THE OUTSIDER

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

 

Screenwriter Sean Ryan cobbles together every Western movie trope he can come up with to create a cliché riddled movie that collapses under the weight of its impure intentions. You won’t find any character development here because every portrayal is as one-dimensional as they come.

“Witness the dark side of the American Dream” is this film’s tagline that pretends such a thing were necessary in the face of a crumbling country that succumbs to mass shootings on a daily basis. Perhaps it’s time to go heavier on sex and romance rather than on American Cinema’s knee-jerk tendency toward gun violence — something to consider.

The cynicism inherent in a movie constructed solely of piecemeal elements of mindless violence is obvious. “The Outsider” is far from the revisionist Spaghetti Western that it imagines itself to be. Here is a movie so derivative that you can set your watch by its roulette approach to satisfying imagined demands of the genre. This isn’t storytelling so much as it is a mishmash of violent sequences stuck together without so much as a second thought given to thematic cohesion. All for the love of revenge, the undying motivation of all Western ideology.  

Country music singer-turned-actor Trace Adkins is no Kris Kristofferson (see “Heaven’s Gate”). Relying on his gravelly baritone voice, pokerfaced acting style, and a deadpan delivery that would make Clint Eastwood break into laughter, Adkins plays small-town sheriff Marshal Walker. Conflicts surface between Walker and his dumb-as-a-stump son James (Kaiwi Lyman) after James rapes and accidentally kills the wife of Jing Phang (John Foo), an immigrant railroad worker with some martial arts skills up his sleeve. Every roundhouse kick feels like it comes from the sensibilities of a ‘70s television show. Yawn.

Poor lighting and a production design that puts your feet to sleep, underscore a film whose hollow religiosity and misdirected sentimentality sit in your stomach like a slow-working poison. “The Outsider” could be taught in film classes as an example of what not to do as a screenwriter. Exploitation is one thing (see “Machete” for an example of a good one), but you have to know the rules of the game. Director Timothy Woodward Jr. and his screenwriter just want a paycheck. Theirs is not a product worth paying to see.

Not Rated. 86 mins.

 

THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE — CANNES 2018

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

After decades of trying to make this movie, Terry Gilliam has done it. Sadly, it isn’t any good. All of our worst fears, about how Gilliam might inject some sorely needed filmic depth into Miguel de Cervantes’s famously shallow if picaresque novel, are proven just. Here is a movie in search of a story.

The 1605 source material might have inspired authors such as Alexandre Dumas and Mark Twain to write such gems as “The Three Musketeers” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” but Gilliam has lost the thread if he ever even had it.

My suspicion is that Gilliam never did have a grip on a story most famous for having its hero tilting at windmills with a jousting pole from atop his horse. It’s a slapstick image that spells deadly trouble for horse and man alike.

The hook of the book is that society is all wrong; only individuals willing to throw social mores out with the bath water, are able to realize the pure sense of freedom that nature intended. Good luck trying to cozy up to that principal watching “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.”

Billed as an adventure-comedy, this movie is a tragedy. Gilliam got it wrong from the start. Perhaps the filmmaker will learn from his mistake and a movie half as good as “The Fisher King” before his time runs out. For a self-reflexive narrative, complete with a film-within-a-film trope, the sequences don’t add up when the final credits roll. We could have at least had a sex scene. No such luck.

Adam Driver is squandered as Toby Grison, an ad director working on a commercial in Spain that features Don Quixote and his (frequently abused) squire (read manservant). Toby’s boss (Stellan Skarsgård) gifts the director with a VHS copy of a black and white student film Grison made (“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”) a decade earlier. Revisiting his film sends Toby on a journey to rekindle connections with actors living in Los Sueños, a nearby Spanish town. Toby reunites with his Don Quixote (Jonathan Pryce); uninspired (would-be) comic set pieces ensue. Yawn. If only there were at least a few funny lines thrown in. Where is Mel Brooks when you need him?

For anyone like myself who holds Terry Gilliam in high esteem in spite of the fact that he hasn’t made a decent film since “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas” back in 1998, you will need to see this filmic atrocity for yourself. You too will know that, in the end, it was Terry Gilliam who killed Don Quixote.

Not Rated. 132 mins.

A BOY CALLED SAILBOAT

          Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

Australian actor-turned-director Cameron Nugent’s debut feature is an inept magical realist story infused with a tone-deaf sense of humor and a vague sense of thematic direction. This film’s rudderless political subtext, involving an immigrant Mexican family living in an unnamed dusty American border town, gives way to bizarre sexual content (witness Jake Busey’s cock-show as an elementary school teacher in tight sweat pants with no underwear). A pro-Big-Tobacco message gets smuggled in for good measure. Shooting guns into the air for no reason also happens out of context. Nothing adds up.

Noel Gugliemi plays Jose, a face-tattooed Chicano family man with Meyo (Elizabeth De Razzo), his loyal housekeeping wife, and their six-year-old son Sailboat (Julian Atocani Sanchez). Jose supports his family’s leaning ramshackle house with a single wood beam that prevents the structure from collapsing on its occupants, ostensibly killing them. Jose drives around in a homie-not-approved four door ‘50s Oldsmobile missing its backseat doors.

There might be some arcane political commentary the filmmakers are attempting to make with the collapsing-house metaphor, but it doesn’t come across. 

The child actor Sanchez delivers monotone voice over narration that upends the movie before it gets started.

“You find the most important things when you’re not looking.” Sailboat finds a ukulele that every character inexplicably calls a guitar.

This “important thing” enables our young musical prodigy to write a song that casts a spell over anyone who hears it. The problem is that the filmmakers didn’t go to the trouble of creating a piece of music to fill the bill. They instead play a single tone akin to a honking car horn whenever Sailboat performs his soul-quenching sonic creation. This is just lazy filmmaking. It’s infuriating for an audience to feel so openly insulted by irresponsible filmmakers.

Without irony, a repeating guitar motif arrives in the guise of “The Sound of Silence.”

J.K. Simmons’s presence seemingly endorses “A Boy Called Sailboat,” although the A-List actor probably shot his scenes in a single day, and didn’t know much about the movie beyond his isolated bit as a used vehicle salesman in the middle of nowhere.

The people who come from miles around to hear Sailboat play his (silent) song sure do enjoy Meyo’s spicy meatballs. There are a lot of things not right about “A Boy Called Sailboat,” not the least of which are the mixed messages the film sends to kids. This is not a movie to leave laying around for your children to watch alone or even with parental guidance.

Not Rated. 92 mins.