weird

The Reflecting Skin

Link posted on by moviebloke

(UK/Canada 1990)

“Sometimes horrible things happen quite naturally.”

“It’s all so horrible, you know, the nightmare of childhood. And it only gets worse. One day you’ll wake up, and you’ll be past it. Your beautiful skin will wrinkle and shrivel up. You’ll lose your hair, your sight, your memory. Your blood will thicken, teeth turn yellow and loose. You will start to stink and fart, and all your friends will be dead. You’ll succumb to arthritis, angina, senile dementia. You’ll piss yourself, shit yourself, drool at the mouth. Just pray that when this happens, you’ve got someone to love you. Because if you’re loved, you’ll still be young.”

—Dolphin Blue

British playwright and occasional film director Philip Ridley’s first picture, The Reflecting Skin, is a wickedly devious bait and switch. It opens downright beautifully with seemingly precious eight-year-old Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) walking through an unnaturally radiant golden field of wheat carrying a huge frog to his friends, Eben (Codie Lucas Wilbee) and Kim (Evan Hall), who are waiting for him on the side of a rural dirt road. The idyllic scene, which could be straight from a Norman Rockwell or Edward Hopper painting or maybe even a Mark Twain novel, immediately takes a seriously twisted turn when one of them sticks a straw in the frog’s butt and inflates it. The tone is set: as Ridley himself admitted, “the opening of the film deliberately dupes you into thinking you’re going to watch Little House on the Prairie, and then it suddenly becomes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with reptiles” (http://thepeoplesmovies.com/2015/12/the-reflecting-skin-philip-ridley-interview/). Ummm, yeah.

Poor Seth: his name rhymes with death, which is all around him and it’s tearing his world apart—he doesn’t even realize it. The adults in his life seem incapable of explaining any of it to him. He lives in a crumbling old farm house next to the gas station that his henpecked father, Luke (Duncan Fraser), operates in an isolated prairie town somewhere in Idaho (a fact I picked up from a state trooper’s uniform) in the 1950s. Maybe the town has seen better days, but probably not. A group of handsome greasers in a big black Cadillac comes into the station for a fill up. The creepy driver (Jason Wolfe) asks Seth a few weird questions and promises to see him soon before driving away.

WARNING: Potential spoilers ahead!

The aforementioned frog was the unfortunate pawn in an awful prank involving one of the Doves’ neighbors, a glum and taciturn English widow with the spectacular name Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan). Seth’s mother, Ruth (Sheila Moore), a raving termagant obsessed with the smell of gasoline in her house, makes him go apologize to her. It’s a weird exchange: Dolphin relates that she used to burn cats when she was little and shows Seth a box containing her dead husband’s teeth, hair, and cologne before she breaks down, sending Seth running away with a harpoon. Soon after, Eben disappears. Seth blames Dolphin, whom he concludes is a vampire in part because she looks like the one on the cover of a pulp novel his father is reading. The police, particularly cynical Sheriff Ticker (Robert Koons), think otherwise: they blame Luke because of a past transgression. Feeling backed into a corner, Luke eventually immerses himself in gasoline and sets himself on fire.

Seth’s older brother, Cameron (Viggo Mortensen), comes home from the military, where he’s serving on a mission in the Pacific. Cameron meets Dolphin at the cemetery—a spark ignites, and they start spending time together. Seth is horrified when his brother tells him he’s sick: he’s losing weight, his hair is falling out, and something is going on with his teeth. Seth again blames Dolphin, who he thinks is turning Cameron into a vampire (although Cameron reveals what’s really going on when he breaks out a photo of a Japanese baby whose skin turned silver from an atomic bomb). After catching an intimate moment while spying on the budding lovebirds, Seth observes the guys in the Cadillac snatch Kim.

“Innocence can be hell,” is the last thing Dolphin says to Seth before she accepts a ride into town from the black Cadillac.

