4 Luni, 3 Saptamâni si 2 Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) (2008)

The first shot of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is a doozy: the inside of a dorm room belonging to Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), winter; the photography has an antiseptic chilliness, and later, when casting its gaze upon the pale Otilia nuzzling and deeply kissing her boyfriend, Adi, inspires repulsion at the lips and skin contact. I have seen this effect before, probably for the very first time in Larry Clark’s Kids where sex was de-eroticized and photographed to look like two husks of smeared flesh were sucking on one another – the skin contact was sickly and hungry: it was gross – and in Cristian Mungiu’s film, while not smeared, the paleness of the actors’ skin, the chilliness of the photography, drains any and all warmth from the physical intimacy. Sex is often like heroin or sleep for some, operating as a momentary escape (witness the animal hunger of Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) frenziedly pushing her naked skin upon her boyfriend’s naked skin in Mike Leigh's similarly grim social drama, Secrets & Lies (1996), another Palme d’Or winner), a warm body serving as a relief from gray, desolate surroundings. Only these bodies do not look warm, and when they touch one another, the thought of it producing more pallid, dreary souls seems devastating.


Cristian Mungiu has produced a formidable work here, though I have a rather significant reservation.

Spoilers ahead: if you’ve not seen the film, I’d recommend not continuing the review.

Employing long takes and breathing an air of grim urgency into every scene, especially when the handheld camera is tremoring slightly, subliminally, the film commands your attention; even without sound, it is evident that some harrowing, somber inevitability is underway. The kitchen-sink drabness of the proceedings and the often tremoring hand-held 35mm camerawork is reminiscent of another Romanian film, a film some have compared to “watching paint dry,” Cristi Puiu’s Moartea domnului Lazarescu or The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005). However, to find fault with the mundane tedium of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is to completely miss the point, which is the mundane tedium, how what should be the poignant and moving death of a lonely old man becomes a tiresome slog through red tape and the banalities of hospital bureaucracy, rendering his death a relief for the viewer rather than a tragedy. The film is brilliant, an insidious masterpiece. What that film did right and what 4 Months does wrong is Lazarescu doesn’t compromise its seemingly uneventful story. Shot to produce a slightly more rigorous tone of hyper-realism, 4 Months makes a sharp and disastrous turn into lurid melodrama.


If this had been an American film or something that hadn’t won the Palme d’Or or something that didn’t enforce such a grave tone of kitchen sink hyper-realism, then the two girls, Otilia and Gabita, prostituting themselves to the abortionist, would have been predictable. But in a prestige piece like this, such lurid melodrama breaks the atmosphere of quiet despair with a loud, obvious, even clichéd manipulation of viewers' emotions. Perhaps such things really happened, but the way it is handled here is so indelicate, so loud, it struck me as the most unexpected type of pandering.

Everything up to this point is properly prosaic: Otilia’s inability to retrieve a room in the first hotel, the quibbling of the hotel management of the second hotel who insist on exasperating red tape procedures in order to simply reserve a room, the finding of the taxi driver, reassuring the taxi driver, who, we gather from his briefcase, is the abortion proprietor, explaining the reasons why Gabita didn’t follow the arrangements they had discussed over the phone to the man, Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), Bebe’s lecturing them on why Gabita should have followed the instructions, and then lecturing them on the consequences of the procedure, and then lecturing them on the details, then making sure Gabita is telling him the truth about her circumstances, and finding she lied, asking her why, and if she still wants to continue with the procedure. He drinks some water and tells her to think it over while he steps into the bathroom. When he comes out, she says she does, and then he asks about money. They explain that the hotel room was more expensive than they thought it would be, and he lectures them some more. Otilia, getting sick of his self-righteous laying down of rules and exasperating lectures, becomes visibly perturbed, which makes him erupt in anger and threaten to leave. Gabita begs him not to. Next thing we know, he and Otilia are undressing, Gabita steps out for a cigarette, she steps back in, goes in the bathroom, which Otilia enters, nude from the waist down, and then exits, as Otilia proceeds to squat in the bathtub and scrub her genitals with a bar of soap. I’m sorry, but this is wrong, wrong, wrong. The horror of the film was being very nicely underplayed without having Otilia (and also Gabita it seems to imply) prostitute themselves to the abortionist. After seeing such devolution of the story, I would not have been surprised to see Otilia use the knife she found in Bebe’s briefcase to stab him to death.

