Movie Review: Wedding Trough (1974)

Rating: D-/ Why the hell is this categorized as a ‘romance’ on Imdb?!!

To say that Wedding Trough, also aptly known as The Pig Fucking Movie, is not for everyone would be the understatement of the millennium. This dialogue-free, Belgian art-house film tells the charming story of a man (Dominique Garny) who appears to be somewhat lacking in mental faculties who rapes and miraculously (!) impregnates his pet pig. That’s pretty much the extent of the plot, excluding a couple of grisly spoilers, should you be brave (or crazy) enough to look up the entirety of this film online.

Movie Review: The Witch (2015)

Rating: B+/ The Witch is a good example of a film you should go into blind, knowing next to nothing about it’s story. It’s a bit of a slow burn, definitely not for everyone, though those with the patience to soldier through it’s sluggish bits will be rewarded by the film’s eerie, cynical conclusion. In 1630’s New England, a dysfunctional puritan brood, led by the devoutly Christian William (Ralph Ineson) eke out an existence in the middle of fucking nowhere, shortly after leaving their home village due to religious differences with the town elders. No sooner are they living off the grid, so to speak, than the infant son of William and his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) vanishes seemingly into thin air while their teen daughter (Anya Taylor-Joy) is watching him, and some weird shit starts going down in the woods surrounding their small farmstead.

Movie Review: Lilya 4-Ever (2002)

Rating: A-/ Prostitution is bad, okay, kids? Lukas Moodyson’s tale of a sixteen-year-old girl sold into sexual slavery will scare any man away from hiring a hooker much in the same way that Requiem for a Dream scared us away from heroin abuse. Much of it’s power relies on the performance of Oksana Akinshina as Lilya, a world-weary but somehow naive teen ekeing out an existence in a low-income Estonian suburb. Lilya’s mother (Lyubov Agapova) abandons her willful daughter at home to go run away with her boyfriend to a new life in the U.S., and her aunt (Liliya Shinkaryova) (a grade-a cunt if there ever was one) moves her niece into a complete shithole so she can live in relative comfort in Lilya and her mother’s apartment. In fact, Lilya’s only real lifeline is an abused adolescent named Volodya (Artyom Bogucharskiy,) who becomes her confidante and friend.

Movie Review: 12 Years a Slave (2013)

Rating: A-/ Imagine living a regular, relatively charmed life and being taken from your home, your family, everything you know. Imagine being shipped overnight to a place where you could be both bought and sold as property. It seems so unreal, doesn’t it? But in 1841, it actually happened to Solomon Northup (played here by Chiwetel Ejiofor,) a free black man who was drugged and kidnapped by two con men and sent to the Antebellum South as a slave. Solomon was educated, savvy, everything that was forbidden of blacks during this time, and he soon learned to hide the fact that he could read and write and tried to go unnoticed among the hoards of black faces that passed through insane slave owner Edwin Epps’ (Michael Fassbender)’s cotton fields every day.

30 Hard-to-Watch Film Scenes

Part one (first five movies- divided into six parts)

Some scenes from movies just make you want to scrub them out of your brain so you won’t have to ever think about their disturbing horribleness again. These are some of those movies. Be forewarned, there is some disturbing content in this post so NSFW… obviously. Also, some spoilers may be included in the descriptions.

Movie Review: Puppylove (2013)

    Rating: C/ Puppylove opens with two 14-year-old kids preparing to have sex. The awkwardness and authenticity of this scene made me think the movie itself was going to be more realistic than it was. But no, the ick factor of this film goes way above and beyond a realistic amount and into a level of ridiculousness. Let me explain. The girl in the movie, Diane (Selene Rigot) is a young teen and looks barely old enough to be weaned off Barbie dolls. She also seems to be in love with her ineffectual father (Vincent Perez) (Freud would be proud.) At the beginning, we see the girl, Diane, befriend Julia (Audrey Bastien,) the remarkably self-possessed nymphet daughter of overbearing intellectual parents who is all too aware of her effect on men.

