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Death, stabby and otherwise
Knives abound in this week’s new movie releases, including 78/52 and Suburbicon
78/52: “My, Granny, what a big knife you have!”
Guns are fun, but when directors really want to paint the screen red, they go for the stabbing, slicing, slashing goodness of blades. And this week sees the opening of 78/52, a documentary about maybe the most famous knife killing in all of cinema: the Psycho shower scene. Psycho-phile Scott Marks mostly approved!
Movie
Suburbicon *
It may be possible — perhaps by squinting and turning your head just so and maybe crossing your eyes a touch — to see why director George Clooney juxtaposes, at a climactic moment, the sick comedic violence of a man finding himself unable to extract his golf club from the smashed face of the poor slob he just murdered with the sick dramatic violence of a white mob terrorizing the first black family to take up residence in a normally peaceful neighborhood. (And not just there, just most glaringly there.) Perhaps it’s to show the evil that lurks in the hearts of white men, even as they fret over what will happen when the blacks move in. Perhaps it’s to scold those who focus on future woes like declining property values and intermarriage while murder and blackmail go on right under their noses. But whatever the reason, it just doesn’t work: the narrative automobile lurches from fifth gear to first, then swerves into a white picket fence and bursts into flames. It doesn’t help matters that the blacks in question register more as dignified props than as characters, while the white folks involved in the opposing murder story are made to live and breathe. And that story coulda been something: a grieving child’s gradual and terrifying awakening to the rot under his own roof. Instead, the film feels like what it is: an awkward, bloody mashup of Coen Bros. tragicomedy (they’re credited on the screenplay) and Clooney earnestness. Matt Damon and Julianne Moore star.
There’s a stabbing death in George Clooney’s Coen-Brothers-plus-progressive-conscience Suburbicon as well, and while it doesn’t get as much play as the beating and poisoning, it does leave more of an impression than the shooting. And the wartime stabbing death in Tom of Finland makes a big impression on the film’s homosexual hero, so much so that his sister blames his gayness on it, at least at first. (And speaking of wartime and death, Scott was not a fan of the damaged-vet drama Thank You For Your Service.)
And it should go without saying that folks get cut to ribbons in Jigsaw. (It didn’t screen for us critical types, but a little bat told me that Scott may take it in this weekend and report back.)
The Departure departs from the death-dealing, but not too far: the doc concerns a Buddhist priest who spends his days trying to talk people out of suicide.
But the big non-lethal feel-good movie of the week has got to be the road trip/art doc Faces Places. (Unless it’s Nobody’s Watching — not sure on that one, because, well, nobody here watched it.)
Here's something you might be interested in.
Death, stabby and otherwise
Knives abound in this week’s new movie releases, including 78/52 and Suburbicon
Death, stabby and otherwise
Knives abound in this week’s new movie releases, including 78/52 and Suburbicon
78/52: “My, Granny, what a big knife you have!”
Guns are fun, but when directors really want to paint the screen red, they go for the stabbing, slicing, slashing goodness of blades. And this week sees the opening of 78/52, a documentary about maybe the most famous knife killing in all of cinema: the Psycho shower scene. Psycho-phile Scott Marks mostly approved!
Movie
Suburbicon *
It may be possible — perhaps by squinting and turning your head just so and maybe crossing your eyes a touch — to see why director George Clooney juxtaposes, at a climactic moment, the sick comedic violence of a man finding himself unable to extract his golf club from the smashed face of the poor slob he just murdered with the sick dramatic violence of a white mob terrorizing the first black family to take up residence in a normally peaceful neighborhood. (And not just there, just most glaringly there.) Perhaps it’s to show the evil that lurks in the hearts of white men, even as they fret over what will happen when the blacks move in. Perhaps it’s to scold those who focus on future woes like declining property values and intermarriage while murder and blackmail go on right under their noses. But whatever the reason, it just doesn’t work: the narrative automobile lurches from fifth gear to first, then swerves into a white picket fence and bursts into flames. It doesn’t help matters that the blacks in question register more as dignified props than as characters, while the white folks involved in the opposing murder story are made to live and breathe. And that story coulda been something: a grieving child’s gradual and terrifying awakening to the rot under his own roof. Instead, the film feels like what it is: an awkward, bloody mashup of Coen Bros. tragicomedy (they’re credited on the screenplay) and Clooney earnestness. Matt Damon and Julianne Moore star.
There’s a stabbing death in George Clooney’s Coen-Brothers-plus-progressive-conscience Suburbicon as well, and while it doesn’t get as much play as the beating and poisoning, it does leave more of an impression than the shooting. And the wartime stabbing death in Tom of Finland makes a big impression on the film’s homosexual hero, so much so that his sister blames his gayness on it, at least at first. (And speaking of wartime and death, Scott was not a fan of the damaged-vet drama Thank You For Your Service.)
And it should go without saying that folks get cut to ribbons in Jigsaw. (It didn’t screen for us critical types, but a little bat told me that Scott may take it in this weekend and report back.)
The Departure departs from the death-dealing, but not too far: the doc concerns a Buddhist priest who spends his days trying to talk people out of suicide.
But the big non-lethal feel-good movie of the week has got to be the road trip/art doc Faces Places. (Unless it’s Nobody’s Watching — not sure on that one, because, well, nobody here watched it.)
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