Again, such things may have happened, but that doesn’t mean such things, when used for dramatic effect, are not clichés, even if they are rationalized as being non-literal, or a metaphor. Though the film earns back its presented tone of hyper-realism later, and the film continues to be perfectly photographed, lit, and framed, this sequence is fundamental to the film’s impact. In my opinion, the impact is severely dulled by the wrong-headedness of such a plot turn.

Nevertheless, the film is crucial viewing for anyone serious about art films, and despite my reservations, I am neither dismayed nor surprised that it won the Palme d'Or, which, unlike the Academy Awards, by and large, is a signifier of a truly quality film (if you don't believe me, check out some of the other films that won it: The Conversation, Taxi Driver, L'Albero Degli Zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs), Apocalypse Now, Barton Fink, Pulp Fiction, the already mentioned Secrets & Lies, L'Enfant (The Child), all, if not masterpieces, indisputably thought-provoking and profound works of art). While not the former in my opinion, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is most definitely the latter.


Grade: A-

A Tribute to Paul Newman by David Letterman

Last night on David Letterman, there was a short but terribly moving tribute to Paul Newman showing clips of Newman's various appearances on David Letterman over the years accompanied by Rufus Wainwright's "(Cold and Broken) Hallelujah" . I tried finding a video that was limited to just the brief clip, but all I could find was the long version where Dave, with all due respect, prattles on and on with an anecdote about Paul Newman, he, and a custom-made car Newman got him as a gift. Last night, it was moderately amusing, as Dave's stammering and acerbic befuddlement usually is, but if you want to skip straight to the tribute, just drag the cursor to 7:28, and try not to get choked up.

Reconsidering Burn After Reading

I found myself thinking about God the other night, and the universe, and the term, “Third Rock from the Sun” (did that term originate from the John Lithgow television series?). Why is it that people have to anthropomorphize the source of creation? The Sun and the collected detritus that naturally found itself in its orbit is an organic product, something that occurred from an unconscious chain reaction, like the way the wind might knock over a pie sitting on a windowsill. The pie falls on the grass outside and over time is descended upon by a colony of insects that feeds off the seemingly unlimited resources of the pie for years. The insects birth larvae and the larvae never know a life of not existing in the toppled berry mush. Not having any conception of how the pie landed where it did, they invent a figure with a personality, who they give a face and a fabricated back-story, and this Being was responsible for creating the pie. Even if a more pragmatic insect concluded that the wind was responsible for toppling the pie, then the insects would want to anthropomorphize the wind and worship it as if was sentient. The Big Bang, or whatever you want to call the series of natural acceleration of energy and matter that set off a chain reaction that produced the cosmos, is not a conscious entity. It is an unconscious natural phenomenon. If you want to call an unconscious natural force God, so be it, but then it is not a thinking, feeling, caring, opinionated, aware Creator. God is science and vice-versa.

