Rating: B+/ Not as crudely irreverent as the title might suggest, The Dirty Parts of the Bible is the surprisingly touching and sweet story of Tobias Henry, the nineteen-year-old sexually frustrated son of a born-again Baptist preacher. Struggling with his sexual urges and skeptical of his father’s teachings, Tobias is sent out on a journey to his uncle’s farm in Glen Rose, Michigan after his dad suffers a bizarre accident and is temporarily blinded. Tobias’ goal is to uncover a large sum of money that his dad hid in a well on his family property years ago.
Rating: C+/ I honestly don’t know if Lynch has created a profound work of art or an extended rape/bondage fetish fantasy on film. Blue Velvet is a movie where nobody behaves like a human being should, characters go on long, bizarre tangents for interminable lengths of time, and the lead female is treated as a hysterical piece of sex meat. Yet there is a kind of an artistry here, in the haunting nature of the imagery and the bizarre atmosphere Lynch invokes that lurks behind a picturesque suburban community. I can’t claim to understand this movie, but there is a genuinely sinister vibe and a beautiful visual element. Continue reading Movie Review: Blue Velvet (1986)→
   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. Continue reading Movie Review: Puppylove (2013)→
While King of Thebes serves as an atmospheric, eerie art house oddity, there is nothing about it that would urge me to recommend it to you. It is seven minutes  long, so I’ll keep my analysis of it brief. A man (Laurence R. Harvey) enters a room and meticulously starts setting up his things for a carefully planned rendezvous. When the object of his affection is presented, things get increasingly icky/strange and it all wraps up to a weird and inexplicable finale.
When I say that Laurence R. Harvey is a terrific actor, I am not simply saying it because we have been online friends for more than a year. He blew us away in a better performance than the film deserved in The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), and he does creepy and disturbed, albeit in this case harmless, again in King Of Thebes. However, after watching ‘Martin’ (Harvey’s wordless villain) rape the back end of a stapled-together line of people in THC2, nothing in this movie presents shocks me that much.
Anyway, Laurence R. Harvey does desperation well, and this short gives him the opportunity to do a kind-off sex scene, make a singularly unappealing ‘Oh’ face, and act generally sketchy. I would love to see him play against type, maybe the huggable teddy bear Uncle, or the love interest. Is that too much to ask? King of Thebes was an okay short and might be enjoyed by people who like weird for weird’s sake.
Despite a rocky start, L.I.E. proves to be a powerful movie in the long run, with great performances from Brian Cox and a young Paul Dano. Dano plays a Howie Blitzer, a fifteen-year-old juvenile delinquent whose dad is an inattentive swindler, and whose friends are leading him down the wrong path quick. The school guidance counselor senses that Howie is different, but Howie thinks that it is too late to be saved, and spirals deeper and deeper into disaffected adolescent crime.
One day Howie and his friends break into the house of Big John Harrigan (Brian Cox,) Irish-American Vietnam veteran and pedophile and steal two valuable guns from him. Harrigan finds Howie and tricks him into thinking he’s a friend of Howie’s late mother’s, and he grooms and attempts to seduce the boy, using threat of legal action for the missing guns to his advantage. Thus begins a icky, and very odd turn of events where the kid realizes that a monster is his only lifeline.
  L.I.E. was originally rated NC-17, and probably crosses the line with child actors as much as it can be crossed in an American movie. Even more disturbing than the pedophilic content and the sweaty, horny, hazed portrayal of out-of-control teen behavior, is the ambiguity concerning the relationship between an adult and a child. It is easy to portray a child molester as a teeth-gnashing sex fiend. It is hard to portray them as human. Don’t get me wrong, I think pedophiles are evil and will get their karma in the afterlife. But many of them were made that way, not born bad. They have human attributes and psychological reasons for doing what they do- to portray them as solely mustache-twirling villains is to deny the complexity of life.
The first ten minutes or so of this movie disappointed me- it seemed like they were trying way too hard to be shocking and edgy. It’s Harmony Korine syndrome- let’s show just how disgusting people can be! The scene where the boy is talking about screwing his sister didn’t ring true to me, nor did the scene with the boys being blown behind street signs. You have to get a little farther in to get to the good part. Brian Cox is chilling. He vacillates between being charming and repugnant. The fact that you begin to like him- just a little- shows the brilliance of the character dynamics.
L.I.E.‘s terrifying. It’s more terrifying than The Conjuring or the Human Centipede movies because it can happen, and is happening… outside our doors, in our neighborhoods, and maybe, just maybe, in our houses. Because Big John is only as scary as the society he inhabits, which neglects our children, raises a generation of ‘latchkey kid,’ and grows them up to be disaffected and attention-starved. It allows these things to happen. An abrupt ending makes you question what it all really meant. Not easy or kid-friendly, but relevant.
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