Movie Review: Little Children (2006)

Rating: B+/ So, is the movie called Little Children because the sex offender played by Jackie Earle Haley has a thing for little children or because all the adult characters in the movie act like little children, self-obsessed and bickering? The jury’s still out on that. While the main plotline concerning extramarital affairs and upper-class ennui in an affluent suburban neighborhood is dark and distressing enough, I found the subplot following a child abuser and exhibitionist moving into his mothers’ house after being released from prison (the superior thread by far) absolutely harrowing. Did this movie really make me feel compassion for a guy who gets his kicks flashing his weenie at little kids? What does that say about the film’s aptitude for puzzling moral ambiguity? Moreover, what does it say about me?

Movie Review: Midnight Cowboy (1969)

Rating- A / Even though it seems fairly tame by today’s standards in terms of violence, language, and sexual content, it’s easy to imagine Midnight Cowboy making waves in 1969. Both controversial and extremely daring for it’s time, the film, based on the novel of the same title by Leo James Herlihy, deals with hot-button issues such as prostitution, rape, homosexuality, and childhood sexual abuse. And it transcends the constraints of time and setting to tell an incredible story of innocence lost and outcasts eking out a hardscrabble urban existence that is both archetypal and vitally original.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

Rating: B/  Oh, Franklin. you should have worn the damned condom!

Okay, so maybe Eva Khachaturian wasn’t meant to be a mother. But is she responsible for making her son a monster? Society seems to think so. In the wake of a horrific attack orchestrated by Kevin, a sadistic fifteen-year-old psychopath, Eva (Tilda Swinton) is heckled on the street and sometimes outright attacked by people who lost their loved ones in the tragedy.

    In a swirl of fever dream-like memories, past becomes present, and Eva remembers when her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) and kids Kevin and Celie (Ezra Miller and Ashley Gerasimovich) were still with her. Eva never seemed to really want Kevin, a vile, evil, perpetually incontinent child turned killer teen who mind-fucked his mother from a very early age, but the real question is whether Eva could stop the direction her son was going.

   Franklin, a happy guy in denial of Kevin’s true nature, condemns Eva for not connecting with her little moppet, and Kevin simultaneously gaslights Eva and turns Eva and her well-meaning but dopey husband against each other. Kevin might seem like a child of Satan or some other supernatural incarnate, but really he’s like thousands of other children in the world who really don’t seem to have a conscience- and who better to blame than the boy’s own mother?

Anyone who has seen filmmaker Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher knows she has a propensity for both beautiful cinematography and grueling bleakness. We Need to Talk About Kevin, based on the best-selling novel by the same title by Lionel Shriver, is no exception. The film is intensely visual, with a kind of stream-of-consciousness style, especially around the beginning, and benefits from an outstanding performance by Tilda Swinton as the complex Eva.

Eva seems alternately like a bad mother and all-around ice queen and a woman trying to do best by her family, and one must wonder if her memory (and by extension, the whole movie’s narrative) is reliable as she paints a terrifying portrait of Kevin literally from babyhood to present day. The movie asks the question of whether we can always blame the parents of these children for the kids’ evil actions or if some youngsters are just bad eggs.

The answer to this question is often ambiguous here, but ultimately we decide that no, we can’t ultimately blame Eva for how ‘widdle Kevin’ turned out. It brings up the aged-old question of ‘nature vs. nurture’ in a new and interesting way, and packs a hell of a wallop in the process. This movie will make you think twice about going off the pill and make you wonder if having a little ball of joy of your own is overrated.

The part near the end of the movie at the school when Kevin’s plan goes full circle makes me think of a extra I saw on my parents’ DVD of the original Halloween. Donald Pleasence, who played Sam Loomis, told the director that he could play the sequence when Myers falls out the window after getting shot and somehow escapes into thin air one of two ways; ‘Oh my God, he’s gone’ or ‘I knew this would happen.’ Ultimately they decided on the latter because the former would be, well, too much.

