Killer Joe (2012)

William Friedkin has made some interesting movies. What else are you supposed to say about the guy who made "The Exorcist?" That's his best known film apart from "The French Connection," but there's also movies like "Jade" and "Bug," which have what can only be called "That Friedkin Sleaze." They may not always be pleasant, but they're always interesting. In a way he reminds me a little bit of Stanley Kubrick, even though they have very different styles. But like Kubrick, even if the end product isn't easily digestible or even what one might even call "good," I for one am always at least glad I saw it, because I can usually safely say "Well THAT was a thing."

"Killer Joe" is indeed "a thing." It's certainly a film that you don't come across often, because few films contain the insanity or sleaze that it contains, of which it has in spades. If sleaze and a good deal of outright wrongness does not appeal to you than "Killer Joe" will not be a pleasant movie-going experience. Well, even if it does appeal to you it might not be pleasant, but you know what I mean. What I'm saying is that if you're going to watch this movie, unless you go into it expecting and being okay with seeing a bunch of depraved stuff that you may find yourself saying "I need an adult" over, this won't be fun.

Well, it still might not be "fun" but...you know what I mean!

Killer Joe is the name of our...well I can't really call him protagonist, because he's more of an antagonist in actuality. At least he becomes one by the end. Then again everyone in this movie is such a low-life that it's difficult to apply the label "Good guy" and "Bad guy" to anyone. This is only skimming the top of the moral ambiguity of "Killer Joe," as there is no black or white in terms of good vs. bad. There are only many, many different places to stand between the two colors. Everyone here is essentially a scumbag, but few are outright evil about it, which actually makes it far more realistic.

Anyway, Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a cop who moonlights as a hitman. He is hired by Chris (Emile Hirsch), a catastrophic loser who specializes in bad decisions and making things worse, to kill Chris' mother. He's doing this so that his sister Dottie (Juno Temple) can collect on her $50,000 life insurance policy and go to school, and so that he can pay off the drug dealers he owes a lot of money. And while it's obviously a horrible thing to put a hit on one's own mother, they make it clear that this women is absolutely terrible, everyone hates her, and she even tried to kill Dottie once when she was a child. In fact, everyone is on board with this plan - even her ex-husband Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), Ansel's current wife Sharla (Gina Gershon) and even Dottie herself. So there you go. A family of people who want their own mother/ex-wife dead.

Your heroes!

From there it becomes a story of "from bad to worse" and things spiral further and further out of control. Poor decisions are made, certain people turn out to not be very trustworthy (shock!) and insurance plans are misinterpreted by stupid people who didn't read the fine print. Or read it at all. But through it all, one thing remains constant: Killer Joe needs to get paid one way or the other.

In lieu of up-front payment, which Chris can't provide, Joe decides to take Dottie as a retainer until he gets his money. You can imagine that the reasons for him taking on a young, pretty "retainer" involve just as much depravity as you think it does. And yes, the suspicions you have about what Joe is thinking when he stares at Dottie like he's got X-ray glasses are spot on. It's exactly like that. This is the beginning of the wrongness of this movie, as I'm pretty sure she's at best 17. At best. And he's obviously in his mid-30's. At least. At least that's what I got. And even if she were actually older, mentally Dottie isn't all there, and seems closer to someone who is 12 or 13. Yeah, gross.

So yeah. That's the setup. Chris tells Joe "You can have my sister as long as you kill my mother."

Your heroes!

The things about "Killer Joe" that may make you want to stick with it through the depravity are the performances, because they are undeniably fantastic. Emile Hirsch manages to actually be not soul-punchingly annoying for a change, despite playing arguably the most despicable character in the film, and yes that's including Joe. With Joe, yes it's true that's he's a killer and a total psychopathic scumbag, but at least he's smart. Chris is an absolute moron who rightly gets played over and over again by people who have no business getting the upper hand over anybody. So yes, Chris is a moron and a total slimeball, but Emile Hirsch played him so that you didn't necessarily hate him completely. You also feel really sorry for him. That's tough to do.

Thomas Haden Church and Gina Gershon were also fantastic. Gershon took a while to grow on me as a character, which she certainly did by the end, but Church's Ansel was great right from the get-go. He kind of lumbers through the movie like a deep-fried, inbred Lurch from the Addam's Family. Coincidentally he also provides most of the laughs, although some of those may have been unintentional.

