The Girthy Grindhouse Guy Presents: Rubber (2010, Quentin Dupieux)

Every so often a film comes around that entirely changes how you, as a viewer, will treat your movie-going experience for the rest of your life.  It may be because of the script or a particular performance, or simply because it was an altogether well-made film.  It creates such a sense of wonder that you immediately decide, come hell or high water, that you are going to spend the rest of your life making films.  OR (and such is the case with a 12 year old Christopher Centanni), you are subjected to a film riddled with tits, gore, the occult and cussing.  After that heathen hardwiring takes place, its fairly difficult to bounce back.  If you’re me, you still want to make movies (yeah, I went to film school)—but you want to make regressive, totally insane films that make people question “Why?” Sure, making the next Citizen Kane would be fun too, but there is something so sweet about making a ridiculous story that equal parts entertains and offends.  I always have been, and always will be a fan of the “B Movie” and “Grindhouse Cinema.” Long story short, stupid shit excites me, and Grindhouse movies are the stupidest of shit.

So with that, I would like to introduce you to the Girthy Grindhouse Guy.  This pathetic pseudonym is my way of sharing some of my favorite films from my life to this point, as well as maybe bringing to light some new films that would normally be left out in the dark… probably where they belong.  So for better or for worse, let’s begin.

Writer/Director Quentin Dupieux’s debut feature Rubber begs the question, “Why?” Why did a film like this get made? Why did any of these actors take the part? Why did Mr. Dupieux even write it in the first place? The answer is summed up, quite literally, in the AMAZING expository sequence of the film (it’s possibly the greatest opening sequence in the history of cinema, but I won’t spoil it here) when it is explained to the audience that the film is an homage to the concept of “no reason.”

AWESOME.

The ridiculousness of the film is simultaneously its greatest strength and weakness.  As a “story”, the film is very fragmented and not really in place.  It’s told in two basic parts; there are the people involved in the actual “rampage” created by Robert—yeah, the tire got a name—and their attempts to stop him.  Then, simultaneously there is a large group of people watching the film through binoculars as if they are a movie audience.  The former contains moments where people are fully aware that this is a ludicrous story, and that there is no way it could be real… and many times it's not.  I know that sounds strange, but it's what makes the film so interesting.  The things Robert does are very real and very violent.  The human characters involved in the film however, are living in an existence where bullets don’t kill them (literally) and a turkey that was randomly fed to them by a pervert on a bike is fatally poisonous.  All of this sounds absolutely insane, and rightfully so.  The film is about a TELEKENETIC RADIAL TIRE that stalks a nameless girl and uses his powers to blow people’s heads off.

AWESOME.

If we take a step back and examine the film not as a story, but as an experiment with genres, adding in a little bit of social commentary, we get a very different picture.  Rubber succeeds largely because of its presentation.  I’ve seen the movie described as an “Absurdist Thriller,” and I couldn’t think of a more accurate description.  You do wonder what all of the suffering is for.  Is there an end to it?  Will the girl get out alive?  Why are all of these random people made to suffer?  The answer, as presented to us right up front, is and always shall be, “no reason.”  To me it says a lot about the horror genre, especially in modern times with all of the exploitation that has made it into mainstream films.  Rubber aims to showcase the stupidity and inherent humor there is in people dying for “no reason” in movies.  His selection of a telekinetic super tire with murderous tendencies was just a funny, over the top vehicle to get these ideas across.

I think the most interesting part of the film comes when you piece the two parallel stories together.  The tire is a violent murderer, causing endless pain and suffering, killing innocent people and stalking a beautiful woman. Everybody’s worst fears, right?  MAYBE.  In the movies it’s all about buying in.  This film is no exception.  If you buy into the fact that there aren’t really any typical jokes, its just such a ridiculous premise that all of the things that would normally be scary are rendered hilarious.  I think Dupieux wants his audience to realize the absurdity of the horror genre, and then embrace it to a comedic end.  This critic (read: fanboy) bought in from the first frame and never looked back.  I think the film is a very interesting look into the aesthetics of a horror movie as well as an indictment of their total inanity.

No matter what, Rubber is one of the most unique, obtuse and unnecessary movies I’ve seen in a while.  But it is also one of the best.

