Film Review: THE PAPERBOY: BASED ON THE NOVEL "THE PAPERBOY" BY PETE DEXTER (2012, Lee Daniels)

Jellyfish Stings: 5 of 5.
Running Time: 107 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Starring Zac Efron (HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL, 17 AGAIN), Matthew McConaughey (TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION, ANGELS IN THE OUTFIELD), Nicole Kidman (BMX BANDITS, BATMAN FOREVER), John Cusack (ONE CRAZY SUMMER, CON AIR), David Oyelowo (RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, JACK REACHER), Macy Gray (THE CROW: WICKED PRAYER, the Schwarzenegger AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS), and Scott Glenn (URBAN COWBOY, BACKDRAFT). Co-adapted, and based on the novel by Pete Dexter (MICHAEL, PARIS TROUT, WILD BILL). Directed and co-adapted by Lee Daniels (PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL "PUSH" BY SAPPHIRE, SHADOWBOXER).
Tag-line: None that I could find.
Best one-liner: "IF ANYONE'S GONNA PISS ON HIM, IT'S GONNA BE ME!"

After making PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL 'PUSH' BY SAPPHIRE, Lee Daniels decided to win over mainstream filmgoers once again with a film designed to address capital-I "Important" issues in broad, hilarious strokes and deliver the sort of glossy, over the top melodrama audiences have been deeply craving in the wake of jaw-dropping trashterpieces like CRASH '04, and other films of its ilk.

Originally designed as Pedro Almodóvar's English-language debut (for those who are unfamiliar, he's the post-Franco, candy-colored Spanish fusion of Alfred Hitchcock and John Waters), it was handed off to Mr. Daniels, who no doubt sought to replicate the awards buzz and loving glow he received from PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL 'PUSH' BY SAPPHIRE.   Lucky for us all, Almodóvar left a few of his delightful fingerprints behind on this thing (he supposedly tweaked the treatment, if not the script), and that, combined with a high-budgeted, borderline santicmonious disposition has created a work of lunatic, corporate-funded camp, the likes of which I've never seen before.  It's like if Paul Verhoeven did a remake of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or as if Lucio Fulci directed THE FIRM.  It is a movie so spectacularly awful and so splendidly sure of itself that it transcends kitsch:  it is "kitschscendent." Ladies and gentlemen:  it's the second installment of Crawdad-Lickin', Southern-Fried Sleaze-O-Rama, and hot damn– my Dixie cup runneth over!

Here's the 1950s sci-fi movie poster rundown:

SEE!

Nicole Kidman giving a Southern accent her best shot and engaging in some "no-touch" masturbation in front of an audience so that her convicted murderer boyfriend (John Cusack) can get off, via mutual manacle masturbation.

Cusack contemplates: mutual manacle masturbation, his paycheck.

This scene is somehow the exact median point between Kathleen Turner's wild courtroom leg thrashing in SERIAL MOM and Sharon Stone's leg-cross-and-uncross technique in BASIC INSTINCT.


Zac Efron's two modes of acting:  looking toward and away from Nicole Kidman.

Just when you think the scene has "peaked," it continues to devolve/escalate and reach new, even trashier depths/heights.  If this film had actually won Academy Awards, I would like to think that this scene– in slow motion and set to sweeping music– would one day be featured in a heartstring-tugging montage about the social courage of Hollywood.

McConaughey's arched eyebrow is well-placed.


David Oyelowo averts his gaze, an act that the audience is somehow unable to do.  It's like watching a car accident.


Pictured:  Oscar gold.   Well, at least Golden Globe gold.  Er, at least Golden Globe nomination gold.  And Golden Globe nominations still mean something– I mean, you can't bribe your way into getting one for anything less than a Cher concert!

WATCH! 

An elderly Scott Glenn successfully maintain his dignity (and some wicked old man sideburns) in the midst of this bayou-blastin' shitshow!

This ain't URBAN COWBOY, pardner!


