Blue Ruin

BLUE RUIN                B                     

USA  (92 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Jeremy Saulnier

Jeremy Saulnier was the superb cinematographer in Matthew Porterfield’s experimental films HAMILTON (2006) and Putty Hill (2010), while making his first feature MURDER PARTY (2007, which could easily be the title of this film as well), a kind of comic Halloween bloodbath, while still holding onto a career in advertising, creating product videos for Kraft Foods, IBM, Viacom, and the NHL.  This second film was the winner of the Director’s Fortnight FIPRESCI Award at Cannes 2013, a marked upgrade in critical acclaim, an ultra stylish revenge thriller made on the cheap, featuring the director’s childhood best friend as the lead actor and executive producer, Macon Blair as Dwight, a homeless man living in his rusted out blue Pontiac on the beach, where the opening sequence replicates Morris Engel’s often overlooked American indie film Little Fugitive (1953), where Dwight similarly hides out under protective cover at the local amusement park, also picking up disposable bottles left laying about and returning them to recycling centers for cash, where immediately we get the feel this is an eccentric and possibly creepy guy living on the fringes.  The cops pick him up not for anything he’s done, but to warn him that the convicted dual murderer of his mother and father is being released from jail soon, which sets a series of events in motion, such as an ominous visit to the local gun shop.  Saulnier does a good job playing with the audience’s expectations, always throwing them a bit off kilter, using plenty of odd humor throughout.  What this really comes down to is watching a geeky loner who has spent his life avoiding people, who barely talks to anyone, suddenly going after the Cleland family, savagely gruesome, grindhouse B-movie characters in the mold of Rob Zombie’s THE DEVIL’S REJECTS (2005), a film that took sadistic trailer trash and elevated it to an art form. 

The audience knows Dwight is in over his head, and every conceivable plan he comes up with goes haywire, but Saulnier amps up the suspense throughout, knowing full well that the audience can’t take their eyes off this foolhardy attempt to exact revenge for his family.  Why he feels the need to pull this off, we’ll never know, as this writer/director confidently leaves out plenty of back story, luring us right into the middle of the action, which at times is fast and fierce, while at other times there’s a lull between the storms, where like a cat, Dwight disappears and licks his wounds.  Acting against type, Dwight surprises us with is ingenuity, though it’s sheer damn luck that seems to get him out of situations, certainly not forethought, as most of the time he responds to pure kneejerk reactions, such as the moment of truth when he springs upon his prey like a man possessed, an unflinching moment of violence reminiscent of a similar moment in Jacques Audiard’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 A Prophet ....  Once he crosses the line, there’s no turning back, as neither he nor the audience have a clue what’s in store for him.  The things that catch his eye are often weirdly amusing, or just plain odd, but he has the good sense to rely upon the help of others, starting out with his sister Sam (Amy Hargreaves), who nearly busts his chops for reviving this blood feud, as she’s now with two children and a home, making her a convenient target.  From that point on, the film seems to take on a life of its own, as it’s Jamie Lee Curtis preparing to meet the bogeyman in HALLOWEEN (1978).  

Tracking down another friend is inspired by a scan through Dwight’s high school yearbook, where Devin Ratray as local war veteran Ben is the best thing in the picture, as he steals every scene he’s in.  Ben isn’t sure what to make of Dwight’s situation at all, and since he’s the one usually perceived as having a screw loose, Dwight must be in sick trouble, but he tries his best to help him out, only sensing what deep shit he must be in.  But Dwight, being who he is, continues to fuck up, but he’s a lovable loser who’s forced to turn into some kind of super sleuth and RAMBO-like warrior on the loose.  Vigilante justice is a genre unto itself, and this director seems to enjoy changing the rules of the game, shifting genres, and putting his lead character into ever more increasing danger, adding dark noirish elements throughout, anything to heighten the atmospheric mood.  The film is fraught with tension, but takes a predictable turn by the end, where the story simply runs out of options, though seeing Eve Plumb from The Brady Bunch (1969-74) as the redneck mama urging her boys to kill this son-of-a-bitch has a charm all its own.  It gets a little dicey, where family secrets are finally revealed, but this plays out like mafia families who vow revenge, refusing to back down under any circumstances, as if it’s a matter of honor.  Well, there’s little honor to speak of, and the moral grounds crossed by all participants keeps the audience guessing what will happen next.  It’s a taut thriller, dark and highly entertaining, continually atmospheric, well written and well directed, with a refreshing take on familiar themes.      