****/Four Stars

Luckily for those of you in Arizona, Rubber will be playing at MADCAP Theaters on May 6th and 7th, courtesy of the Midnite Movie Mamacita.  I know for sure that I will be there, and you better be too.  For those in the other 49 states and our international readers, you can catch Rubber on DVD/Blu-Ray on June 7th, 2011

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Akmareul Boatda (I Saw the Devil) (2010, Jee-woon Kim)

"Abandon All Compassion"

That is the tagline of Korean filmmaker Jee-woon Kim's newest revenge thriller I Saw the Devil, and it couldn't be more appropriate. While it certainly applies to the film itself, I think it's more of a caveat to those about to watch. There are no redeeming people in this film, nobody you feel sorry for, only monsters and their victims. That's not to say it isn't worth watching. On the contrary, the film is a wonderfully weird, psychopathic discussion on the decline of the human mind.

The film starts out much like any of your run of the mill revenge films; a serial killer murders the pregnant wife of a young detective in the Korean police force. He vows at his slain wife's funeral to make the killer suffer as much as she did. From that point on, for better or worse, the film deviates from the norm entirely.

Our detective "protagonist" goes on a wild spree of unmitigated, merciless bloodbaths, smashing the penis of one man with a wrench, beating a woman to death with a club, hitting a man with his car and then beating him senselessly. He is in search of the man who killed his wife and he succeeds, finding him about forty-five minutes into the two and a half hour movie. He slashes, punches, kicks, stabs, and bludgeons the killer until he is on death's doorstep, where he leaves him with an envelope full of money. The killer, while confused, counts his "blessings" and moves on with his life-- unaware that a tracking device had been put into his mouth while unconscious.

What unravels for the next hour and forty-five minutes is a grotesque display of grisly murders, senseless killings, and even a bout with a cannibalistic psychopath. All oddities aside, the story flows very well, balancing each explosion of violence with scenes that build tension and explore the twisted mind of both the killer and the detective. The film brilliantly guides its audience through-- not with words so much as actions-- the deterioration of an otherwise noble man into what I believe to be the titular "Devil." The killer is violent and twisted, but that is to be expected-- there isn't a plethora of new ground to be found there (the character reads much like Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men). What really makes the film stand out is the "good guy." He goes from zero to one-hundred in a matter of minutes, discovering very quickly that, as the other tagline reads, "evil lives inside." He repeatedly hunts down his prey and beats him within inches of his life, only to leave him alive. As the audience, we are meant to relate to him, making the film that much more disturbing to watch.

The last third of the film is where the plot goes from downright intense to utter maniacal chaos. The killer is finally aware of his tracker, and he begins murdering those close to the detective. The detective in turn, murders those close to the killer in order to find him. That's what makes the film so hard to stomach; not the actual gore or the intensity of the violence, (be forewarned though, the film is brutal) but rather who the victims are. Everybody who dies in the film, with one notable exception are innocent victims. It is a sadistic tale, not for the weak of heart, mind or stomach. The film leads its audience into the filth of the underworld, into the mind of a serial killer, and into the heart of the devil. Without getting too involved in the technical jargon, I will say that it is a fantastically shot, edited, scripted, acted and choreographed piece of work, but the tale it tells will leave you feeling as though you've been punched in the stomach. The story and the realizations one comes to at the end entirely overshadow any minor technical flaws that might exist. To quote one of the climactic sequences of the film, "Your nightmare is only getting worse."

And what a glorious nightmare it is.

****/FOUR STARS

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Sex and the City 2 (2010, Michael Patrick King)

There is a genuine laugh-out-loud moment in Michael Patrick King’s atrocious Sex and the City 2, but first I will let you in on a few jokes that weren’t.  It wasn’t when Liza Minnelli shows up to perform ALL OF “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” at a gay wedding.  It wasn’t when we are introduced to a hot, bra-less nanny in slow motion while Samantha opines, “Everyone knows you don’t hire a hot nanny.  It’s the law!” Carrie responds “Yeah! Jude Law!”  Carrie even reminds us later how funny it was when she made this joke, but truth be told, what the hell does it mean?  It certainly wasn’t when Miranda yelled “We’ve got a lot of Abu Dhabi to do!  Abu Dhabi Do!”, which I think was supposed to be a Flintstones or Scooby Doo pun, but I’m not sure.  Does it matter?

The kind of cloying writing in the screenplay is absolutely unreal, and it just keeps coming.  It wasn’t enough to let this self-referentially unfold in bourgeois Upper East Side, instead they found a place that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  Carrie expresses some empathy when she learns her manservant can only save enough money to visit his wife in India a few times a year, but her concern is hollow and worthless:  this is the same character that was upset moments before that she didn’t get the jewelry she hoped for and is clad in so many Gaudi costumes throughout the picture (including some headwear at the opening wedding that looks like a Harry Potter version of Snow White’s Evil Queen crown, a picture of fashion for the sake of fashion), all four women at once seem to have all the money in the world yet make everything around them worthless.  Even the budget for this “romantic comedy” is an unfathomable $100 million.