BEHOLD!

(not pictured)

Matthew McConaughey– bloody, naked, and hogtied– after being raped and tortured by some random dudes in a plotline designed to highlight the plight of closeted gay men during the 1960s, but which instead feels like oddly corporate rape-sploitation that makes PULP FICTION's gimps n' samurai swords look tasteful in comparison.  At least McConaughey is having fun with it, though– after all, this was made the same year as KILLER JOE and MAGIC MIKE.


BEAR WITNESS!

To the best urination scene in Oscar bait since THE GREEN MILE.  You see, what happens is this:

Zac Efron is out for an innocuous swim when he is stung by a cluster of CGI jellyfish.


He makes his way back to the shore in agony, sadly crawling toward trashy Nicole Kidman– his unrequited summer love.  (Did I mention that this movie is sort of framed like a nostalgic, star-crossed, romantic coming of age film?)

Anyway, he is first spied by a gaggle of young women who take note of his jellyfish-stung state and debate who is going to have to urinate on him.

Then Nicole Kidman arrives, and despite being told to call an ambulance,

she becomes combative, drives the young women away, and delivers a line that clearly should have been delivered by, I don't know, an aging Joan Crawford?:

  

"IF ANYONE'S GONNA PISS ON HIM, IT'S GONNA BE ME!"  

Sheer poetry.  This is followed by:

"HE DON'T LIKE STRANGERS PEEIN' ON HIM!"  

She then proceeds to, well, pee on him in a drawn-out mess of a scene, which, as you can see, is described by the subtitles as "full of grunting."

This is one of those

seminal moments

in an aging actress's career,

like Anna Magnani in THE ROSE TATTOO, or Susan Sarandon in DEAD MAN WALKING, or

or Katherine Hepburn in almost anything, from THE AFRICAN QUEEN to GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER 

to, say... ON GOLDEN POND?

CONTEMPLATE!

The long awaited, crawdad-lickin' sex scene between a recently freed John Cusack and his lady love, trashy Nicole Kidman.  Somehow, you already knew that it was going to involve some self-esteem building salad tossing, right?:


It's not my fault that this particular activity has become a recurring motif during this Southern-Fried Sleaze-O-Rama series (or as I newly christened it, "Mason Licksin'").  Also, their sex scene is artfully crosscut with footage of wild boars.

Note grunting.

Either this is a stroke of hilarious, subversive genius worthy of Luis Buñuel...  or an incredibly shallow person's attempt at capital-S "Symbolism."  Either way I'm entertained, so I suppose it doesn't matter much.


GAZE UPON!

An axe versus machete fight scene between an eye-patch-wearing Matthew McConaughey and a greasy bayou John Cusack!  This is clearly worth the price of admission alone.  Though it's brief, it nearly plays like a deleted scene from HARD TARGET!  (No JCVD and Wilford Brimley, though.)


Place yer bets, kiddies!


TAKE A GANDER AT!

The absurdist finale, whereupon the film fully transforms into a FRIDAY THE 13TH sequel, complete with a machete-wielding Jason Voorhees John Cusack chasing a generic teenager Zac Efron around Crystal Lake the bayou.



Cusack taunts him in that ersatz Hollywood Southern accent, and it sounds like "Weahuh yew gooan, papuhboyyy?"  It's pretty damn good.


Hollywood, God bless you for unwittingly pumping cash into making the kind of ludicrous and expensive trash that Russ Meyer could only have dreamed of.
In closing, I have decided that I cannot award THE PAPERBOY any stars, but that I must give it five jellyfish stings out of five. And then I'm going to piss on them.

–Sean Gill

P.S.  Stay tuned for the third and final installment of Crawdad-Lickin', Southern-Fried Sleaze-O-Rama!  Hint:  it could very well be called, "FIFTY SHADES OF EASTWOOD."

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Film Review: CON AIR (1997, Simon West)

Stars: 4.5 of 5.