The Reflecting Skin makes a simple point: children will use their imagination to fill in the blanks of what they don’t understand. The story is told through Seth’s eyes, and his conclusions are often bizzare but he arrives at them using what little he has to work with (that whole deal with the fetus he finds in a barn and rationalizes is Eben—yuck!). As Ridley explained, “it’s a kind of remembered fantasy of childhood; it’s being told by an unreliable, possibly psychotic narrator; objects are used symbolically; there’s this huge kind of nightmare journey through one mythical childhood” (http://thepeoplesmovies.com/2015/12/the-reflecting-skin-philip-ridley-interview/).

The way he illustrates his point is fascinating. Everything about the story is horrible. With an approach worthy of David Lynch, Ridley takes a hodgepodge of characters—vampires, religious zealots, suspicious small town law men—and throws them into this weird mix of the macabre, sexual perversion, punishment, and subtle dark humor. His use of symbolism is liberal to say the least. The story is meticulously plotted: every character, scene, and little event is in here for a reason.

This is all underneath Dick Pope’s gorgeous cinematography, which is loaded with vibrant colors and a beautifully fine-tuned attention to detail: the vastness of the wheat fields, the crazy black hair of both brothers, the flies that are always present. Nearly 30 years on, The Reflecting Skin still looks arresting; in fact, it’s one of the most beautiful looking movies I’ve ever seen. Nick Bicât’s heavy and haunting baroque-inspired score is a perfect fit. The overall result is wonderfully dreamy and surreal, yet we definitely sympathize with Seth—probably because we all know that childhood does in fact suck. He’s grounded in reality.

I would be remiss not to mention the acting, which is all around superb. I doubt this film would work with lesser talent.

A dearly departed old friend of mine introduced me to The Reflecting Skin in 1993 or 1994. I’ve never had an opportunity to see it on the big screen, which is a pity because this is one film clearly meant to be seen in a theater. For years, I had a shitty VHS copy and recently found it on DVD. It’s not an easy film to find, but it’s totally worth the effort.

96 minutes
Rated R

(Home via DVD) A+

https://youtu.be/ZLOj1drPTSE

Staying Vertical [Rester vertical]

Link posted on by moviebloke

(France 2016)

Writer-director Alain Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical is a strange trip indeed. Traveling through the mountains while writing a script, screenwriter Léo (Damien Bonnard) comes upon Marie (India Hair), a single mother of two and a shepherd who works on her father’s farm. Within the first 20 minutes or so of the film, he knocks her up and sticks around after the baby is born. Without explanation, Marie takes off with her two boys, leaving Léo behind to care for the baby. Marie’s father, Jean-Louis (Raphaël Thiéry), allows him to stay on the farm in exchange for taking care of the sheep.

Meanwhile, Léo develops an obsession with a pretty young buck named Yoan (Basile Meilleurat), who lives down the road with a cantankerous old man, Marcel (Christian Bouillette). Their relationship is ambigous: Yoan seems to do nothing but occasionally clean Marcel’s house—and not very well—while Marcel sits in his chair, blasting Pink Floyd and condemning Yoan with anti-gay rants. While this is going on, Léo seeks assistance for his writer’s block from a spiritual healer (Laure Calamy) while dodging his publisher (Sébastien Novac).

Staying Vertical has some great characters, particularly Marcel and Yoan. It also has a few gorgeous and memorable images, such as a brood of vagrants descending upon Léo and the baby under a bridge and a truly odd final scene involving wolves coming out of the dark onto the farm. Other than that, though, it’s really nothing more than a number of episodes and subplots that don’t exactly connect. A pervading homoeroticism that starts out mildly interesting goes somewhere completely unbelivable. I’m not sure what the point of it is, but I can say that about a lot in this film.

98 minutes
Not rated

(AMC River East) C

Chicago International Film Festival

http://www.wildbunch.biz/movie/staying-vertical/

Middle Man

Link posted on by moviebloke

(USA 2016)

“No price is too high to pay for a good laugh.”