But really, Abu Dhabi Do?  What is the joke there?  That they are in a funny foreign place with funny sounding non-English names?  The “reference” is pointless because it’s not making reference to anything, it’s just prattle.  The film is full of this entitled drivel that the characters don’t even realize is insulting.  And neither, I assume, do the writers and its audience.

I found myself asking throughout the picture, “who is this movie for?” and I really have no reference point.  I imagine the characters at this point in the franchise are watered down caricatures of what they once were, and the return value for the loyal fans is something they can recognize as diminished.  I don’t know-- I walked into this thing cold.  It was on HBO, I was in a hotel; it was the same way I ended up seeing Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay and, honestly, there are a lot of similarities.

Both films capitalize on their previous success.  Both include multiple, self-referential cameos that serve no narrative purpose.  Both pander to their audience, confusing comedy with references.  Both structure the narrative haphazardly with no need to make ends meet (not in an anarchistic way, but a sloppy one).  Both talk about vaginas a lot.  As infantile as it sounds, Harold & Kumar 2 at least deals with race knowingly and has the decency to leave it at 107 minutes (still a good twenty-minutes longer than a swift comedy should be), a full TWO REELS shorter than Sex and the City 2’s 146 minutes of torture.

There is no attention to pacing whatsoever in this beast, and the synopsis seems unfair because of it.  The way I understood it, the four women were supposed to visit U.A.E., but after fits and starts, they don’t get on the plane for a full hour.  And yeah, they finally ride some camels, and some grand feminine declaration shows how women everywhere love Louis Vuitton even if they are inhibited by their unfair, primitive custom.  And someone says “Lawrence of my labia”, and that’s about all you’re going to get: racist, emetic nonsense.

The women in this film seem completely unrelatable to anyone I’ve ever met.  They have their cake and eat it too.  They sacrifice nothing and expect the world at their feet.  And I suppose there were women among the $288 million in gross revenue that nodded their heads along with every bit of it.  It’s fantasy that waxes postmodern but fails to call a spade a spade.  It wraps up the cliché moral with “you have to take the tradition [of marriage], and decorate it your own way.”  The accessorizing boils down to unfaithfulness, sidestepping the trials of motherhood, and expecting your husband to do all the changing and forgiving (after all, the biggest plight of man in this piece is Big saying he wants to “watch T.V. and do the shit I wanna do.”)  And it gets wrapped up in a neat package.

But back to the moment that made me laugh: Big and Carrie are enjoying a romantic evening together in a hotel when Big gets excited that It Happens One Night comes on the television.  I laughed that this movie has the gall to compare itself in any fashion to the 1934 classic (and even riffs the hitchhiking scene to save them from angry Muslims).  In It Happened One Night, complexly drawn characters learn about the differences in gender wiring and learn the value of compromise.  In Sex and the City 2, the only compromise was what I felt after having sat through it.  Before I even caught my breath I was treated to an even bigger laugh:  Big tells Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) that she is more beautiful than Claudette Colbert.  It’s the epitome of female wish fulfillment in a hodgepodge mess of a film that is already-- sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly-- highly neurotic. -- ZERO/four stars

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Predators (2010, Nimród Antal)

The fact that Robert Rodriguez's original draft of Predators has been floating around since 1994, only to be rewritten by Michael Finch and Alex Litvak (previously responsible for nothing), should have been the first red flag in a project that reads like a first-draft of a high-concept.  It's a reboot that venerates its monsters without understanding them: a meta film of smarmy dialogue that winks at its audience without saying anything.

Seeking to canonize itself in the Predator legacy, Predators ignores Predator 2, claiming to be the true sequel, but most closely resembles the inane Alien Vs. Predator franchise.  It's a film that fails to recognize that the anchoring themes of the original were solitude and the emptiness of war.  Now, we are given a team of eight mostly-indistinguishable characters (outside of race and nationality, though they all curiously speak English) and the violence is shallow gore-porn (the kind of cliché we've grown so accustomed to in these pictures it has no resonance or memory).

Spoiler alert.

Instead, the plot is driven by the whims of the fanboy architects behind the project.  Gaping holes in logic?  No problem because, wait, wouldn't it be cool if Predator had a dog and fought a samurai?  The army of humans are parachuted in from spacecraft to a foreign rainforest on a distant planet.  We learn that Predators are hand-selecting humans on earth to abduct and plant on this Most Dangerous Game training planet.  Our team stays together even though they are of no help to one another (undermining the message of the film) and any depth the film offers only suggests that we can all be monsters, but we have the choice to help our fellow (wo)man.