Running Time: 123 minutes (director's cut).

Notable Cast or Crew:  Nicolas Cage (WILD AT HEART, VALLEY GIRL), John Malkovich (EMPIRE OF THE SUN, DANGEROUS LIAISONS), John Cusack (BETTER OFF DEAD, ONE CRAZY SUMMER), Steve Buscemi (KING OF NEW YORK, MILLER'S CROSSING), Ving Rhames (PATTY HEARST, JACOB'S LADDER), Dave Chapelle (BUDDIES, 200 CIGARETTES), Rachel Ticotin (TOTAL RECALL, FALLING DOWN), Danny Trejo (KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS, DEATH WISH IV: THE CRACKDOWN), M.C. Gainey (LOST, FATAL BEAUTY), Doug Hutchison (LOST, THE X-FILES), Fredric Lehne (LOST, DALLAS), Colm Meaney (UNDER SIEGE, DICK TRACY), Mykelti Williamson (HEAT, FREE WILLY, FORREST GUMP), and a possible vocal cameo by Powers Boothe (SOUTHERN COMFORT, TOMBSTONE).  Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (THE ROCK, TOP GUN).

Tag-line: "Welcome to Con Air.  They were deadly on the ground.  Now they have wings."

Best one-liner:   "Cy..."  –"Onara!"  [man is burned alive]

Alright, ladies and germs.  We all know CON AIR already, and we all know that it's glorious.  Certain elements have been discussed to death, and I'm sure I could zero in on Cage's mullet, his distressingly bad Southern accent, or his doing origami for the love of a daughter he's never met:

or Steve Buscemi being zanily creepy and singing "He's Got the Whole World (In His Hands)":

 or the enormity of all the hare-raising-stuffed-bunny-related setpieces.

But in such cases where a film– notorious for its singular, over-the-top flavor– has been often discussed elsewhere (á la, say, a BLOODSPORT or a COMMANDO), it would likely behoove me to discuss the elements that you don't think about every day when you reach that point in the afternoon that you reserve for thinking about CON AIR.  Therefore, I am proud to present my ten newest and most absurd observations– nay, revelations– that materialized upon my latest viewing of CON AIR.

#1.  Danny Trejo's intention to fuck your whole family.

Playing the rapist "Johnny-23" ("one heart for each of my 23 bitches"), Trejo's had a lot of experience playing convicts– both in real life and in the movies THE HIDDEN, RUNAWAY TRAIN, PENITENTIARY III, LOCK UP, MANIAC COP 2, WEDLOCK, JAKE AND THE FATMAN, LAST LIGHT, AGAINST THE WALL, ANIMAL FACTORY, and a bunch of others.  In fact, after recently seeing him in Cannon Films' KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS, I now am actually afraid that Danny Trejo is going to fuck my whole family. 

Anyway, my point is that I guess it isn't really an action movie unless Danny Trejo is in it, portraying some kind of imprisoned ne'er-do-well. 

#2.  It's not technically an action movie till you blow up a gas station.

I've held this theory for a while, but I'm just impressed that CON AIR, a movie whose logline would lead you to believe that it must take place entirely in a prison and on an airplane, manages to do so by about the halfway point.

#3.  It's not an action movie till there's a vanity license plate.  

One day I'm going to do a feature on vanity license plates in horror and action movies of the 80s and 90s, but until that day, we'll just have to take 'em one at a time.  It's no AWESOM50 from COBRA, but AZZ KIKR firmly receives the Junta Juleil seal of approval.  Here, it doesn't actually belong to John Cusack, it belongs to his hateful boss Colm Meaney, who's playing an aggregate of every bureaucratic authority figure from all of the DIE HARD films combined.

#4.  John Cusack's bizarre cultural references.