It may seem ludicrous for me to preface a reconsidering of the merits of an essentially minor work of the brothers Coen with a convoluted and probably belabored analogy of the difference between a conscious God and an unconscious god, but it helps me to remember that in all of their films, the universe is indifferent. The good suffer, and the bad do as they wish unnoticed, under an unseeing sky. So, it seems foolish of me, knowing the world of the Coen brothers so well, to suddenly be angry with them for continuing their trend of displaying a worldview they have always displayed. Burn After Reading is irony of the bitterest and cruelest sort: think about it: the impetus for everything that goes wrong is the shallow pursuit of maintaining fit bodies, either as a means to a hotter sex life or in Osborne Cox’s case, well I don’t know exactly why he was at the gym when he lost his CIA “shit.” Why he would take his electronic memoirs with him in his gym bag is a question that can be answered by surrendering that it is an implausible contrivance that must happen or else there would no film (or the Coen Brothers would have to exert more effort in finding better circumstances for superficial body-obsessed types to come into contact with the disc; this reconsideration of the film does not strike its slapdash manner from the record). But, surely, caustic commentary on the depressing culture of Youth, Sex, Bodies that has been eroding the priorities of our nation for a couple decades now is needed more caustic than ever? I think so. And perhaps, though he is the sweetest character of the film, Chad’s appalling murder is not so very pointless after all. Whether the Coens have any pity for poor Chad is not too ambiguous, as they don’t seem to have pity for any of the shallow, murderous, or shallow/murderous buffoons preposterously coming into contact with one another. The film’s poster says all you really need to know about Burn After Reading’s evil sense of humor: one person spies on somebody whose lethalness they are ignorant of, and the lethal person being spied upon, being ignorant of the spying ignorant’s innocuousness, shoots him dead. It’s a hideous misunderstanding. Such things do happen. And the universe doesn’t have an opinion.



The original C+ review

"...this country would have completely lost its collective shit..."

Apropos the last Maher-related post, here's a segment from a very recent episode (Sept. 19, 2008) of Real Time:

Happy Birthday Naomi Watts

Naomi Watts. David Lynch put her on the map, and she did not forget that fact, appearing in a 50 minute film he made, called "Rabbits." Some of this footage was later used in Inland Empire. She, along with Laura Harring, voiced one of the rabbits in this sequence (Is she the one sitting or standing?):


When she is upset or in anguish, few actresses come off as explosively wound up (Hope Davis is good at playing tightly wound women on the verge of hysteria too).

As Diane Selwyn, in Mulholland Dr., the ratty robe she wears precisely captures a tangible form of the frayed nerves of her psyche. Even more frayed are her nerves in 21 Grams, where she seems to be carrying around a ticking time bomb in her expression wherever she goes:


...her haggard features lighted so as to seem even paler than usual, damages to her soul gradually surfacing in her face. She scowls a lot, I've noticed, and when she does, you want to cross to the other side of the street to avoid it. She's a fierce actress, and serious, some might say too serious, as if she is displaying pretense to a gravity that she has not earned yet. Though I would not dismiss that objection immediately, I would tell someone dubious of Watts to watch her in several different films (which would not be a hardhsip, considering the sheer number of quality films she consistently seeks out to appear in).

Mulholland Dr. is one of my all-time favorites. I love The Assassination of Richard Nixon, a film her character is in very little. She plays the ex-wife of Sam Bicke (Sean Penn), the pitiable salesman whose deteriorating sanity and repeatedly trampled self-esteem conspire over the course of the film to produce an unhinged, cockamamie plot to fly a plane into the White House. Her character is vital in establishing the momentum of Bicke's despair, and Naomi Watts is devastating in the way she slights her ex-husband, disgusted by his whiny ineffectualism and trying, with less and less patience, to express her utter disinterest in his companionship, despite the fact that they share two children. Naomi Watts is one of those women who could crush a man with one dismissive glance, and her performance mixed with Penn's pathological neediness produces riveting and devastating moments of botched social interactions.

She has worked with three of my very favorite film directors (Lynch, Cronenberg, Haneke), and has a body of work that is unmatched in its commitment to scouting auteurs and in laboring to create substantive work. You don't see her doing Revlon commercials like Julianne Moore and Halle Berry or L'Oreal commercials like Penelope Cruz or perfume ads like Nicole Kidman. She is an artist, not a product. That puts her ahead of those four, as well as many of the rest of the actresses working in film currently.

In Anticipation of Religulous: Defending Bill Maher

Larry Charles (above, left) is someone I admired long before he directed the virtually unanimously acclaimed Borat:CLoAfMBGNoK. He was a writer on Seinfeld and directed more than 10 episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It made sense that HBO veterans Sacha Baron Cohen and Charles would find themselves collaborating on a film, a film that would go on to become the most critically acclaimed American comedy of the new decade. I really liked Borat quite a bit, and when I stumbled onto this poster:


...sometime last November or thereabouts, I was a little saddened that Charles’s follow-up would be centered around the detestable Bill Maher, who I knew very little about other than the fact that he held hopelessly liberal beliefs, and wore a countenance that radiated smug.