—Fatty Arbuckle

Lenny Freeman (Jim O’Heir) is a wussy ageing milksop who quits his job as an accountant to pursue a career in standup comedy after his mother (Barbo K. Adler) dies. The problems with his plan are numerous. For one, his idea of comedy comes from old radio greats of the 1930s and 1940s—hardly cutting edge or relevant stuff. Further, Lenny has led a sheltered life with his mother. He’s naive. He has no confidence. He isn’t funny. He isn’t particularly perceptive: he doesn’t quite get it when, say, he’s being insulted or threatened. To make matters worse, he’s never even performed for an audience.

Driving from Peoria, Illinois, to Las Vegas in his mother’s 1950s Olds, Lenny picks up a shady hitchhiker (Andrew J. West)— aptly and cornily named “Hitch”—who claims to manage comedians and offers to get Lenny on the very TV show for which he’s on his way to an audition. They make a contract, and Hitch takes Lenny to The Yuck Stop, a desert roadside club in fictitious Lamb Bone, Nevada, to test his material at open mic night. Spoiler alert: Lenny sucks, and the rough crowd is vicious.

Somehow, the corpse of the nastiest heckler (Danny Belrose) is inside Lenny’s trunk in the morning. Lenny thinks he killed him and spends all day in the desert unsuccessfully attempting to dump the body. Hitch pushes Lenny—unglued and soaked in sweat and blood—back onto the Yuck Stop stage, where he confesses to the murder. The crowd takes it as schtick, and this time loves Lenny. Thus begins a killing spree that benefits Lenny’s act more and more with each murder.

Screenwriter and first time director Ned Crowley is onto a good idea with Middle Man, an exploration of selling one’s soul for the spotlight. He references the Coen Brothers, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, David Fincher’s Fight Club, and perhaps in a sense Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. I particularly love sick jokes and dark humor, and Crowley liberally applies both throughout. The execution here is uneven, though. The dialogue really shines, but some characters are disproportionately more interesting than others. Hitch’s motive is probably ambiguous on purpose, but it nagged me and got in the way of fully enjoying the film. Most unfortunately, main character Lenny gets old after awhile. Watching his confidence soar in a romantic subplot with his rival standup’s girlfriend, Grail (Anne Dudek), starts out well enough but soon fizzles badly.

Middle Man takes a decidedly sinister turn about 20 minutes before its ending, which is predictable and not as weird or harrowing as Crowley might have intended. Overall, though, this is a respectable debut that doesn’t take itself too seriously—that’s the most refreshing thing about it.

Screening followed by a live discussion with director Ned Crowley and actor Jim O’Heir.

104 minutes
Not rated

(AMC River East) C+

Chicago International Film Festival

http://www.middlemanmovie.com

http://www.middlemanmovie.comhttps://youtu.be/c2-34SNP-Ok

Eyes of Fire

Posted on by moviebloke

(USA 1983)

I never heard of Eyes of Fire or anyone involved in it until it appeared on the roster for a local horror film festival. Featuring a team of inconsequentials—writer and director Avery Crounse completed two more projects I never heard of after this and most of the actors continued on to television roles—it’s a low budget fantasy/horror flick relegated to obscurity. It’s no wonder why.

Set in 1750 colonial America and told in flashback, Eyes of Fire follows vain and flighty missionary Will Smythe (Dennis Lipscomb), his small flock of devotees that includes his mistress, Eloise (Rebecca Stanley), and a ginger named Leah (Karlene Crockett) who everyone thinks is insane but is really a fairie, and Eloise’s estranged husband, Marion Dalton (Guy Boyd), as they stumble through the Eastern Woodlands looking for a safe haven. To escape attacking Shawnee natives, Dalton leads the group into a valley that Smythe takes to be “the promised land” and settles into the abandoned campsite there. Dalton is uneasy about staying. Leah also senses something amiss and starts seeing spirits—sometimes they’re clothed, sometimes they’re naked and covered in mud. They don’t look happy. An orphaned native girl (Rose Preston) appears on Smythe’s doorstep, and he takes her in to convert her to Christianity. Immediately, strange things start happening: Fanny (Sally Klein) disappears and is found in a coma, Meg (Erin Buchanan) is found hanging upside down from a tree, and a rotten skeleton pops up out of the dirt. !!! Leah figures out what’s going on: a devil-witch is trying to steal their souls and trap them all in the trees in the forest. Can she and Dalton stop the madness?