American Mary

AMERICAN MARY               D+   

Canada  (100 mi)  2012  d:  Jen and Sylvia Soska         Official site

Doesn’t everybody just love a good horror movie?  Well, that’s not exactly what this is, as instead it’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek stab at torture porn, a subgenre of one of the most hideously gruesome forms of sadistic horror, and one that seems to have little if any redeeming value.  Apparently some find this sort of thing entertaining, however, as evidenced by Eli Roth’s two HOSTEL (2005, 2007) movies, the first grossing ten times the initial budget, and the highly profitable SAW (2004) franchise, where the original was made for $1.2 million but grossed over $100 million dollars worldwide, churning out nearly one movie a year ever since, where the latest, SAW VII (2010), is a 3D effort.  While torture porn appeals to the basest form of crude and grotesque behavior, featuring explicit scenes of sadistic torture, dismemberment, and mutilation, where the gory action sequences are presented as freak-show sensationalism, the effects of watching this stuff is largely unknown, though one would think the mentally unstable should stay away.  Some films, like Rob Zombie’s THE DEVIL’S REJECTS (2005), initially thrown into the mix, probably don’t belong, as they pay homage to earlier 70’s era drive-in, grindhouse B-movies, representative of the golden age of exploitation, schlock films filled with buckets of blood and gore, where the melodramatic hysteria is met with equally over-the-top visualizations, all made for next to nothing, usually for satiric effect.  The Kuchar Brothers, for instance, were masters of the low budget aesthetic, working alongside 60’s underground legends Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, which eventually spawned John Waters and his outsiderist cult films of the 70’s, a director who expressed an equal amount of joy and influence from highbrow “art” films and sleazy exploitation films.  But the father of modern horror pictures is Dario Argento, who interestingly began his career as a screenwriter teamed up with Bernardo Bertolucci and Sergio Leone for the spaghetti western ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968) before venturing out on his own, where his claim to fame is giallo films combining high quality, art film production values with nudity, gore, and shocking horror, not the least of which might feature throat slashings or decapitations along with unusually stylish camerawork.  It’s the unflinching content of high production slasher or splatter films that establishes a connection to torture porn, where only snuff films remain an untapped exploitive resource. 

Unbelievably, even a snuff film was presented for the first time at the Cannes Film festival this year, according to Scott Roxborough and Patrick Brzeski from The Hollywood Reporter (Cannes: Ultra-Violence Peppers Competition Selection - The ...). 

Pushing the envelope furthest is Atrocity Exhibition, showing in the Short Film corner, which its director Ebadur Rahman has described as “Cannes’ first snuff film.” Says Rahman: “Cannes has been showing fake ‘extreme content’ for ages: Any film by Tarantino, Takeshi Miike, or Kim Ki Duk is at least as violent as mine. What’s different about Atrocity Exhibition is, I didn’t fake it.” Asked whether viewers might have to look away during screenings, Rahman says: “I would hope so.”

Not only has the SAW franchise legitimized torture porn, providing a large audience and a new avenue into horror films, always a lucrative movie business,  but South Korean filmmakers Park Chan-wook’s OLD BOY (2003) winning the Jury Prize at Cannes (a Tarantino favorite) and Kim Ki-duk’s Pieta (2012) winning the Best Film at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, all but give the genre the artistic seal of approval.  Not so fast, some may scream, as some parted company with Park Chan-wook’s next offering, SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE (2005), where Cinema Scope and freelance writer Michael Sicinski writes an open letter of protest to New York Times critic Manohla Dargis in condemnation of the film (see reviews dated 9/15, 2005 Toronto International Film Festival), calling it “a repugnant piece of shit.”  This kind of outrage is a natural extension of the product, as it’s meant to be revolting, just as Mary Harron’s over-the-top use of surreal horror in American Psycho (2000), something this slightly resembles, is meant to be outrageous, which brings us to Canada’s the Soska sisters, Sylvia and Jen, interviewed here by The Guardian’s Steve Rose (Guardian: Soska Sisters):    

Horror was a natural direction for the Soskas. As kids, they'd lurk in the horror section of the video store looking at the backs of the boxes, they say. "Mom eventually caved in and let us watch Poltergeist when we were 10," says Sylvia. "We were like, 'We can handle it mom.' Then bedtime came and we were scared… fucking… shitless. And my mother did something that would forever change the way we look at horror movies. She sat Jen and me down and explained what we had actually seen. She explained the director, the actors, the prosthetics, the sets, everything. And she told us how these were very talented artists who collaborated with the intention of scaring the audience. We were like, 'Wait a minute. It can be your job to scare people for a living?'"