Well, since then I’ve read about and watched a lot more of Maher. After 9/11, when every American who wasn’t crying tears of blood or flying into a fit of vengeful rage at anybody who looked even vaguely Middle-Eastern was formally declared unpatriotic or traitorous, it took massive guts, balls, backbone, whichever body part serves the idiom best, to say what Bill Maher said, on September 17, 2001, a mere six days after the attacks, on his ABC show Politically Incorrect, when speaking to guest Dinesh D’Souza:

D’Souza: Bill, there's another piece of political correctness I want to mention. And, although I think Bush has been doing a great job, one of the themes we hear constantly is that the people who did this are cowards.

Maher: Not true.

D’Souza: Not true. Look at what they did. First of all, you have a whole bunch of guys who are willing to give their life. None of them backed out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete.

Maher: Exactly.

D’Souza: These are warriors. And we have to realize that the principles of our way of life are in conflict with people in the world. And so -- I mean, I'm all for understanding the sociological causes of this, but we should not blame the victim. Americans shouldn't blame themselves because other people want to bomb them.

Maher: But also, we should -- we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly. You're right.

Warriors? Eh. Does it really take a brave warrior to overpower a female flight-attendant and then cut the unarmed woman's throat? I think D'Souza may have overstated it, but I understand what he's saying. If this highly-organized and carefully planned operation had been carried out by SEALs with less crude weaponry in a location far, far away from our country, then it would have been an act of heroic military cunning. If our country is attacked, it's terrorism. If we are the aggressors, it's counter-terrorism, understand? It's the same old ethnocentric megalomania and hypocrisy that passes as patriotism and love of country over here in the greatest country in the world (read: has the most money) and as we all learned from Mr. Show, “More Money = Better Than.”

Maher is impartial and looks at the 9/11 attacks objectively. The only ones who have any right to be upset with him and D'Souza for what they said are those who lost loved ones or their homes or were injured. In their cases, irrational bias is perfectly justified.

Maher's show was cancelled not long after this episode aired. He got a new show on HBO in 2003, Real Time with Bill Maher. Again, HBO veterans united, and now we have Religulous.

Maher is as polarizing a national figure as one will find. Jackass, or the biggest balls in the nation? He's said plenty of things that support the former and plenty of things that support the latter. The man essentially demands an opinion. Just one look at a picture of his smug face and snide expression elicits a strong reaction.


Mine used to be that he was a jackass, but now, after watching two of his HBO comedy specials and watching select episodes of Real Time and old episodes of Politically Incorrect, and seeing his unapologetic attitude of contempt for the American public, often saying things so wildly contrarian, that there must be an inkling of calculated offense in them, I’ve decided that the man has balls. Balls in the way Sacha Baron Cohen had balls, stepping into the lion’s den of hostile provincialism and slathering himself in barbecue sauce and offering baiting commentary like so much bloody pork, his whole being a walking bait just begging to brave situations of unthinkable social awkwardness, situations which had me cowering behind my fingers out of embarrassment and discomfort while Cohen boldly, self-destructively charged into the fray. I doubt Maher will come close to that, but from the trailers, it looks like he is very conscious of his director’s previous documentary/social commentary/comedy of manners/assault on propriety/stunt and must do his best to meet its challenge. If anybody’s up to the task, it’s Maher. We shall see on October 3.