I’d be lying if I said Eyes of Fire isn’t silly. It takes itself so seriously, too. The story is easy to follow, but Crounse packs an awful lot into it: folklore, witchcraft, the supernatural, colonialism, ethnic superiority, religion, morality. Whatever points he makes are lost in cheesy special effects—lots of Tesla lightning, negative images, and distorted sounds. The trees have gruesome faces, and at one point they all puke bilge. The devil-witch looks like Captain Caveman made out of twigs. It all warrants a great big “whatever.” Even with its low-budget giveaways, though, I found this film weirdly fascinating—it plods along slowly but somehow kept me engaged. The simple stuff works best—the scene in the forest with white feathers covering the entrance to the valley (repeated later with pages torn out of Smythe’s books and spread all over the campsite) is beautifully ominous and visually arresting. Too bad there isn’t more of it.

86 minutes
Rated R

(Music Box) C-

Music Box of Horrors

https://youtu.be/BdSILmOWwDQ

Winter of the Witch

Link posted on by moviebloke

(USA 1970)

I never heard of this nifty gem of a short until I saw it, but it’s apparently quite big with Gen X. I can see why: a precursor to Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Scooby Doo with Bewitched and The Addams Family thrown in, it’s about a single mother (Anna Strasberg) who skips town (Manhattan) in her VW Bug with her young son, Nicky (Roger Morgan), and buys a dilapidated old Victorian mansion in the boonies for cheap. Real cheap: $400 cheap. Turns out, there’s a catch: the place is haunted by a gloomy and depressed 300-year old witch (Hermione Gingold) who’s given up on the world.

Adapted from the book Old Black Witch by Wende and Harry Devlin, screenwriter and director Gerald Herman turns in something unintentionally impressive. I can see why this is such a hit with members of my generation. Aside from a few nouveau social issues for the time (a single parent and a vaguely gay little boy) and the mysterious untold backstory of this mother-son team, Winter of the Witch is really fucking weird. What kid’s story mixes the occult and “magic pancakes” laced with something no one will identify? The damned pancakes make everyone who eats them happy, so… The quality of the film is cheap and eerie, adding to the mood. Plus, Burgess Meredith narrates.

Winter of the Witch is roughly the length of a sitcom episode, which makes me think it was a pilot that didn’t get picked up. Regardless, I love it! See for yourself below.

24 minutes
Not rated

(Music Box) B+

Music Box of Horrors

Are We Not Cats

Video posted on by moviebloke

(USA 2016)

Focused on romance, pleasure, and pain, screenwriter and director Xander Robin’s feature length debut, Are We Not Cats, is a stylishly edgy, wry, and quirky delight. Eli (Michael Patrick Nicholson) is neither ambitious nor grounded. In the span of a few hours, he loses his girl (really his f-bud, but he didn’t quite get that), his job as a garbage collector, and his home when his Russian immigrant parents abruptly inform him that they sold their house and are moving to Arizona. “Visit us!” his mother chirps right after his father bribes him with a delivery truck to get out that night.

After moving into the back of the truck, crashing and showering wherever he can, and driving around aimlessly, Eli picks up a one-off job delivering a motor to a junkyard. There, he stumbles upon knitcapped Kyle (Michael Godere), who introduces him to a toxic elixir, a feral underground scene in a basement, and his impish feline girlfriend, Anya (Chelsea LJ Lopez). Eli is smitten. He stalks Anya, who doesn’t seem to mind. He discovers that they share a similar nervous habit: he pulls his hair out and she eats hair. Anya’s magnetism pulls Eli down a dark path he isn’t quite equipped to travel.

