewer notes, the half-way point massacre, Stuntman Mike’s “vehicular homicide” takes out those protagonists in whom we’ve just invested time and attention and leaves us with no choice but to callously discard our empathies for these characters and start over again. It’s an alienating experience, or at least it was and may have been one of the reasons I found the film initially resistible. I didn’t want to start over again on account of I’m bone lazy and impatient and get cranky when I’m asked to make an effort. And, at the time I was far more impressed by Robert Rodriguez’s sublimely unhinged “Planet Terror” and it’s “why the fuck not”* attitude to story-telling.

Another thing, Tarantino’s habit of having his characters lapse into fanboy enthusiasms, such as the name-checking of “road” or, to be more precise in this case, “rod” movies which happens here is getting a little too self-consciously twee and I wish he’d knock it off. I get the point, get back to the movie please.

Second time around, however, it did work for me, there being subtleties and spaces throughout that become far more apparent when you pull it away from the immediacy of expectations that typically cluster around Tarantino’s work.

As a matter of fact, I think it’s a work of utter bloody genius.

The difference between the two groups of women became far more apparent to me the second time around. The first group, the victims, give the initial impression of independence, full of smart mouth sass and attitude. But no, they’re not that at all. They’re just in the process of becoming tomorrow’s housewives today, still looking to have their existence validated by some man, whether it’s the boyfriend who hasn’t turned up, or the film director who won’t remember a birthday, or some gormless sleazebags in a bar. Girlie girls all dressed up waiting to go somewhere with someone, to be courted and paid for.

Pfhht.

The second group, on the other hand, they’re the real deal. Beholden to no one, dependent on nothing, they live fast, for and in the moment. These women are cooler than fuck, as tough as nails and goddamn it if they’ll take any shit from anyone. But there’s no attitude here, no style that they’ve adopted to telegraph their individual philosophies, who they are.

Some guy tries some cheesy line on these women in a bar, they’d have his balls for breakfast. For tapas.

Kurt Russell, as Stuntman Mike, with the first group, he’s the bad guy, the mean, nasty murdering motherfucker. But against the second group? Nah, he’s just another lip-licking, toe-sniffing, garden variety crybaby creep. As are they all.

Fucking brilliant.

Where Rodriguez played his exploitation hand as fondly reverential spoof, Tarantino has played his by demanding the audience too fully immerse themselves in an “exploitation” attitude, dispensing with fashionably post-modern concerns about the fate and motivation of characters and asking only that everything put before them is fast, sexy, violent and fun. That there be no point, no lesson, no thing of learned value to be taken away from this experience other than, “Did you see how the car took the top of her head off?! Cool!” is all there should be.

And that was a fucking excellent scene.


* For example:

- Why don’t we throw this in?

- Why the fuck not!


“THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL” (2008)

I made myself a very nice bacon and egg sandwich halfway through this movie. With HP sauce. Four strips of bacon and two eggs.

I left the plate out overnight on the couch? And the next morning, there were ants crawling all over it ‘cause there were a couple of drops of sauce left on the plate.

It’s not the first time, either. They just come from nowhere and crawl over anything that may have a trace of food on it. It’s not like I leave stuff out all the time. There aren’t food scraps lying all over the fucking place. It’s respectably clean, my house.

It’s a weather thing with ants, isn’t it? Maybe they’ll piss off when the weather cools down.

Because it’s beginning to give me the shits.