Splice EvLOLution

The ride involves inexplicable twists and betrayals that serve to give motion to a destinationless picture.  We're supposed to believe Arien Brody is a black ops lone wolf, but his action appeal toes the line much closer to Shia LaBeouf than Schwarzenegger.  I mean, this is the guy with the Auschwitz frame in The Pianist and the lab-geek in the witty t-shirts in Splice.  I love Brody and everything, but the idea that he and Topher Grace are earth's most insidious, mechanized killers is a little hard to swallow.

Predators suffers most from misunderstanding its source material in the worst possible way.  It's a hunt with no stakes, a labyrinth with no escape and an enemy with no dread.  The predators in the film are less menacing than Jason in the most humorous Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood (yet unlike this point in the Friday the 13th series, Predators's confused tone would have us root for wicked-cool Predator and humanity).  I mean, they have lasers that can blow you to bits from across the forest, so I'm not sure where the competitive spirit comes into play.  I understood Predators to value honor, but here they also pick off the easy targets over audience guffaws.  What a misread by the producers that the same minor demographic that would pick nits over Predators' compromised integrity is the same group they targeting.

Basically, Predators is dumb and unnecessary.  It is difficult to see what its makers loved about the franchise in the first place.  It whiffs at any attempt at social commentary, though it is obvious five minutes in that this was back-burner material to start with.  Predators has the feel of a bad video game movie in that there is no arc surrounding its cyclical premise.  Compare it to Machete (ties with both Rodriguez and Danny Trejo), a movie that is also dumb-- relishes in being dumb-- but manages to be highly enjoyable because it goes the short distance to thematic relevance.  I'm not begging for subtlety or nuance (Rodriguez is likely incapable of either), just some small ort to gnaw. -- *½ / four stars

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The Killer Inside Me (2010, Michael Winterbottom)

One directorial intuition that made Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde such a powerful and dangerous film is the way the progression of its violent content is mirrored in its form. What begins in a language of comedy (minor violence in long-shot, backed with playful banjo) evolves into a language of terror--grim, slo-mo, close-up. Though arguably irresponsible from an historic standpoint, the film's depiction of the duo down a slippery slope from naïveté to a point of no return is masterfully driven home in the way it is told.

To give director Michael Winterbottom the benefit of the doubt in his self-proclaimed noir drama The Killer Inside Me, I could argue that his apparent disregard for filmic language--nay, sometimes counter-intuitive use of it--is a clever device mimicking Deputy Lou Ford's (Casey Affleck) madness. Hence, his early, ungodly brutality is later lightened with his violence turning more comedic (long-shot, cartoon scored) as he gets madder. Is there a lesson learned in such an inverse treatment? Not really. Rather, the lightening of the material takes away from whatever grittiness the first act sowed, and that's saying something considering the writing and delivery of the characters give us nothing to root for and little to interest us. Such hopefulness in Winterbottom's delivery would demand a similar naïveté spoken of earlier.

Gone is the use of wordplay and twist of platitudes in the pulp novel in which Ford's use of cliché counters his dark side. It is replaced with boredom--not a malaise which drives a character like Holden Caulfield, but one felt mostly by the audience. Interesting how a film filled with noirish twists exudes such unaffectedness. And not in a beneficial way.

Despite such groping, The Killer Inside Me does benefit from its proximity to fellow reality-benders Shutter Island and Inception. Certain imagery in the film's climax echoes Shutter Island so completely, we listen closer to think we hear a murmur beneath the vacuous exercise. And as flawed, heavy-handed, and humorless as those two films are, that's really saying something. Here, repeat viewings bear little fruit because the chasm of disbelief is widened by shoddy portrayals (in a key sequence, we see that Ford's foster brother voluntarily [inexplicably?] took the blame for his molestation of a young girl--only they are all about ten years old and we don't know who is who) and poor writing (in the film's climax, any amount of officers both let their only witness walk into her death and fail to smell a house drenched in gasoline).

To claim the film elbows the misogyny of classic noir is giving the filmmakers far too much credit. Jessica Alba reportedly walked out of the film's screening at Sundance, and few could blame her when it has the gall to irresponsibly guffaw over the end credits: "Shame, shame on you. Ran around with other guys, tried to lie when I got wise. Foolish girl, shame on you." To compare the film's treatment of the cloth from which both violence and sex are cut from the male psyche to that in Anton Corbijn's The American is no contest. The latter is not only successful in providing meaningful relationships to explore its theory, it give mature commentary on its male-dominated genre. The former pushes all the buttons and comes off fetishistic for the sake of being masturbatory. No thesis, no money-shot. -- */ four stars

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