That’s what I think of when I see Eva’s expression as she eyes the bicycle locks Kevin previously ordered in the mail on the doors of the school auditorium. Her expression is less a look of shocked horror as it is a look of resignation. I knew this would happen. On one hand, you wonder why Eva didn’t get her son major psychological help right off the bat, but on the other, could she really of prevented Kevin’s insanity if she had? After all, when you have a blissfully ignorant husband who refuses to believe your son has a problem, how are you going to get an evaluation carried out without his blessing?

All in all, We Need to Talk About Kevin is kind of like watching a train wreck, albeit a visually striking one with a handful of outstanding shots. It makes us women, whether we plan to be mothers or not, wonder how far maternal love goes and if you can be held culpable simply for not loving your child enough. Is it possible to love a monster? I think so. People do it all the time.

But for someone like Eva who obviously didn’t want to be a mother in the first place, her failure to love her son was ultimately ammunition for her evil child to use against her. Eva’s coldness is not an excuse for Kevin’s behavior anymore than Kevin being a difficult baby is an excuse for Eva to make very little effort with her offspring. One persons’ blame does not cancel the others’ out. But that’s not enough for other parent not to convince themselves that they could do better. Given the circumstances, could you?

 

The Death King (Der Todesking) (1990)

There is a moment in Jorg Buttgereit’s shockfest anthology “The Death King” where a man arbitrarily blows his girlfriend’s head off when she comes back from shopping and scolds him for not attending a party. Like this scene, much of the film is random and lacks context, it is literally seventy minutes of people killing each other and themselves. It certainly commands your attention (for a while at least) by beating you over the head with a bit of the old ultra-violence, but for a movie primarily about suicide, it ultimately has as little to say about people who take their own lives as it does about human nature.

While avid fans of underground and ‘transgressive’ films will probably love this movie to bits, for me it seemed like a whole lot of nothing. The premise is absurdly simple- a death-themed short for each day of the week. The shorts range from surprisingly decent (the first one, with the goldfish-loving man poisoning himself in the bathtub) to the totally WTF (the retarded man in Captain America underwear literally beating himself senseless in a small, windowless room where he is presumably (?) held prisoner) and the acting is quite spotty. Many of the actors don’t seem to be acting at all as much as just looking vaguely at the camera while blandly delivering their exceedingly few lines.

So, this movie isn’t big on acting and dialogue, you say? What does it excel in? Well, The Death King does make use of a limited budget and includes some really creepy editing/sound effects. It’s not much, but it might be worth a view by people who are into weird for weird’s sake and low-budget experimental film making. I like weird movies, but I just couldn’t get into this bizarrofest; give me an compelling plot, a character I can care about, anything. Pure experiment can be intriguing, but Eraserhead this is not. It’s actually quite boring, despite all the sadistic violence and eerie sound effects and people offing themselves.

The director claimed in the intro on my DVD that The Death King is a film against suicide. “Of course,” he adds, almost as an afterthought. But how can a movie that offers it’s victims no development and no other alternatives be against suicide? The movie is less an attempt to bring light to a misunderstood act of desperation and more a eager attempt to shock the viewer into thinking it’s ‘deep.’ I can just picture Jorg getting all his friends together, and saying, “Hey guys, let’s make a movie of people waxing themselves. We’ll call it… The Death King.” And his friends, not being entirely sober themselves, let out a collective “Whoa… that’s rad.”

I’m not disturbed by this movie. It takes a lot more than an amateurish attempt at cringe cinema like this to shock me. But The Death King is roughly acted, written, and directed, like a film school project, and above all it gives you no reason to fucking care. I’m not asking for a sentimental and pedestrian motion picture on suicide where the kind, gallant hero goes all ‘Goodbye cruel world,’ leading to an epic confrontation with the film’s antagonist and a tearjerker ending. I like edgy. But if you’re going to make a movie, have something to say. If you’re a self-proclaimed fan of the dark and disturbing with a Salo; 120 Days of Sodom poster on the wall of your college dorm who attributes depth to the arbitrary and grotesque, this movie’s for you. It just wasn’t my cup of tea.