It's widely panned. I see the point. I think this one's best enjoyed, and that can be done, by not thinking about it and going with it's goopy emotional interior: Boy meets Girl, Boy loses girl for 15 years, Girl searches for and finds boy, the longed for reunion occurs, Boy is shot and drops dead.
This simple business is so shrouded in a bizarre and busy plot that it's best viewed with all neocortical activity shut down. But the thing is, there are some wickedly smart bits floating around in the soup. Oscar, "O", and Peaches, become child-lovers while waiting for the "fated" reunion with Loux. They both grow into criminal androgynes. Both are crudely manipulated by their twisted, deeply jealous and covertly sadistic boss, "Birdie", who has a thing going with "Peaches", a woman he's got fifty tears on, and so wants to rip these two apart.
Then there's the bit with "Sway", Mark Boone Junior, my favorite player in this, the Faginesque character who makes open reference to Oliver Twist, as though that situation wasn't obvious enough, and who is chomping heart pills like M&M's for his arrhythmia, who finally gets his guts blown out with a 12 gauge by a manipulated Peaches, because of "His heart problems, it's too big."
A note on these obvious literary references: Dicken's, Romeo & Juliet, Frankenstein, (The Michael Pitt creation) and to me most strongly, You Can't Go Home Again, is that they are more or less obvious and awkwardly sutured together, Frankenstein stuff, in this Frankenstein of a movie.
These touches are just built in and not a big deal is made of them. So the movie is devious, just like the characters, and that interested me. The smartest bits in the movie are right out there, but so little is made of them as the main story line trudges on, little subconcious bombs, that occurred to me later. And these are actually the best parts of the movie. Then, the players chosen are an interesting crew to be sure. It's aways nice to see William Forsythe again, this time playing a strict dad. If there was ever a natural born bad guy, it's him. And it was nice to see that he's put back every pound of the weight he made such a point of losing for much of his career. He looks like himself again for the first time in 30 years.
I agree with the crowd that the movie is a mess. But....it's "shot with sugar, through and through."
This simple business is so shrouded in a bizarre and busy plot that it's best viewed with all neocortical activity shut down. But the thing is, there are some wickedly smart bits floating around in the soup. Oscar, "O", and Peaches, become child-lovers while waiting for the "fated" reunion with Loux. They both grow into criminal androgynes. Both are crudely manipulated by their twisted, deeply jealous and covertly sadistic boss, "Birdie", who has a thing going with "Peaches", a woman he's got fifty tears on, and so wants to rip these two apart.
Then there's the bit with "Sway", Mark Boone Junior, my favorite player in this, the Faginesque character who makes open reference to Oliver Twist, as though that situation wasn't obvious enough, and who is chomping heart pills like M&M's for his arrhythmia, who finally gets his guts blown out with a 12 gauge by a manipulated Peaches, because of "His heart problems, it's too big."
A note on these obvious literary references: Dicken's, Romeo & Juliet, Frankenstein, (The Michael Pitt creation) and to me most strongly, You Can't Go Home Again, is that they are more or less obvious and awkwardly sutured together, Frankenstein stuff, in this Frankenstein of a movie.
These touches are just built in and not a big deal is made of them. So the movie is devious, just like the characters, and that interested me. The smartest bits in the movie are right out there, but so little is made of them as the main story line trudges on, little subconcious bombs, that occurred to me later. And these are actually the best parts of the movie. Then, the players chosen are an interesting crew to be sure. It's aways nice to see William Forsythe again, this time playing a strict dad. If there was ever a natural born bad guy, it's him. And it was nice to see that he's put back every pound of the weight he made such a point of losing for much of his career. He looks like himself again for the first time in 30 years.
I agree with the crowd that the movie is a mess. But....it's "shot with sugar, through and through."