Michelangelo Antonioni's L’avventura (1960)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is one of my most favorite films, exploring the incompatibility of the primal elements of nature with human beings, specifically human beings who think they have civilized the inhospitable by maintaining a rigorously prim lifestyle of corsets, frocks, and immaculate white lace dresses. Mrs. Appleyard’s Victorian-fashioned girls’ school plants their field trip in the muggy, buzzing mosslands of Hanging Rock, certain their propriety and neck-to-ankle-length dresses will ward off the wilderness. For the school’s presumption, three of the girls vanish, to god knows where, seemingly swallowed into the earth.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura’s premise is identical, but serving different purposes: a group of Italian bourgeoisie out yachting find themselves drawn to a poker-faced landmass, an island, whose features are often shot to accentuate their permanence as compared to the dwarfed ephemera of the tourists. Whereas the Rock in Weir’s film evoked a more actively malevolent presence, the rocks and quarries on the anonymous island in Antonioni’s film are indifferent to the visitors, though the indifference is frighteningly implacable, and accompanied by the ever-present sound of the wind, the island begins to give the impression that it is harboring secrets. One of those secrets is the whereabouts of Anna (Lea Massari), ostensibly the lead female character in the film – she is introduced to us before anyone else (the film opens with Anna persuading her father not to worry about the yachting excursion). Anna’s boyfriend or fiancée, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and her best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti), join her on the trip, as well as some other friends.

Anna comes from a wealthy family, is spoiled, and jaded in a petulant sort of way that renders her dissipated restlessness more unlikable than the others, who, granted, are as listless and idle as she, though without the nasty attitude. These people have nothing to do and nowhere to go: ennui hangs over them all as darkly as the uniform cloud that shudders quietly over the island as they idle on land. Anna, so bored she has begun to play irresponsible tricks on her friends and loved ones by claiming to have come within proximity of a shark, seems to be asking for it, and indeed, It answers, and she abruptly disappears, triggering the alarm of her fellow island-loiterers, who then search for her earnestly and without results. It appears her dissipation was more profound than it appeared.

Whether the disappearance is literal or not can be puzzled over for hours – the whole film presents itself in a protracted state of meditative aimlessness, saying nothing, revealing nothing, doing nothing, really, but at the same time, expressing everything.

Some audiences don’t like to fill in the blanks provided by a film, but what is art if not a communication of sensibilities? How is the art to linger in the crevices of your brain if you’ve solved it, know it top to bottom, understand it thoroughly? Film is a medium that is too often used as vulgar diversion, and not enough as a means of refinement. How is one to hear God without silence and stillness (the two things American audiences find utterly anathema when sitting down to watch a movie)?

One might say, after watching Claudia guiltily succumb to Sandro’s affections only to see him cheating on her with a prostitute late in the film, that the disappearance of Anna earlier was not literal, but symbolic of the manner in which men and women, after growing tired with their current lover, lose sight of them. I think the mystery is part of the fascination of Antonioni’s film, a haunting hypothesis that the more insolent a person is in broadcasting their dissatisfaction, how bored they are by existence, the sooner existence will let them know how bored it is of them.


Grade: A+

Joel & Ethan Coens' Burn After Reading (2008)

If for whatever reason you are looking at this review and have not seen Burn After Reading, DO NOT continue reading.

I repeat: If you have not seen this film, do NOT continue reading.

SPOILERS AHEAD. STOP NOW if you have not seen Burn After Reading. Seriously.

No one is more inclined to defend the Coen Brothers than me. No one, in the face of a flawed or unimpressive work of theirs, is more insistent on finding the silver lining. But this is the hardest it’s ever been to excuse them.

Burn After Reading is pointlessly mean-spirited. When a director is malevolent towards his characters in order to bolster thematic material, that’s wholly understandable, but here, the two most sweet and innocent characters in the film are brutally, glibly murdered, and for what? A laugh. I was shocked when George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer, in a hilarious (not to me) misunderstanding, blows Chad’s brains out the back of his head. After that I kind of glazed over for the remainder of the film, which was why I didn’t understand the reasons for Richard Jenkin’s character’s presence in the basement of the house belonging to Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton). His presence leads to another misunderstanding and the brutal murder of Jenkins at the hands of Katie’s soon to be ex-husband, Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), whose character was disgruntled at the start of the film, and by the end, a delirious psychotic. My brother, whose attention had not been blunted from shock, told me that Jenkins had been asked by Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) in a scene I had watched but not really absorbed, to find more information on Osborne Cox for reasons too complicated and pointless to explain. The film is simply an exercise for its own sake. It has no reason for being, other than, I guess, the Coens’ fear of their movie-making skills getting rusty if they sit on their laurels for too long? For shits and giggles? I did not giggle when Chad’s brains were blown out the back of his head. He (Brad Pitt) was the most likeable character in the film; dim, yes, but his dimness was endearing, more endearing than the repellent self-absorption of the other characters. McDormand’s character points out that he was a “can-do kind of guy” or something along those lines while everyone else she knew, in reference to Clooney’s character, is “defeated.” Perhaps that's the ironic point, but...