If this isn't a breakout role for Juno Temple, it will be a crime. An absolute crime. After this she needs to be a known actress. I'm talking big roles in A list blockbusters. Yeah, she had a small part in "The Dark Knight Rises" as Selena's partner in crime, but that was small potatoes. Although she is starring in "Maleficent," which is "Sleeping Beauty" told from the villain's point of view, which might be interesting. But for all that is good in the world, somebody please give Aronofsky her number.

Think I've got another favorite to add to the list...

As good as everyone was, though, the guy who unsurprisingly steals the show is Matty McC. I love McConaughey. I have for a long time. This guy is an incredible actor and anyone who thinks otherwise needs to see "Killer Joe." He is so sleazy, so creepy, so evil, and so completely wrong while somehow, somehow still being charming as hell, even though you know none of it is genuine. It's really a marvel to see. And this is a movie where McConaughey makes Gina Gershon perform fellatio on a chicken drumstick after punching her in the face and threatening to kill all of them. And he STILL manages to be likable.

Did I mention this movie is kind of messed up?

Yeah, that's the final thing about "Killer Joe." You gotta be okay with some pretty depraved stuff. You also have to be okay with a movie where nobody is really a villain, because nobody is really a good guy. When everyone you see is kind of insane, it's hard to get a measuring stick for sanity, you know? And while it may be troubling and upsetting, it's difficult to deny that "Killer Joe" is very interesting and impossible to take your eyes off of.

The only big complaint I have is the ending, which literally seems like it stops about 15 seconds before the actual end. I get the jarring effect of it, and I appreciate a challenging ending that requires you to think, but sometimes it seems that endings like that exist just because that's the way weird movies end. And it's doubly annoying because the movie is going 150 mph when it hits a wall that says "DIRECTED BY WILLIAM FRIEDKIN." It's one of the more significant "Oh come on!" moments I've had with a movie this year. Although if I'm yelling that because I was enjoying it and wanted to see more, there are worse problems I can imagine for a movie.

Now who wants some chicken? No, I'm serious guys. There is chicken-leg fellatio in this movie. That is now a thing that exists.

You'll never eat fried chicken again without thinking of "Killer Joe." This may ruin it for you forever.

THE BOTTOM LINE - I really liked "Killer Joe," even though I hesitate to assume others would as well. It's a weird movie. It's a movie that contains a vast amount of wrong. And you have to be cool with that. Honestly though, I'd give this a watch, if for nothing else the incredible performances all around.

John Carter (2012)

Am I the only person who found it impossible to not say John Carter's name like Arnold Schwarzenegger? You know, cause it's really close to "John Conner?" Didn't you ever look at the poster and think "John Conna! Cum wit me if you vant to live!" Or maybe you actually saw the movie and when John Carter gets transported you maybe thought to yourself "Nygaah! Git you ass to Mah's!"

Nobody? Ok then. Disregard that last paragraph.

"John Carter" is of course famous for failing. Along with "Battleship," this film was the first of two huge financial disasters for Disney in 2012. Both of these films had budgets that could have fed a small country for a few months, and both of them tanked like a horse in Skyrim. (/nerdjoke) It's pretty clear why "Battleship" went under, even though I thought it wasn't that bad. I think the main problem was that people couldn't get past the fact that the genesis of it was a board game. It wasn't great, but it wasn't as awful as people made it out to be.

With "John Carter" it was the advertising. This has been a note of record, and I'm pretty sure plenty of people in that department got fired. And rightly so. The trailer for "John Carter" was a big, jumbled mess that didn't tell us anything about the movie we were supposed to be excited about. I thought it looked like it was trying to tackle too many ideas, and I had no idea what anything was or what was going on at all. It was a terrible trailer and advertising campaign. And it was so quietly shuffled out of theaters, head hung low, that I never got a chance to see it.

So I finally got to see "John Carter" and I have to say, I'm really glad I didn't blow $9.50 on it. Had I seen this in theaters I would have been ticked off. Or maybe not ticked off but tired and bored. I didn't give two craps about this movie. And it's not because it was overly bad, which it wasn't, but because it just was so bland and unmemorable. That's a weird thing to say about a movie as admittedly visually stunning as "John Carter" is, but it's true. "Bland" is the only word to describe it, not because there is any notable lack of tradecraft, but because it's just so unbelievably stock.

It's really sad when you can see stuff like this in a movie and say "It's been done."

