Six Ways to Sunday: (1997. dir: Adam Bernstein) Whoa! Sick and twisted! It feels justified in styling itself a dark comedy because its tongue is shoved so far into its cheek that its face is deformed. Certainly it's not comic in the sense that it tries to use humor at all. The only laughs it wants from you are the shock-value groans inspired by the grossness or vulgarity or unbearable moments of awkwardness or sudden violence. It's not the lowest form of comedy, I guess, but it's probably the least enjoyable one.
This is a modern gangster story about a young man with severe Oedipal problems who, between his long-suffocated rage and a peculiar sexual peccadillo which demands that he commit violence in order to get hard, finds that he possesses unusually strong talents as a hitman. Technically, the movie is well done, with fine acting, editing, camera work, and particularly good lighting. Reedus is especially well photographed, showcasing his subtlety of facial gesture to great effect. He gives us a believable character arc, from graceless boy to suave assassin who turns back into a clumsy kid when his mom is around.
If there is a weak link in the cast, it's Deborah Harry in a thankless turn as the predatory, maternal harridan. She has good moments and bad, but it's a tough role, with an absolute zero chance of garnering the smallest sliver of audience sympathy, and absolute zero chance any of us will ever relax in her presence. All we, the audience, can do is tense up and endure until she's off the screen and we can loosen up a little with some more prettily-colored ultraviolence.
It's a story which finds its pleasure in flaunting its perversity. At the end, young Harry (Reedus) says, "I didn't come out clean. I took a bath, but I didn't come out clean." And that about sums it up. I feel exactly the same way.
Rating: two stars
Reedus Factor: five stars
*SPOILER ALERT*
8mm: (1999. dir: Joel Schumacher) My heart always sinks when I'm watching the opening credits roll and I see the words, "directed by Joel Schumacher." Still, although he has a penchant for taking a potential piece of gold and making shit of it, he also has a way of taking a piece of shit and making... not gold, exactly, but a less stinky piece of shit, anyway. I like his editing on this one (by frequent collaborator Mark Stevens). Very smooth, and the camera movement, too, smooth and creeping without drawing attention to itself. Schumacher loves building up tension in a scene the cheating way, through the use of bombast-music. Although it's a dirty trick and I hate it, I have to admit he (along with his collaborators) knows how to do it well. Then there's one great, climactic scene in which a death metal record comes to a screeching halt and the tension is built by the sound of the phonograph needle stuck and repeating in that end groove. Very nice.
As far as the story goes, though, why does anyone think it's a good idea to make a picture like this? Why would anyone pour money into it? It wasn't a good idea when Schrader made Hardcore, why would it be now? A billion-dollar movie fixated on showing us the inner workings of the snuff-porn industry? Who exactly was the audience for this?
This is the gist of it: an apparent snuff film is found in the private safe of a dead tycoon; his grieving widow hires a private dick (Nicolas Cage) to trace it, find out if it's real, hoping that it's not. He follows the trail of a missing girl to Hollywood and delves into its seedy underworld, risking the loss of his soul, just as George C. Scott before him. The moral of the piece is succinctly spoken early on by Joaquin Phoenix's Max, a wonderfully, drily funny kid working in a porn store: "You dance with the devil, the devil doesn't change. He changes you." So we delve further and further into the world of porn and potential snuff, hanging out with dirtbags played by James Gandolfini, Peter Stormare and Chris Bauer, all having a whale of a good time.
But first, we see Norman Reedus in his single scene. He's a kid whose dreams have prematurely died and his heart with it, a cold-blooded, nasty-talking kid doing a dime in the state pen for a B&E. Reedus knows just what to do with it, but we only get him for a few minutes.
After that, it's a matter of following along as the self-righteous vigilante violence gathers steam. There's a saving grace, in that Cage has that great, broken-looking, dissolute face and at the end, when he's bravely smiling at his wife and daughter, who are the only reason he didn't lose his soul entirely, the smile is so brittle and threadbare that we are willing to overlook the fact that this just barely escapes being, as I so recently described a different Reedus vehicle, "a prurient pile of crap masked as hardcore piety."
Rating: two and a half stars, creeping up on three
Reedus Factor: two stars
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