Vibrating Homosexuality and the Pacino Popper Freakouts

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Killer Joe

I just have to tell you how bad this is!

Killer Joe has been sitting on my shelf for months. a couple months ago I had 35 films that I still wanted to see from 2012 and Killer Joe has always been one of them. My friend Justin told me this movie was terrible, but I insisted on seeing it. This is the great Matthew McConaughey season, we are told (with KJ, Magic Mike, and The Paperboy this year and The Lincoln Lawyer last year). I am inclined to agree. McConaughey's doing different and better projects than his standard rom-com fare. His performances are getting better, and he's getting more interesting to watch. But either Killer Joe is a hiccup in a winning streak, or we're only seeing something we want to see... that really isn't there.

The other pro, on the face of it, for Killer Joe is that it was written by Tracy Letts. I loved the original play of Killer Joe when it came out. It was part of the earliest strand of the 1990s New Brutalist movement in Britain. They loved KJ in the UK, though it didn't gain many fans in the US. Letts would have to wait until Bug came out to really take off. But I always thought it was good; I have always been a fan of the New Brutalists – Kane, Ravenhill, Butterworth: that's my stuff.

And that's fine and all. As a play. But William Friedkin's Killer Joe purports to be a movie. I'm here to tell you it isn't one, and the main trouble with this is Letts's screenplay. He hasn't cut down his dialogue even a bit, and the film is just one, long, talky scene after another. And another. The film starts with Emile Hirsch convincing his father (Thomas Haden Church) to hire someone to murder their mother, and the conversation between them goes on for about 7 or 8 minutes. This is fine for a play, really, especially if someone is going to be naked in the next minute or shoot someone in the stomach or fellate a chicken leg right in front of us. But these things are only shocking or strange in a play. In a movie... one has the feeling one has seen all of this before. I was bored out of my mind.

Killer Joe was strange and cool on stage in the early 90s before YouTube. Nowadays, we begin our days looking at video footage of hick Texans doing stupid things.

Friedkin's film has all sorts of other problems – does it like its characters? are we supposed to identify with their moral quandaries? are these people still talking? – but central to these problems is also the fact that McConaughey is just too likable and good-looking to play Joe in the first place. He's never really the scary, unpredictable force that he needed to be to make the play work. (Scott Glenn played Joe in the original New York production.) The film already doesn't work, but the unbridled, insensitive chaos at the center of what worked about the play, is completely lost in the film adaptation.

And let me predict for a moment before we all get too crazy: everyone should probably calm down about Letts's upcoming August: Osage County. If Friedkin couldn't get Bug or Killer Joe to work onscreen, why is it that everyone is thinking John Wells (who? he's directed one film) will get the Sam Shepard/Eugene O'Neill-inspired behemoth of August to work. With Letts once again penning the screenplay, this seems to me more and more unlikely.

Train Movies: Part 1

I don't know what got into me, but I watched Unstoppable, last year's Tony Scott film, and I liked it so much that I thought perhaps I would rent a couple of other train movies. I mean, there are quite a few famous ones – Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express comes immediately to mind – but, as I don't really re-watch movies, I thought I would check out a couple that I hadn't seen.

The thing that is great about Unstoppable is that it is, basically, a thrill a minute. The acting is passable, the storyline is highly improbable, and the whole thing has this very serious tone. It was also obviously written by the typical Hollywood writer who can't think of a more interesting villain than a big-business hatchet man whose main motive is "corporate greed" in the abstract. But I thought the whole thing was just so exciting. I mean, a train is barreling through Pennsylvania at like eighty-five miles an hour running into shit or nearly running into shit. I had a great time.

I watched Runaway Train, the Andrei Konchalovsky film with Jon Voight and Eric Roberts because I had thought that Unstoppable was based on this 1985 flick. Not so, it turns out. Runaway Train is a much smarter, much more 1970s-style film with an anti-hero in the Gene Hackman vein (I'm thinking of The Conversation and The French Connection). Runaway Train is about a prison breakout in Alaska. Jon Voight and Eric Roberts break out of the prison, sneak through the sewer system and get out to a trainyard somehow. After they get on the train, the drama really starts. This one doesn't have the suspenseful big-movie qualities that Unstoppable does, but it is not a film about trains crashing into shit like Unstoppable is.

Instead, Runaway Train is a film with an interesting ethical center, a movie interested in ethical conundrums and the essential humanity of the incarcerated. I was really into it, and since Runaway Train takes place on a train going ninety-five miles an hour, it's hard for it not to be suspenseful. Runaway Train also has an absolutely great ending, and you know how I love a great ending.

More train films to come. I'm just getting warmed up.

Buggin'

I finally saw William Friedkin's film version of Tracy Lett's sensational play Bug. The film stars Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon (the original Off-Broadway star), Harry Connick Jr. and Brían F. O'Byrne.

You can read my review of the play here. I wanted to see the movie because I loved the play so much, and I have to say I was a little disappointed. Bug still works on screen. It's freaky and disturbing. The dialogue is still great. The performances are excellent. But the shock value that is inherent in a stage play that features as much blood and as much nudity as Bug does is all lost on the big screen (almost wrote bug screen).

Oh yeah, and they cut out the nudity, which is weird. On stage, the actors were naked for like 30 minutes and it was awesome. On screen, they are naked for about 2 seconds. So tame.

Still, it's a creepy, fucked-up movie, and I liked it, even if it is better on stage.