Floating: (1997. dir: William Roth) It's one of those movies about a kid (once again, Reedus is playing younger than his age) asking the question, "What do I do with my life?" and getting Hollywood's only answer, "Either college, or crime. There is NO THIRD CHOICE." (Which is a funny message coming from Hollywood. Think Woody Allen went to college? thrown out of NYU after one semester, then dropped out of CCNY. Kevin Bacon, Jack Benny, Naomi Watts, Quentin Tarantino, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine, Peter Bogdanovich: all high school drop-outs. Brando was expelled from both high school and military academy. Paul Thomas Anderson? left NYU after two days. David Fincher? jumped straight from high school into Lucasfilm to work on the ewoks, and Humphrey Bogart flunked out of Andover. Charlie Chaplin never finished the English equivalent of grade school. Norman Reedus? one semester at Bethany College, in the Swedish part of Kansas, in 1987.)
This boy, Van, lives on the edge of the '90s punk rock scene (no women in the mosh pit, bands with heavy-muscled, sweaty, shirtless, Rollins-type singers) but the film itself sports a super-sweet soundtrack by David Mansfield (the fellow who was my personal favorite part of Heaven's Gate). It's ostensibly a coming-of-age movie about a straight boy finding his way without sacrificing his honor, but in truth it's a fairly thinly disguised gay fantasy with a Madame Butterfly finale.
Flawed as it is (slowly paced, with an unevenly-told story), it's a beautiful coming-out party for Reedus. It's his first big film: not his best work, but he's already strong enough to bear it aloft, and the whole thing radiates outward from him, from the easy command of his presence.
Rating: two and a half stars
Reedus Factor: five stars
*SPOILER ALERT*
Pulse: (2002. dir: Marcus Adams) On a late night drive, a mother and teenaged daughter bicker and hallucinate. By the end of the night, they have fought their way free from the clutches of a murderous cult. Or have they?
The story is so disjointed and dreamlike that it's possible it only makes sense if you think of it as a fever-dream in the pill-addled, half-asleep, at-the-end-of-her-tethered mind of the mother (Madeleine Stowe). Mischa Barton is the petulant girl-child, nubile of body but still a girl elsewise. There's a lot of tricksey photography and effects which bolster the dream-quality, but can be annoying until you sink into the aesthetic. The only successful way to watch this, in fact, may be late at night in a fever or a dream-stupor, so you can turn your left brain off and let the right brain play.
Reedus gets a different kind of turn as a lurking, watcher guy, The Recovery Man, he's called, the guy in the tow-truck. These cultees, they kill people by causing auto accidents and lure girls estranged from their families into the ongoing rave in the back of their empty oil tanker. The Jim Jones is played by Jonathan Rhys-Myers, who is good at that sort of thing. He's the sort of guy who can slice his tongue open, slow and sexy for shock appeal, then still has no trouble speaking clearly. Lots of minor mutilation in this one. We watch close-up the piercing of a belly button, that sort of thing. There's a lot of fascination with the mingling of cars and blood, sort of Crash-inspired, but nowhere near as inspired as Crash.
And what's with the razor blade ending? What is it supposed to mean, exactly, beyond a gesture of ill-defined menace? How did it get into the car? are we to take it as confirmation that the whole thing is a folie-a-deux, a shared and manifested hallucination from the two women's brains, and the razor blade is a sign that although the night of terror is through, the underlying tumult which launched it into being still lurks at the threshhold, and may, like Dracula, rise up again?
Well, OK. When I put it that way, it's far more interesting. I initially read it to mean the film-maker didn't know how to end the story.
Rating: two stars, maybe more late at night if you're stoned
Reedus Factor: three stars
photo courtesy of fanzone 50: http://www.fanzone50.com/Norman/Pulse.html
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