Are We Not Cats is uneven, but what it lacks in consistency and depth it makes up for in style. Robin has a wicked dark, offbeat sense of humor. His camerawork is sharp, nimble, and has a certain momentum to it. The locations—a junkyard, a disused barn, an empty diner—work beautifully with the bleak, snow covered landscapes to underscore Eli’s resigned state of mind. Robin contrasts this with colorfully vivid and cozy scenes with Anya, who possesses a flair for clutter. Matt Clegg’s druggy, dreamlike cinematography is flat where it should be, and brighter and more dimensional where it needs to be. The story sags a bit toward the end, but the film’s brevity mitigates this problem. Nicholson’s passive and forlorn take on his scruffy character is deftly balanced; somehow, he keeps Eli sympathetic despite the fact that his hapless demeanor, lack of social skills and boundaries, and sleepy purposelessness are turnoffs. The soundtrack, consisting almost entirely of old Seventies soul tunes, is as much a character as anyone; the music contributes its own warmth and personality that literally makes this film sing.

Screening followed by a live Q and A with Xander Robin and Michael Patrick Nicholson.

78 minutes
Not rated

(AMC River East) B-

Chicago International Film Festival

http://www.arewenotcats.com

Multiple Maniacs

Video posted on by moviebloke

(USA 1970)

“I can only take so much of this kind of talk, especially from common lesbians.”

—Bonnie

‘Cheap,’ ‘campy,’ and ‘scandalous’ are all words that accurately describe the work of John Waters—his early stuff, anyway. No one makes depravity as fun or funny as he does. Multiple Maniacs, his second feature-length film, is unmistakable Waters: it’s a twisted and revolting mess of antipathy, vitriol, sacrilege, and sleaze. Holy shit, Sugar Scrub—and I mean that literally!

Multiple Maniacs depicts the mental breakdown of Lady Divine (Divine), the proprietor and star of a traveling freak show called “The Cavalcade of Perversion.” The show’s “performers” literally drag people off the streets and under a tent, where they eat puke, take drugs, lick armpits, and perform other acts of deviance in front of them. For the grand finale, Lady Divine robs everyone in the audience at gunpoint. One day, she decides out of sheer boredom to murder them instead—much to the dismay of her lover, Mr. David (David Lochary). Lady Divine flees the scene of the crimes to hide out at the home of her hooker daughter, Cookie (Cookie Mueller), whose horny new boyfriend, Steve (Paul Swift), is crashing there. Mr. David takes off with his lover, Bonnie (Mary Vivian Pearce), who wants nothing more than to “perform acts” with him. A phone call from a bar owner (Edith Massey) takes Lady Divine down a debaucherous path of rape, lesbianism, blasphemy, betrayal, and more murder.

Like many members of my generation, demographic, and cultural persuasion, I discovered John Waters when I was a teenager. Everything wrong with his films—silly plots, over-the-top trashy cartoonish characters, amateur “acting,” low-rent production, and his general misanthropic outlook and total irreverence—is precisely what drew me to him. He was punk before punk rock. It’s all so wonderfully awful, like Ed Wood with an intentionally nasty, edgy bite—not an unsophisticated innocence that happened by accident.

Multiple Maniacs is typical John Waters, but it’s noteworthy for two reasons. One, it’s loaded with ideas that show up in later films—as far down the line as Serial Mom and Peckerhead. This definitely will appeal to fans, especially when it becomes apparent that Multiple Maniacs is a rough (if you can imagine) blueprint for Pink Flamingos. If nothing else, this film is interesting from a developmental perspective. Two, the shock value is extreme even considering the source. Eating dog shit is tame compared to shooting up in church, cannibalism, a rosary up Divine’s ass (as she recites the Stations of the Cross), and a rape scene involving a giant lobster straight from a Godzilla flick. Jammed with references to Catholicism—including Jesus (George Figgs), Mary (Massey), and the Infant of Prague (Michael Renner, Jr.)—and Charles Manson, Waters creates a number of shall we say “colorful” moments you won’t see anywhere else, ever again.

Oh, Sugar Scrub, can we watch a Disney movie now?

Side note: I started to write this entry as a letter to my friend John (a.k.a. Sugar Scrub), who saw Multiple Maniacs with us. The idea didn’t work. Sorry, John!

