The Killer Inside Me (2010)

The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom, 2010) Searingly sordid film noir that only reinforces what film noir truly is, rather than merely high-contrast photography and light bleeding through venetian blinds.  Film noir is evil breaking the rules of polite society...any rules... and The Killer Inside Me goes beyond it to even breaking the rules of film noir—nothing is sacred, not even that all-consuming reson d'etre that makes up the twisted spine of plots and double-crosses of film noir—love in the wolf's clothing as lust.  True merciless Sociopathy—the psychopathic disregard of everything—knows no boundaries, has no sweethearts, and at the end, may have no reason at the heart of it. 

Because there is no heart.

Deputy Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) is assigned a bull-shit job in the department: the scion of a big construction contractor is seeing a prostitute on the edge of town, and Daddy wants her gone.  Lou should pay her a visit, be polite, but suggest that her presence is not appreciated and she should look to relocating her cottage-industry.  Doesn't go that way, though.  When Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba) opens the door, sparks fly.  And they're not good sparks.  He's attracted to her but he's got a job to do.  She's attracted to him but she's got a job to do.  He insists.  She deflects.  Then she starts throwing punches.

It's love at first fight.  And before the story ends, Ford will follow a twisted path to revenge with maximum collateral damage, culminating in the type of eruptive fulmination that has precedence in such noir films as White Heat and Kiss Me Deadly.  It's not the "safe" bad manners of the vast majority of noir films but treads along the (hopefully) abandoned railroad tracks at the edge of the worst of human behavior and, without a thought, crosses over—the type of evil that noir wanna-bes like Frank Miller's Sin City only aspire to, but can only reach by rathcheting up the carnage.  Body counts don't count, not if you want to reach the tortured, torturing depths of a writer like Jim Thompson, the author of "The Killer Inside Me."

Thompson was a pulp-writer who used a typewriter as a blunt instrument, and his style so direct that Stanley Kubrick regularly hired him in his early directing career (working on The Killing and Paths of Glory), probably for that quality that Stephen King describes: "Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it."  Such naked lack of self-censorship is at the nuclear core of Thompson's writing—a brave, maybe fool-hardy ability to go there.

So, The Killer Inside Me, with killer instincts towards thoughtless violence (against men...and—especially—women, who, traditionally in noirs, are dispatched with a single, sanitarily unseen gun-shot) will not be everyone's cup of razor blades.*  It's shocking, unholy, and (hopefully) repulsive to the viewer.  But, it plumbs the depths of the abyss to see just how black noir can be. 




* I spent the end of last year waiting for it to make it to theaters.  Never did.  Instead, I first encountered it on the shelf at Blockbuster.  The film is just too rough and dark to make a profit in a theater-run.

Fantastic Four II: The Rise of the Silver Surfer

Galactus Intolerant

Well, first, a confession: I'm not a fan of Jack Kirby, the artist who collaborated with Stan Lee to produce the Fantastic Four comic, the self-described "World's Greatest Comic Magazine!!" In some circles, this is considered blasphemy. I find Kirby's work good in the macro--he knew how to design a page to draw the eye--but cringe-inducing in the micro--he had very creative ways to convey human anatomy, for which he is given a pass from the folks who usually complain about those things.* He would occasionally hit on a good idea, but usually the stuff he created was really "out there," if not downright juvenile. For every "Silver Surfer," (which is a pretty silly concept, let's face it, though it "worked."), there was his Apokolips Figure of Death, "The Black Racer," who was an armored black guy...on skis. The guy flew through the air...on skis...with poles...and would appear right before you died. If I was dying, I'd could buy my life passing before my eyes, or a winged angel, or Neil Gaiman's little Goth-girl. But, a flying guy on skis? Pretty stupid. At least I'd get a good laugh before I kicked the bucket.