The eventual film-making course didn't go well, though. They became so disillusioned that their graduation project was a fake trailer, partly inspired by Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse and partly by the film school's list of things not to put in a graduation movie. "Necrophilia, bestiality, vomiting… we put in everything we could," says Jen. "Half the audience walked out, and the other half was laughing so hard you couldn't hear the intentionally disgusting language."

Horror tends to be an exclusively all-male domain, where women are used as fetishistic objects to scare out of their wits, from Fay Wray in KING KONG (1933) to Jamie Lee Curtis in HALLOWEEN (1978), where scantily clad girls are seen staying in a secluded cabin in the woods from I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978) to THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2011), but there are notable exceptions, such as Takashi Miike’s AUDITION (1999) where the roles are reversed.  AMERICAN MARY will not be for everyone, as it’s graphically disturbing throughout, but it is a horror film with a uniquely female perspective.  Much like Tarantino, the Soska sisters not only have an admiration for the horror genre, but a certain reverence for its form, where the film is basically a series of horror set pieces filled with twisted and strangely unlikable characters.  Seen almost entirely through the impressionable eyes of Katharine Isabelle as Mary (talk about a working actress, IMDb lists 10 movies made after this one with another four either filming or in post production), an attractive young medical student who is having trouble making ends meet, painting a much rosier picture to her Hungarian grandmother on the phone, but despite getting harassed by an over-controlling professor, even though she’s the best and most promising student in class, she needs to make money fast.  So she answers an ad for what she thinks is a dancer at a strip club, but due to her meticulously detailed resumé that indicates she’s in medical school, the sleazy owner Billy (Antonio Cupo) pays $5000 cash up front and sucks her into an under-the-table, highly specialized offer of stitching up mutilated bodies that have been pulverized and left for dead from vicious beatings.  Afterwards, she immediately starts receiving calls from the Diane Arbus world of the bizarre requesting “extreme body modification.” While Mary is a professed innocent to this looming underworld of desired body disfigurement and mutilation, where despite the unpleasantness associated with the often gruesome task, the lucrative offers are extremely generous, making it difficult to turn down. 

The film’s saving grace is the exaggerated tone throughout, something of a satirical spoof, where Mary has an absurdly comic dialogue with many of her patients, some of whom feel more like a childlike collection of dolls or specimens than human beings, where it’s as if her subconscious has a voice through her exotic bodywork, giving her a titillating sense of empowerment.  Dressed in skimpy outfits, stalkings and stilleto’s, she’s always dressed for the male idealization, as if Xena the Warrior Princess has suddenly been transformed into someone’s idea of a male sexual fantasy, where working out of her own apartment, she becomes an underground cult sensation, dropping out of medical school and maintaining a thriving practice, where she quickly picks up the affectionate online nickname “Bloody Mary.”  The Soska sisters themselves appear onscreen as a pair of batshit crazy sisters that surgically wish to exchange arms with one another, so there are obviously other issues at play here, all of them disturbing, including an underlying thread throughout of nonchalant sadism, becoming an anatomically precise horror show of disfigurement.  Delving into SAW territory, Mary even holds her professor captive (as it was after all he who crossed the line), as she experiments with particularly difficult procedures on him just for practice, leaving him something of a whimpering human stump.  Where the film does tread new ground, expressed with demented relish, is portraying a highly distinctive, feminist sense of controlling one’s own body image while also adding, just for good measure, a righteous sense of feminist anger and revenge, going where no one has gone before, so to speak, as it has the desired effect the sisters are looking for, where much of what we see is pretty disgusting.  The heavily artistic production design might actually be called outlaw biker fantasy porn, as biker guys get off on drinking heavily, naked girls, and beating the crap out of people, and here they get to watch their fantasy sweetheart stitch their mangled victims back together again, where every last detail is explicitly prohibited outlaw behavior.  While the underlying comic element may be subversive, there were no laughs heard in the theater, as the experience is meant to be nauseating and revolting.  This may be highly appealing for deviants of all kinds, or people who enjoy watching sadistic behavior for their theatrical entertainment, but there remains an open question whether this graphically grotesque material adds anything significant to the world of cinema.