Just because I spend my time trying on my favourite dresses doesn't mean that I don't hate cry babies. Like, one time I was in the cinema when I got this thick cokey, nosebleed. I looked down and my white shirt was a red shirt. Then this hulk next to me picked me out of my seat, carried me out of the theatre, and dialled an ambulance. I assured him I was fine and walked straight back into the theatre. He made me miss the trailers. I like the trailers because I like to see what's coming soon.
Other crybabies include: Them people who don't eat veal, and the people who get upset about Michael Winterbottom movies.
I went to see that film the Killer Inside Me and I honestly didn't know what all the fuss was about. I mean it is definetly a gruesome film, but this is not like, Gaspar Noe, its not even Tarantino really. There is a scene were Jessica Alba gets her eyes plucked out. Its pretty bad, but I mean just don't go and see the movie you know? The thing that really pissed people off was that the women in the movie seem to enjoy gettin' a rapin'.
Hence the same outcry in the press, that greets every second offering from MW. Bare people walked out of a press screening in Berlin, and apparently some douche bag stood up at the screening at Sundance and shouted "How dare you Sundance."
Which is all fine, apart from the fact that you get the impression that MW loves it. Every time his mid-life crisis flutters into existence, some hack comes out and pens this nonsense melodrama which casts MW as a tartan, Fuckaneer, jamming both barrels into the gob of a Gilbert and Sullivan Appreciation Society treasurer. I mean he must love that you know?
The second thing that comes out of all of this, is that MW gets right on the blower to Newsnight Review or Southbank or something and gets them to give him an interview were he explains to the dumbfound proles that the violence of his movies is loaded with irony or some subtlety which they obviously missed. He gets off scott-free and makes his critics look pretty dim.
So he went on Radio 4 the other day and was like "This film is completely like, unreliable narratory. Ergo, anyone who thinks that the women actually enjoyed the violence or whatever, have totally got the wrong end of the stick. Psyche."
There's two reasons why this is bollocks. One is because, if this is the point of the movie, he's fucked it up. The second is that its a well old idea, and one that didn't need to be done again, because its been done loads by well cleverer people than MW.
The driving thing of the whole film was the schizophrenic behaviour of Lou Ford (the main character played by Casey Affleck) prone to personality shifts (from loveable bumpkin to rapacious nutjob). So MW's point is that we see the rape of the girls purely through his eyes or whatever. But its pretty haphazardly done. The whole thing is riddled with Freudian nudgewinkery and flashbacks. Occasionally there's these real hamfisted bits of fourth wall breaking, when MW asks an otherwise admirable Affleck to mum and gurn at the camera. Its really balls all that side of it actually.
But the point is, its not as interesting or pioneering as MW wants you to think. I just came out of that cinema and wanted to put posters up everywhere telling people to see Detour, Edgar Ulmer's 1945 movie. That's how to do unreliable narrator so that its snappy, and subtle, and absorbing and really, really creepy.
It always feels a bit shit when you hear directors making excuses for their movies. Its especially bad when the movie itself is such a shabby, shit little number.
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