Speaking of DIE HARD, Cusack's function here is basically to be the Reginald VelJohnson (Carl Winslow) role from DIE HARD– a.k.a. the only man on the ground who fights the FBI/DEA bureaucracy and believes in his anonymous action-buddy helper who's trapped in the building/airplane fighting thieves/hijackers, and then, ultimately, proves himself as he saves Willis/Cage from that pesky Godunov/Malkovich who you thought might be dead already but then of course he wasn't.  Whew.  Anyway, I guess my original point was to say that it's an odd choice to have the Cusack character quoting Dostoyevsky and enthusing about the PLANET OF THE APES Pentology, but it's a choice that I appreciate.

#5.  Q:  Are Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman CON AIR fans?

A:  Difficult to say, but all of the main characters from Kaufman's first two screenplays to be directed by Spike Jonze (Cusack & Malkovich and Cage & Cage in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and ADAPTATION, respectively) come from the top billing of CON AIR.  Makes ya wonder.

#6.  I never thought in a million years that I would ever see Dave Chappelle's corpse plummet to Earth

 

and land atop the hood of Don S. Davis' car in a bit intended to be comic relief. 

Also, it's never explicity made clear whether or not Don S. Davis is still portraying his character from TWIN PEAKS, Major Briggs, so for the sake of argument, I'm just going to assume that he is.

#7.  There's an extremely bizarre connection to TV's LOST.  Okay, they're not just both about airplanes that happen to crash.  It goes deeper.  In CON AIR, only two characters actually fly the eponymous airplane: the original, pre-hijacking pilot; and the prisoner who takes the controls post-hijacking.  The original pilot is none other than Fredric Lehne, who on LOST plays the Marshal Edward Mars, the only true authority figure on the plane.
 
After the convicts– or CON AIR's 'Others,' if you will– take over, M.C. Gainey mans the controls.

Fans of LOST will recall him as the memorable, mysterious character Mr. Friendly who is the initial face of the "Others" and one of the primary antagonists throughout several episodes.  Pret-ty strange, I say.  [Also, Doug Hutchison ("Horace Goodspeed" on LOST) has a bit part here, too. ]

#8.  The look in Nic Cage's eyes after he reveals his intention to prove that God exists.  You see, at one point, it doesn't look like Cage's prison buddy (Mykelti Williamson– Bubba from FORREST GUMP) is gonna make it.  He's been shot, maimed, and needs insulin. 

And all he can think about is, like, there ain't no God.

Cage says, "I'm gonna show you God does exist," and then commences to kick some ass and cause a crash landing and a number of slow motion explosions.  But before he commences with the requisite Bruckheimerian antics, he does this with his face:

Maybe Cage attempting to will God into existence, or it's Bruckheimer's kind of deus ex machina, with Nic Cage as literally a god in the machine.  Or maybe it's something else entirely.  Who can say?  Regardless, I applaud it with the same slow-clap used by faux-Gorbachev in ROCKY IV.

#9.  Strange surface similarities to David Lynch's WILD AT HEART.  For those, not in the know, that's another movie with frequent slow motion flames where Nicolas Cage has an ambiguously terrible Southern accent and serves a prison sentence while a blonde waits patiently for him and upon his release introduces him to his own beloved child that he's never met in the flesh before.   

#10.  The idea that this film was born as the filmmakers absentmindedly daydreamed while watching THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and decided that wouldn't this be a lot better as an action movie?  Think about it.  Combine Steve Buscemi's gnawin' mask and Malkovich's intellectual psychopath and you've basically got an American Hannibal Lecter.  "Hannibal the Cannibal."

  That's perfect!  Wait-  they couldn't call him that, though– copyright issues!  Damn!  How 'bout "Cyrus the Virus?"

Then– they co-star Colm Meaney as the "annoying, undermining-the-whole-operation-through-his-own-dickery bureaucrat" character.

He functions and looks like the Irish version of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS' American counterpart, Anthony Heald!

However, all of this simply proves that I have too much time/character actor knowledge on my hands.  Ah, well.

Four and a half stars.

-Sean Gill

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