IMDb #120 Review: The Hunt (2012)

Source: Wikipedia

Pedophilia is a touchy subject.

Joking aside, this scenario is my nightmare. A forty-something single man working in a day care (already an awful idea) gets accused of abusing a kid in his day care. With his man-parts. And everybody believes the confused little person whose brain hasn't even fully developed yet.

Recipe for a ruined life. Combine a precocious kindergarten girl; her porn-crazed older brother; poorly phrased comments to the worst person imaginable, a paranoid old lady; and a provincial community of inflammatory idiots. At least the other kids have the excuse of being young and dumb when they hop aboard the hunt-the-pedo bandwagon.

He loses his job. His girlfriend. Visitation rights to his young son. Friends and family shun him. the community ostracizes him, the the point where he can't shop at the grocery store without risk of bodily assault. He can't replace the windows fast enough before more rocks crash through. And anybody who dares sympathize with the (alleged!) pervert suffer the same fate.

Most horrifying is the sheer plausibility, crystallized by convincing delivery from a talented cast. (Mads Mikkelsen is a madman.) Just watching fake things happen makes you irrationally furious.

Soon the little girl who inadvertently kicked off this madness can't dissuade the modern mob from their kangaroo-court vigilante justice.

And this shit goes on for a long time. Up till the saddest Christmas mass ever, when the outcast mere attendance makes a scene. (Then his impassioned plea for sanity makes the scene.)

The man's last shot at redemption is, pardon the poor taste in word choice, touching.

This kind of thing would never happen in America. They'd immediately boil him alive in a tub of HIV-positive hobo splooge. Which they keep on hand at all times for delicate cases such as this.

115 minutes.

IMDb #122 Review: Heat (1995)

Source: Wikipedia

Al Pacino as a depressed workaholic LAPD detective? Robert de Niro as an emotionally detached safecracker saving up to leave his life of crime? And there's a passive-aggressive man-date scene where they sip coffee and snipe at each other? WHERE DO I SIGN UP.

This glorious collaboration begins with an armored truck robbery, which sets in motion all the horrible things to follow.

Meet the crime team as they make off with a motherlode of bearer bonds. A paranoid millionaire wants them back; the thieves don't want blood. They want to settle down with their wives and children. Well, except for one lonely bastard without love or a lover, and the maniac who just wants to steal things and kill people.

Heat has nothing to do with molecular excitation. It refers to the lonely bastard's motto: "Allow nothing in your  life you can't walk out on in thirty seconds flat, if you spot the heat around the corner." In essence, when the going gets tough, drop everything and ditch your buddies.

At the worst possible time, he falls for a bookworm/graphic designer girl. She might just pull him out of the crime world, if he weren't such a greedy vindictive asshole. If he weren't bringing the team back together for one last big job. Even if the heat has cranked up and the law is closing in on them.

Meet the detective. He tracks the team on scant evidence and recovers from embarrassing losses to their superior instincts. For a while.

But while the men play cat and mouse, their significant women and children suffer in isolated ignorance. Spouses squabble. Yes, the movie may be well-made, but the protracted arguments grow unpleasant quite quickly.

Until the bank robbery. Which devolves into the single best shootout I've ever seen in any movie. Mad props to the sound designer who made gunshots echo off streets and skyscrapers. Anyway, this amazing scene puts in in motion the other horrible things to follow. The giant scissors of justice snip the knotted plot threads without mercy or compassion.

It goes to show, real-life high-stakes games of cops-and-robbers only destroy the lives of everybody involved. So when the deuteragonists finally square off, knowing that innocent loved ones suffer no matter who wins, it's not a performance you can just walk away from with no lingering attachments.

170 minutes.

IMDb #179 Review: There Will Be Blood (2007)

Source: Wikipedia

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a charismatic misanthrope transforms a sleepy western hamlet into an oil-drenched boomtown, through the power of personality and sociopathy.

First lesson: early fossil fuel extraction was grueling, messy, and crazy hazardous. Second: don't piss off the soft-spoken fire-and-brimstone young preacher. Though his family used to own the oil land, he still owns the souls of the religious community.

As the egocentric oil baron, Daniel Day-Lewis steals the show along with everything else, again thanks to insane method acting. His bristly mustache, clipped speech, raspy voice, and barely restrained intensity dominate the screen, and every inch of property his boots tread on. When provoked, his ire surges to the surface like an oil gusher.

His young son, his protege, suffers the brunt of his father's antisocial inclinations. When a mining accident strikes, as they do, the kid becomes broken goods. Between his successor's fading out and a half-brother appearing, the father takes steps to underscore his asshattery.

(About the soundtrack. Just as you seem to like unsympathetic protagonists, hope you like strings. Droning strings, thrumming strings, shrieking strings, singing strings. Expect lots.)

So this confirmed douchebag becomes filthy rich by slurping up the blood, sweat, and tears of the little people like a delicious milkshake. He builds a mansion with a marble-floored foyer and a bowling alley.

The title fulfills its promise; there actually is blood, eventually. This is hardly a gore-soaked spaghetti western, but more a simmering pressure cooker that emits intermittent bursts before it explodes. But the final shouting match, in the acoustically sublime bowling alley, cements the new standard for slow-burn masterpieces and unintentionally hilarious overacting.

IMDb #235 Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Source: Wikipedia

A miserably married couple invites two young newlyweds into their home. The situation accelerates downhill faster than the laws of gravitation should allow.

It’s after midnight, the older couple drink profusely despite being sozzled from a previous party, and the hosts despise each other and their guests. When somebody brings up the older couple’s son, it spirals into madness.

The title hinges on a bad pun, the first of many of brutally unfunny jokes. Despite the backdrop of a prestigious university, the characters behave like social cripples. The older couple drags the youngsters into their marital spats and faculty politics and semantic squabbles.

Speaking of language, the dialogue is shockingly obscene for the 1960’s. As in, it explicitly references to certain body parts and functions. Fortunately, the younger man is a biologist (no, he's not from the Maths department, nor is he the History department). And he's certainly equipped to explore the biology of the older professor’s wife.

The result is nastier and even less fulfilling than The Graduate.

It’s incredible how much of the IMDb Top 250 consists of uncomfortable dinner parties. Hell, I could manage that. Just invite all my readers/spammers in for a Friday night bender and leave a camcorder running. I’ll collect my Oscars in the morning, thank you.

Recommended for happy couples, genial hosts, and the nonreligious, as an instruction manual how NOT to do it.

132 excruciating minutes.