I've seen all 12 of the Coens' previous films, and can read them about as well as one can, and when they have a serious point they want to make, no matter how caustic, they find a subtle way to infuse a little gravity into the tone of the goofball antics (an example being the strangely moving description of H.I.'s dream at the very end of Raising Arizona, or the sober manner in which they consider Norville's preparations for suicide in The Hudsucker Proxy). The only gravity in Burn After Reading are bungled moments of earnestness, such as when McDormand's character sits in her lonely living room after a profoundly unsatisfying date. This shot is framed from a distance, and is lit beautifully, diagonal pale yellow diaphanous folds of light refracted from the moon off the softly flowing drapes in the window reaching across the carpet. The music becomes serious for a moment, as does the film, but it is totally out of place here. Chad's appalling murder, on the other hand, is portrayed as a joke. So is the hatcheting of Richard Jenkins. I know "the hatcheting of Richard Jenkins" sounds funny, but to witness it is not. Frankly, this is a callousness that is beneath them. The Coens transmit an invisible disgust with just such callousness in Fargo when their camera looks upon Carl Showalter's pitiless giggles at Jean Lundegaard's pathetic attempts to run away in the snow with a bag over her head. Now, Joel & Ethan are the ones pitilessly giggling at the poor sap, Chad, as he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and with a fountain of gore totally out of character with the effervescent goofiness that has preceded it, point at his horrifying misfortune and snort, 'What a dope.' The last expression on his stupid face is a big 'Whoops, what a pickle! Let me just explain..' smile and then that stupid face gets fired into at point-blank range.

At the end of the movie, two CIA officers congregate to discuss all that has happened. One says to the other, “So what did we learn?” The second one shrugs, and the first officer answers his own question, “Uh, I guess that we shouldn’t let it happen again.” Yeah.


Grade: C+

The Usual Suspects (1995)

I don’t see how rabid fans of The Usual Suspects can see much replay value in the film for any reason other than studying the elegant long-distance shots or the John Ottman score (it evokes a sense of conspiracy with music alone, nevermind the images). Once you know that 85% of the story is just the suspect ramblings of a liar, there’s no reason to go back and piece it all together, because there is no “it” there; more than ¾ of the film has been pulled out of Verbal Kint’s ass, some of it on the spot, from looking at random shit nailed on the bulletin board in the office of a police station where he sits explaining, and explaining, and explaining, all of it being more or less a lot of nothing; in short, a complete waste of time.

And all that exposition he pulled out of his ass (you know, the movie) is hopelessly complicated for one reason, and one reason only: if it wasn’t, you’d realize you’ve seen it all before. But because there are flashbacks, and crisscrossing timelines, and double-crosses, and false leads, and red herrings, you find yourself concluding that there was a lot there: it’s the shaggy dog story in the form of a thriller: you’re told this, and that, and how they connect and where they diverge, and this goes over here, and that goes there, and then at the end, you learn that none of it really matters. It’s sort of like the titular joke in The Aristocrats: the point is not the long-winded time-consuming set-up but the two word punch line. The problem is, once you learn the punch line, it doesn’t make up for the precious 15 minutes you stood there listening to the set-up, and if you’d known better, you’d have preferred to have not heard it all together. However, "the Aristocrats" joke reveals insight into the unique pathology and dysfunction of the individual who tells it, and the joke, while inherently of no value, becomes valuable because the procedure snowballs into a dissection of the fundamental essence of comedy, how so much of it derives from a twisted alienation, the nature of taboos, why one taboo is more severe than another, the motivation for speaking the unspeakable, and lots of interesting tributaries break off from what seemed like a stagnant little puddle. The Usual Suspects is all puddle.