The story concerns an American Civil War soldier who, through some technology never really explained, is transported to Mars (Oh, I'm sorry. Barsoom. More on THAT later, because THAT didn't get old). Thrust into the middle of a conflict between two countries on the planet, he leads an uprising to stop the war. Or something like that. I know it involves these 4-armed bug type creatures for some reason, and there are these pale dudes who are kind of like gods but not. Oh, and there's a princess.

See, this is what I'm talking about. I saw this movie yesterday and I've already forgotten nearly everything about it. I can't even remember a single character's name besides John Carter, and I only remember him because his name is on the freaking box art. I had no clue what was going on, but at the same time, I knew everything that was about to happen, because the story is so paint-by-numbers.

I know that "A Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs is a classic sci-fi story that has been the inspiration for a lot of films. I've never read it, and nobody I know has ever read it, true, but I'm aware that it exists. The fact that it is a story that other films have lifted heavily from does give it a pass on being derivative. After all, we can't blame an old story for being influential. But that doesn't mean that it will be fresh and exciting when we've seen this story a hundred times before. It will be boring. Like "John Carter" was.

It's a shame, but when a story has been mined so much that nearly everything about it has become a trope or cliche, that's going to be boring as hell and annoying to sit through despite how pretty you make it look. It's not the story's fault, but that's the way it is. Fortunately, Hollywood doesn't do that too much.

OH WAIT.

There were two other things that irked me about "John Carter." Or at least, these were the things in the movie that were memorable enough for me to remember that I didn't like.

The first was the cast. Taylor Kitsch as John Carter was...how to put this nicely...bad. He was bad. Between this and "Battleship" (Headlining two earth-shattering bombs in a row. Ouch.) I'm not sure he's going to have much of a career. And based on his performance as John Carter, which essentially consisted of him squinting and grunting while seeming like he was distracted by the football game on the TV in the next room, I can't say that I'll be too sad to see him go. It's not a good thing when Channing Tatum has more charisma than you do, I'm just saying.

Lynn Collins as the token Princess was also quite irritating. It's not that she did a bad job necessarily (she was better than Taylor Kitsch, anyway) but I can't stand her character. It's that same "I'm a Princess who is tough and strong and totally a strong role model but ugggh I have to run away from everything and get somebody else to fight my battles for me" crap that you always see. Also, she's another one of those chicks with a "kind of" accent. It's kind of there. Enough to where she can't pronounce "John Carter" properly. It's "Jawn Cah-tah." I hate that accent. Oh, and she whispers a lot. Why does every Princess do that? She's like Liv Tyler in "Lord of The Rings." You just want to chapter skip through her scenes.

On the plus side Willem Dafoe is in this movie. That's cool.

Oh wait. You don't see him? That's crap.

The second thing was that the culture of Mars, oh sorry, BARSOOM, is shoved in our faces pretty hardcore. That's not a problem by itself necessarily, after all it lends credibility, but geez give us some time to adjust. You want to know why I don't remember anybody's name? It's because they are all these crazy alien names that are impossible to remember, and many of them sound the same. I swear there was one word that was used to address like 4 different people. It sounded like "Rejjick" or something, and it was really confusing for me because I was thinking that was the name of Willem Dafoe's character, and then all of a sudden that's what they're calling Ciarán Hinds! About halfway though the movie I realized that it must mean "king" or "leader" or "Your Majesty" or something. Could have used that info earlier, guys. Or here's a thought: "Don't do that."

I think that maybe if "John Carter" was a TV series this alien culture could have been more gracefully introduced as to not be so jarring and disorientating, but we are thrown on Mars (oh sorry, BARSOOM) at about the 15 minute mark, and are there until about the last 10 minutes. That's about an hour and a forty five minutes that we are dunked headfirst into this culture with all the subtlety of a freight train. That's not nearly enough time to adjust to the amount of stuff they throw at us.

 For reference, as the credits roll on "John Carter," Gandalf hadn't even fought the Balrog yet in the Director's Cut. And there's two movies left. #doingitright

You know, I just realized something. I can perfectly sum up how confusing "John Carter" is: I don't even know if the people on Mars were originally from Earth. I don't even know if the aliens are aliens. That's pretty bad.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "John Carter" isn't a bad film, but I just didn't care. It was a stupendously boring and confusing cluster of stuff being thrown at me in front of a bunch of pretty CGI. Don't waste your time. Skip it.