But I was a big fan of the old Hanna-Barbera "Fantastic Four" cartoon in the 60's, so I've always been a little nostalgic (which means, I look at it with blinders on) for the FF, no matter how wide Kirby drew their fore-heads. I didn't see the first FF movie because the trailer looked atrociously cheesey. I just didn't bother. I figured I'd catch up with it on video (which I never did). But I did want to see "The Rise of the Silver Surfer," because if its one thing those early Fantastic Four stories did well, they produced a truly imaginative cosmic scope. I wanted to see how it re-produced on the Big Screen.

The answer: not bad. When FF2:TROTSS (what an unfortunate acronym!) concentrates on the heinous exploits of The Silver Surfer--the name says all you need to know, and as you might guess, he talks profoundly as if he was preaching Shakespeare--and the approach of its Master, the planet-consuming Galactus, it does a fine job, recreating that iconic Marvel sense of "I don't know what it IS, but it sure is BIG!" In fact, the climactic battle for this film is more focussed and a considerably better set-piece than the Big Events of the latest Superman, Batman, X-men and Spiderman films, which all tended to over-complicate things and fall apart at the end. There are shots that stay with you, like the one where The Surfer parts trees in a forest, and is, suddenly appears, incongruously non-organic in the natural setting. The Galactus-like shadow passing over and disrupting the rings of Saturn.

Where the thing (not "The Thing") falls flat is in the other 90% of the movie, and a lot of it is just inexplicable. The acting is...troubling. Andre Braugher's in this, and he commands the screen by holding back, while everybody else is busy flailing. Michael Chiklis' "Thing"/Ben Grimm is terrific, but the considerable make-up work doesn't suggest rock so much as the cracked surface of a chocolate cookie. I expected to hate Chris Evan's Johnny Storm, aka "The Human Torch," but I found the actor's take on the character fun and his portrayal of it very assured (and Johnny has the dramatic character arc in this one). But who told Julian McMahon that arch-villain Dr. Doom should be portrayed like an ineffectual Euro-trash fashion designer? And with all the blonde actresses in the world, whose bright idea was it to cast Jessica Alba who 1) can't act--her best scenes in this are when she's...unconscious--and 2) isn't remotely someone who could pass for a) blonde, or b) Johnny Storm's sister. And Ioan Gruffud just doesn't have the gravitas needed to pull off the role of uber-genius Reed Richards (he has hair problems, too--the grey at his temples comes and goes) and, if anything, he suggests the bland heroes that inhabited the Gerry Anderson puppet shows.

Director Tim Story keeps everything brightly lit, and it hums along editorially, but there are lots of things that just make ya wince--the usual Soap Opera, Marvel-style, here represented by Reed and Sue's difficulties dealing with fame and a celebrity wedding, an inexplicable and underdeveloped "Wedding Bells are Breakin' Up that Old Gang o' Mine" dead-end that makes a Big Unintended Statement against Diversity before it's abandoned, and another dance routine with Mr. Fantastic dancing his own version of the Funky Chicken, or is that the Rubber Chicken (Story does give him a wierdly apt Gene Kelly "Gotta Dance!" moment).

And, again, too much with the Stan Lee cameo! For any future Marvel movie, can we just give him a sign to hang around his neck that says "I USED TO BE STAN LEE," and place him randomly in crowd scenes? I think that would be more effective than stopping the movie cold so we can have an uniterrupted scene of Stan.

So, bad movie...with some good aspects to it. But if there's an FF3, they need to go back to the casting stage if there's going to be any improvement.

"Fantastic Four 2: The Rise of the Silver Surfer" is a cheap rental.

* I remember reading a letter in some comics magazine written by Bill Mumy (as "Billy" Mumy, he played Will Robinson on "Lost in Space"). He was responding to an interview with Carmine Infantino, who was editor-in-chief at DC when Kirby was working there, and Infantino had some critical things to say about Kirby's work, to which Mr. Mumy took great umbrage, and declared that he was going to have to re-evaluate Infantino's own artwork, given his words regarding "The King." I would say that my opinion of Mr. Mumy's work might have been influenced by his letter, but it wasn't--I've always thought he was a talentless hack.