91 fucked up minutes
Rated X (NC-17 today)

(Music Box) B

http://www.janusfilms.com/films/1817

Director’s Cut

Video posted on by moviebloke

(USA 2016)

Yeah…this. Hmmm. Herbert Blount (Penn Jillette) is a weird crowdfunding stalker obsessed with actress Missi Pyle, playing herself, who costars in a low budget crime-gore “movie” with Harry Hamlin and a guy named Reed (Hayes MacArthur). Blount, who is given behind-the-scenes access because he used his PayPal account to donate a large sum of money to the project, is seduced by the artistic process and secretly hijacks the film to make his own version: he wants Pyle front and center. He undermines the director (Adam Rifken), steals footage, and kidnaps Pyle to shoot new scenes with her in his basement.

A movie within a fake movie (Knocked Off), Director’s Cut is a satire of the film industry, celebrity, and the changing role of the audience. Directed for real by Rifken, it exhibits some competent technical handiwork: Knocked Off, little more than a CSI episode, looks professional right down to its angles, cuts, and color grade. A slew of cameos—some, like Jillette, former contestants of Celebrity Apprentice (Gilbert Godfrey, Lisa Rinna)—adds a smart lighthearted touch. Jillette’s longtime partner in magic, Raymond Joseph Teller, makes a fun though not exactly unexpected appearance. Pyle’s diva tantrums “off screen” are amusing. The film makes interesting and timely points about the dangers of giving artistic input and access to the general public and obsessed fans: even in an era where the tools of the trade are readily available to virtually anyone, not everyone can (or should attempt to) make a movie.

Director’s Cut just doesn’t cut it. Sadly, Jillette himself is the most disappointing thing about it. He doesn’t pull off creepy; his gentle, dulcet voice bantering lame “commentary”—like in a bonus feature of a DVD (get it?)—undermines that. Worse, his terrible “acting,” the oddly tame scenes he stages with Pyle, and his crude homemade edits of his version of the film paint him as a harmless grandfatherly dolt more than anything. The gimmick here wears out before the movie is even half over. Director’s Cut has good ideas, but it’s just not funny.

83 minutes
Not rated

(Gene Siskel Film Center) D-

https://makepennbad.com

https://youtu.be/pAuh1u-IZ3k

Swiss Army Man

Video posted on by moviebloke

(USA 2016)

The premise of Swiss Army Man is bizarre: Hank (Paul Dano), starving and bored, is stranded on a tiny deserted island. Just as he is about to off himself, he sees a corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) in a suit wash up on the beach. It moves. It squirts water out of its butt. It talks! It has strange powers. Hank names it Manny, and the two set off to find their way home. The previews sold me, so I saw it the night it opened in Chicago.

Swiss Army Man is a strange and perplexing film. Never mind that one of the main characters is a decomposing stiff with a raging boner, a leaky ass, and a fucked up eye—as if that’s not disturbing enough. It’s impossible to discern what’s happening in reality and what’s happening in Hank’s head. The whole thing is a cross between a kid’s story and a hallucination; director Dan Kwan is so vague and hazy that even after a week mulling it over, I have no idea what happened let alone what the film is about. A girl named Sarah (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is involved, a grizzly bear makes an appearance, and the guys bond. Hank can’t masturbate because it makes him remember his dead mother, and his father (Richard Gross) is indifferent to him. Mmmkay.

Somewhere amid the references to Jurassic Park and all the fart, poop, and dick jokes is a point. Friendship saves? Know yourself? Take risks and live life? I honsetly don’t know.

97 minutes
Rated R

(ArcLight) C+

http://swissarmyman.com

The Lobster

Video posted on by moviebloke

(Ireland/UK/Greece 2015)

“Now the fact that you will turn into an animal if you fail to fall in love with someone during your stay here is not something that should upset you or get you down. Just think, as an animal you’ll have a second chance to find a companion. But, even then, you must be careful; you need to choose a companion that is a similar type of animal to you. A wolf and a penguin could never live together, nor could a camel and a hippopotamus. That would be absurd.”