Christopher McQuarrie’s screenplay seems to have been written with the end first. The premise is interesting: a meek, bullied little two-bit thief is actually a fearsome and dangerous criminal mastermind...


...and he’s right there in plain sight the whole time.


But the premise is only as good as the elaboration on it, and the elaboration on it, McQuarrie’s screenplay, is (basically) 95 minutes of pedestal built to make the 5 minutes of twist look, well, like it’s on a pedestal. And the 5 minutes is pretty cool, but not worth the 95 minutes it took to get there, 95 minutes of dialogue and situations which amount to watching the hard-boiled posturing of two insecure bullies glowering at one another in a schoolyard. The dialogue between the five Suspects of the title is especially awful when they are sizing one another up in a holding cell in which they are all being kept while being held for weapons charges:

“I’ve eaten scum like you for breakfast, chum”

“Chum rhymes with scum, tough guy.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“Oh, am I? Or are you?

“I got a big job I’m working on.”

“Why don’t you take your job and shove it up your ass?”

“This job is big, pal, real big. You want in, or am I talking to the Dean Keaton of legend?”

“What legend? I’m just a guy and you’re kitty litter.”

Et cetera, ad infinitum. I made that up of course, but you get the idea; this dialogue is such juvenile, clichéd tough-guy speak it could’ve been written by Frank Miller. There is actually a scene where two groups of criminals thump their chests in each other’s faces, and Stephen Baldwin’s character on one side sarcastically calls Peter Greene’s character on the other side, “tough guy,” to which Greene replies back with, “You know McManus, you think you’re such a tough guy.” These thugs would pick up their skirts and drop the act as soon as Jimmy Conway and Tommy DeVito got in their faces. According to some positive reviews, the clichéd dialogue is intended to be ironic, but that would require the film to have a certain tone which the film most definitely does not have - It tells Soze’s story in a straightforward manner, soberly. The movie, I’m afraid, actually thinks this is how “tough guys” talk. More examples of the writer’s pathetic idea of what equals “a bad dude:” Verbal Kint tells numbskulled Agent Kujan (the Neanderthal-looking Chazz Palminteri) that Keyser Soze is so bad, sooo bad that he kills his enemies, then his enemies’ parents, then their kids, then their friends. Then he kills their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends’ friends, and even their friends’ friends’ friends’ friends’ pets, the employees of the pet store who sold the pets, the employees of the pet stores’ friends, parents, pets, mailmen, that one guy they kinda knew in high school, his parents, etc. etc. If this was intended to be ironic, then it’s hilarious, but it’s not, and it’s the sort of laughable demonstration you’d see a scowling high schooler scribble in a handmade comic book: “He kills their children, and their parents, and their pets…yeah…this dude is fucking evil…”

There is a scene in the film where Pete Postlethwaite (in a chilling performance) shows up as Soze’s #2, Mr. Kobayashi, and offers the five guys a deal. Kevin Pollack’s character, Hockney, with knee-jerk overcompensating machismo, aims his gun (sideways), at Kobayashi and snarls something like, “Why don’t I kill you right now (tough guy)?”


Kobayashi talks for a while, explains himself, and Hockney, realizing he's performing a pointless action by aiming a gun he has no intention of shooting (and really had no intention of shooting in the first place), gradually, pathetically lowers his gun. That’s a perfect symbol for what The Usual Suspects does: it makes mean faces and makes sure you know it has a gun, but it doesn’t pull the trigger. It’s a movie for 15 year old boys, of which I was once, and back then I recall thinking The Usual Suspects was pretty cool.


But when I read reviews and hear fans calling it, absurdly, “smart,” I wonder if they’d be fooled by Kevin Spacey’s crooked left foot and obviously affected “I’m so timid” pantomime. Oversell it much, Verbal? See his foot? It’s crooked. And he quivers a lot. And he’s called a “stupid cripple” about 1,396 times through the course of the film. He’s a weakling, get it? No way could a weakling as weak a weakling as that could ever be a nefarious, pet-killing criminal mastermind, no sir.


Grade: C-