The latest from
William Friedkin may be the funniest film you see all year. It’s also likely the most disturbing and
morally repugnant one—not for anything it espouses, but for the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel
degradation of its motley cast of characters.
Matthew McConaughey plays the titular Joe, a Dallas cop who runs a side business as a hit man and is
hired by Chris (Emile Hirsch) and his trailer trash father (Thomas Haden Church) and stepmother (Gina Gershon) to kill Chris’s mother—whom no one seems to like much—to score an insurance payout.
Chris needs the money to pay off a drug debt.
This is Friedkin’s second time in a row adapting a play by the playwright
Tracy Letts, after his fantastic but barely seen 2006 take on Letts’s
Bug. That films was a harrowing, claustrophobic psychological thriller that detailed
one couple’s descent into madness.
Killer Joe is probably no less harrowing, but its characters are less mad and more moronic,
until they experience utter terror when they realize that their stupidity and desperation
has led them to put themselves under the hard, unforgiving bootheel of a man—Joe—who
is something approximating pure, sadistic evil.
It’s a shame the Academy would never touch a film with scenes as shocking as this—it
earns its NC-17 rating and then some—with a ten-foot Oscar statue, because McConaughey
is nothing short of brilliant here. Between this movie, his frightening and charismatic
turn in
Magic Mike, and
Bernie and
The Lincoln Lawyer recently, he is settling into his true calling, which isn’t so much being a romantic
comedy star as it is a dark, dangerous character actor. He anchors both the dark humor
and the frightening violence of this film. Friedkin, meanwhile, plays a trick that
might be mean if it wasn’t so fascinating to see him pull off, which is that he blends
laugh-out-loud humor with absolutely repulsive images, turning from one to the other
on a dime in the same scene, forcing audiences to wind up laughing when they should
be disturbed. It’s disorienting and unsettling, and while that might sound
like a bad thing, it’s an absolute endorsement of what Friedkin accomplishes here.
View the trailer. Opens tomorrow at Landmark
E Street.
You’ve probably never heard of
Sixto Rodriguez. That’s to be expected, as his extremely brief recording career encompassed all of
two albums back in the early ’70s, and he essentially disappeared after being dropped
by his label. Except that somehow his recordings found their way to South Africa years
later, and he became as legendary a figure there as the Beatles or Elvis. One character
in the movie says Rodriguez was unquestionably bigger than the Rolling Stones in the country,
and that if you went to a party, the three albums you’d expect everybody would always
have were the Beatles’
Abbey Road, Simon & Garfunkel’s
Bridge Over Troubled Water, and Rodriguez’s
Cold Fact. The difference was that while everyone knew
everything about the first two artists,
no one knew anything about Rodriguez aside from his music and
rumors that he killed
himself onstage in spectacularly gruesome fashion many years
before. This documentary,
one of the best music docs I can recall, details the efforts of
some tenacious South
Africans trying to track down the truth about Rodriguez’s
history in the days before
the Internet. You can read more about the film, and its
surprise twist in my piece
over at the Atlantic—but
be warned that the piece does contain some spoilers, and if you
want to remain in
the dark while watching the film, you should avoid Google
searches of any kind before
seeing the film. Information was hard to come by for the film’s
characters in the
’90s, but of course, this is a different time.
View the trailer. Opens tomorrow at Landmark
Bethesda Row.
The 1990
Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi/action flick
Total Recall has become one of his signature works, one that doesn’t feel so much like an action-star
vanity piece so much as a fully realized piece of dark science fiction that happens
to star an action hero. Given its fairly classic status, there was much trepidation
about the prospect of a new adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s story, which takes place
in a society where people can implant memories in lieu of actual vacations, and in
which our hero, Quaid (Colin Farrell, taking over Arnie’s role), discovers that at some point his memory has been wiped
and he may have been involved in events he cannot recall. This discovery makes him
a target and puts him on the run.
Underworld director
Len Wiseman is at the helm here, which bodes well for visual flair but not so much for coherent
storytelling; but I’m heartened by the casting of Farrell, who, despite some questionable
choices, is often a fine actor. As Atlantic writer
Christopher Wallace points out in this essay
yesterday, Farrell’s best work often comes playing desperate characters at the end
of their rope; if Wiseman lets that aspect of Quaid’s story win out over mindless
action, there could be something worth seeing here.
View the trailer. Opens tomorrow at theaters
across the area.
Ways of Seeing: 40th Anniversary
John Berger’s landmark 1972 BBC special celebrates its 40th anniversary this year,
a four-part series that introduced a new way of looking at Western art and culture.
The film, along with a book of the same name, was produced in part as a response to
another BBC cultural history from a few years earlier, Kenneth Clark’s
Civilisation. But where Clark’s series was rigidly traditional, Berger opens up the art to much
deeper interpretations of motivation and ideology couched within the art, which was
extremely provocative at the time and ended up being hugely influential to the way
we think about art. The National Gallery’s screening of all four episodes (totaling
about an hour and a half) will be accompanied by a discussion with historian
Jonathan Conlin of the University of Southampton.
View the beginning of the first episode.
Saturday at 2:30 PM at the National Gallery of Art.
Free.
As the Nazis rolled through Europe in 1939, they took control of more than just land
and nations; they also stole a whole lot of art. Among the work that were taken was
the collection of Austrian
Lea Bondi, including a painting by Egon Schiele known as “Portrait of Wally.” This documentary
details a battle that took place over the course of 70 years as Bondi’s family attempted
to get the painting back. They didn’t have the Nazis to fight for it, though, but
rather the Austrian government, MoMa, and even NPR. Director
Andrew Shea crafts the struggle to regain the painting into a complex detective story.
View the trailer. Opens tomorrow at West
End Cinema.
Blu-ray/DVD Pick of the Week:
Le Havre
Filled with all the oddball, deadpan humor one would expect from Finnish director
Aki Kaurismäki, his latest takes place in a port city in northern France filled with the requisite
quirky cast of characters. It centers on Marcel, a writer and shoeshiner who’s finding
that the shoeshine business isn’t what it used to be, and he and his wife are beginning
to have problems getting by. He finds a young African boy whose family was heading
to London via shipping container when the police found them. The boy escapes, and
Marcel and his neighborhood band together to help the kid out. The film is sentimental
without ever being too much so, and political without ever being strident. You can
check out my complete review here.
Special Features: Interview with actor
André Wilms, footage from the film’s debut at the 2011 Cannes Film festival, an interview with
actress
Kati Outinen, and footage from a “Little Bob” concert, a musician featured in the film.