—Hotel Manager

Every now and then, a film so wonderfully unique comes along that you just don’t know what exactly to make of it until you take some time to digest it (I took all summer to write and post this entry). The Lobster is such a film. It’s not going to appeal to everyone—it’s a dark, subtle, absurd, uncomfortable, irreverent, and totally open-ended satire of the desire to be “in a relationship.” None of this is the stuff of a summer movie, but I loved it precisely because of these qualities. So far, The Lobster is easily my favorite film I’ve seen this year—released in Europe last fall, it crossed the Atlantic just this past spring.

In the not-so-distant future in a not-so-distant society, being single is against the law. Regardless of the reason for their singularity (death of a spouse, divorce, being dumped), unattached adults must check into a certain hotel designated for singles and find a suitable match, verified and approved by the hotel manager (Olivia Colman), within 45 days. Everything is regimented with meal times, active learning exercises, forced social events, and a strict prohibition on masturbation (though one form of sex with the housekeeping staff is required). “Guests” can buy additional time by shooting “loners”—rogue outlaw singles who escaped to the woods—on daily hunting excursions that resemble Hunger Games. Those who fail to find someone before their time runs out are transformed into the animal of their choice, selected during their initial processing, and banished to the woods.

The Lobster’s protagonist, mild-mannered David (Colin Farrell), finds himself at the hotel, his brother, Bob—now a dog—in tow, after the end of his marriage. He chooses a lobster as his animal because “lobsters live for over one hundred years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives.” He also likes the sea.

WARNING: Potential spoilers ahead!

The Lobster is essentially divided into two acts: the first in the hotel and the second in the woods. David connects with fellow guests the Lisping Man (John C. Reilly) and the Limping Man (Ben Wishaw). David notices that the guests there tend seek others like themselves—except for Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia), an emotionless femmebot who seeks out no one but has a seemingly infinite amount of time left thanks to her ruthless archery skills. David decides to go for her, which leads him to the woods. There, he meets the Short Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz), who is near-sighted like he is. They connect, but the militaristic Loner Leader (Léa Seydoux) forbids all romance—punishable by mutilation. “We dance alone,” she tells David as she hands him an iPod. “That’s why we only play electronic music.”

Written by Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou, the screenplay feels like a Chuck Palahniuk novel. The story is so bizarre and far fetched that it seems silly on paper, but proves incredibly powerful once in motion—in the same way that Being John Malkovich, another film I love that requires the same suspension of disbelief, didn’t sound like much to me before I saw it. Lanthimos has a taste for sadness and the macabre, and he liberally infuses The Lobster with both. He doesn’t take a dim view of relationships, but he notices the dim things people do to have one. The cinematography by Thimios Bakatakis is fabulously drab, with a cool, monotonous, faded color palette that creates a sense of distance and evokes a sense of resignation. Classical music plays throughout to add a kind of Clockwork Orange weirdness to the whole thing.

Despite the mood here, the story turns out to be oddly beautiful. Farrell gives one of his best performances—he drops all his rakish charm to become a colorless, big-bellied middle-aged schlub I found myself rooting for with each predicament he gets into. The inability of David and the Short Sighted Girl to express their feelings for each other is damn near heartbreaking. The entire cast is outstanding, and not a single character is superfluous. The second act is noticeably slower than the first, and perhaps could have been shorter than it is. Regardless, the momentum continues to build to a brilliantly ironic ending that comes about through David’s nearsightedness.

The Lobster doesn’t resolve in the end, which is my favorite thing about it. The viewer is left to decide what happens—and I’ve already discussed different opinions others have about whether David did, or didn’t. It’s the kind of film that lingers on in your memory and forces you think about it even though you’ll never know for sure.

Side note: the film’s website has a quiz that determines your suitable animal. Mine were an elephant, a horse (which finds pleasure in carrots, music, and oral sex), and a water bear. I chose a horse, of course.

119 minutes
Rated R

(ArcLight) A-

http://thelobster-movie.com

 

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