(1999. dir: Troy Duffy) Yup. It's the biggest, smoothest, most utterly shameless Boy Movie I ever saw. It's got verve, style, panache, joie de vivre, good actors, a stupid plot, bad dialogue, all the bigotry and misogyny and jokey homophobia you expect from Boy Movies, all fashioned to fit tightly around the silliest scenes of violence you'll ever witness. The director, god love him, has vision. There's a steady, graceful hand (Adam Kane's) at the camera. Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus are fabulous. Willem Dafoe has a gleefully good time as the faggoty FBI guy in charge of the investigation, and Ron Jeremy is downright inspired as a mob slimeball who suffers a visit from Nemesis.
I think we can all agree that Quentin Tarantino has provided both magnificent wonderment and equal trouble for the cinephile at large: a good "rule of thumb" (see this movie for a bad scene explaining that phrase) might be that like Hemingway before him, nobody but Tarantino should try to write like Tarantino. Despite the considerable quality of these actors, most of the attempts at humor clunk to the floor in an embarrassing fashion. There's way too much yelling, and not one ounce, not one single whisper of subtlety anywhere. It has, however, got a nice, inventive, Tarantino-inspired playing-with-time structure, in which we see the lead-up to each massacre, then skip to the cops trying to piece together the events, and that works well.
But make no mistake: these are not "crimes" or "shootings", they are all, without exception, bloody massacres done self-righteously by these "angelic" boys suffering an utter certainty that God (they are good Catholic boys) is on their side, and that those they choose to slay are Bad. They do not discriminate between killer mafiosos and just some poor schlubs jerking off in porno booths: all are evil by their own infallible judgments, and so deserving of immediate and gruesome murder. (An interesting side-note: amiable as these two brothers are when they're not murdering folks, and as gorgeous as they are, thoughtfully stripping off their kits so that we can enjoy their musculatures, they seem to be completely asexual, even anti-sexual, which makes the film's fixation on homosexuality rife with implication. I'm sure these guys fixed that in the sequel, as some of their homophobic friends must have pointed out the obvious.) I'm not one to try and foist a uniform sense of ethics on film-makers, but just this week some kid took an automatic weapon into a mall upstate, and only yesterday another kid committed probably the most sickening mass shooting ever, at a grade school, for chrissake, and so can we please, please have some intelligent semblance of ethics in our filmmaking? Not forced by a new Hays Code, but can we all just grow up a little? take some personal responsibility?
(Now I've had my rant, let me say I firmly believe that ultimately the buck stops with the boy in question. We all go through crap trying to grow up, and most of us, no matter how many video games or movies or Black Sabbath records we have, never pick up the AK-47. The responsibility lies not with film-makers, but with the human holding the gun. And with the Republicans who allowed him to get it with such ease and facility. That allowed, can we all put our heads together and figure out ways to inspire the youth of America without intoxicating them with the adrenaline rush of the kill?)
I thought I might watch Overnight, the documentary about this director's bumpy rise and ignominious crash, but the idea of spending time with this guy without the ameliorating, intercessory influence of Flanery and Reedus is just too exhausting.
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