Terri: You're a big boy now

Terri’s eponymous hero is a rotund teen living in some warm, semi-rural place with only an uncle who tends to wander around in a medicinal fog for a guardian. With his wavy locks and formidable neck, Terri cuts something of a Wildean profile, but whatever air of sophistication such qualities might generate is undercut by his calm refusal to engage in social or academic life. He wears Crocs and socks and old school pajamas everywhere—less out of resignation, he claims, than for sheer comfort. He’s exiled from the school gymnasium for declining to participate. He observes other teens going about their activities with the same anthropological distance and wonder he brings to his new habit of murdering mice so as to witness the feeding habits of local birds of prey. He’s also regularly late or absent for class, a casual transgression that inadvertently becomes a route out of his troublesome solitude, because cutting class means going to the principal’s office, and Terri’s principal, Mr. Fitzgerald, takes a special interest in Terri.

Fitzgerald is a middle-aged married man, but both his stagey manner of asserting authority and his calculated attempts to “reach out”—by aiding and abetting Terri’s class cutting through regular appointments; by offering snacks and high-fives and peppering their consultations with an earnestly intoned “Dude...”—render him less a teacher or father figure than an overgrown peer or passive-aggressively needy big brother. Fitzgerald is played by John C. Reilly, and if you start watching Terri and find yourself feeling unsure whether or not it’s supposed to be a comedy, Reilly doesn’t seem to have any such doubts. He’s understatedly goofy, unflatteringly lit and very funny, as well as oddly sweet and lived-in. Reilly is often cast in the supporting bit as that guy that the central character slowly becomes friends with. It’s because it’s hard not to want to become friends with John C. Reilly.

Terri is played by Jacob Wysocki, a young actor with obvious talent but, equally important in a character study such as this, he simply has a marvelously expressive face and body that, however outsized, conveys inner depths even when doing almost nothing. Walking through the woods in his PJs, Wysocki’s Terri could almost be walking through a dream, and there are moments where director Azazel Jacobs’ keen eye for low-key, ordinary strangeness pleasingly heightens that feeling. But as it goes along it becomes clear that Terri, scripted by Patrick Dewitt from a story by Dewitt and Jacobs, is firmly grounded in reality, its depiction of idiotic bullying, misguided cries for help, exploratory sadism, peculiar alliances between unlikely friends, horny fumblings in home economics, and nights spent in the shed getting wasted on stolen whiskey and uncle’s meds and making awkward attempts as sexual posturing all resonate deeply with my experience of high school at least. This is a film that’s attuned to the pains of alienation without wallowing in despair—yet neither does it offer bullshit uplift. It merely suggests that, if we stay alert, there is almost always some chance for each and every one of us to connect.

Closed marriage: Eyes Wide Shut

I hadn’t seen Eyes Wide Shut (1999) since it opened, though in the years since—the years that found me stumbling into criticism—countless friends and colleagues have urged me to revisit the film, Stanley Kubrick’s last and, on the surface, least obviously “Kubrickian.” Films have a way of changing on us while we’re off doing other things, and indeed, coming back to Eyes Wide Shut after 12 years—on the occasion of Warner’s new Stanley Kubrick: Limited Edition Collection blu-ray box—yielded a tremendous amount of interesting detail that I’d either not noticed the first time around or had forgotten. Yet my overall response was exactly the same: Eyes Wide Shut is a fascinating failure, more fun to think about or argue over than to actually sit through, though you’ve really got to sit through it to think or argue about it.

Based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, or Dream Story, Eyes Wide Shut—its title evoking both the wilful blindness of marital complacency and the dream state—is a story of re-marriage in which the apparently harmonious coexistence of Bill and Alice, a handsome upper class couple (real-life handsome upper class couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman), is disrupted by Alice’s confession of erotic fantasies involving a naval officer. Just as Alice completes her confession, Doctor Bill, now thoroughly tormented, gets called away to attend to the death of an elderly patient. While paying his respects, Bill becomes audience to a second, equally disorienting confession, this one coming from the deceased’s daughter, who explains that she’s always been in love with Bill. Bill flees, eventually finding himself at a jazz club where an old friend plays piano. The friend accidentally lets slip that he’s playing another gig that same night for some clandestine masquerade/sex party and, having learned the password needed to gain entry (Fidelio, or “fidelity”), Bill rents a costume from some pervert who whores out his teenage daughter and attends the event, which seems to be organized by a wealthy cult—the same cult from The 7th Victim (1943)?—and proves more dangerous than he’d anticipated.

Brimming with blemish-free, perfectly groomed, fresh-from-the-gym naked bodies and a parade of women who inexplicably can’t keep their hands off Cruise, Eyes Wide Shut, at times like David Lynch without the flights of imagination, at others like Roman Polanski without the genuine perversity, is not a very sexy movie. It cautions us to the potentially mortal dangers of sexual adventure, dangers that Bill evades partly through the seemingly clairvoyant protective powers of Alice, who, for example, calls Bill on his mobile just as he’s about to engage a prostitute, prompting him to abort the arrangement. The next day Bill finds out that the prostitute is HIV positive; moments later he buys a newspaper bearing the headline LUCKY TO BE ALIVE. Similarly, while Bill’s at the sex party Alice has a dream that nearly parallels his experience, something which, along with the film’s curiously artificial-looking Manhattan, its cryptic coincidences and pervasive use of blue gels and Christmas lights, alludes to the source material’s dreamlike quality without quite ever fully surrendering to it.

There’s something uncertain about the tone of Eyes Wide Shut, and this, along with a preposterously flabby script by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael—a script that finds nearly every question followed by someone repeating the question back to the questioner—and the pause-laden, alternately stiff, strained, or distracted performances from Cruise and, far more surprisingly, Kidman, renders the film turgid and tiring and over two-and-a-half hours long. Not even his champions would characterize Kubrick as a director especially sensitive to eros or love, and one suspects he may have hoped that having a real couple, a celebrity couple, together onscreen would carry its own special charge. But Cruise and Kidman, who divorced in 2001, seem strangely awkward, comfortable with each other’s bodies but not with each other’s presence, and reveal nothing of the particular nature of their relationship—other than, perhaps, this rigid unease—through Bill and Alice. Whatever brought them together or tore them apart, they kept it to themselves.

The unforgettable Fire

For some reason Quest For Fire (1981) was one of the first movies I bought on DVD, and ever since I’ve had a hard time convincing people to watch it with me and I don’t understand why. It’s set 80,000 years ago. It was directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and adapted from J.H. Rosny aîné’s novel by frequent Polanski collaborator Gérard Brach, with everybody speaking pre-historical lingo created by Anthony Burgess. It inspired a song by Iron Maiden and a band from Toronto. It was filmed in Iceland, Scotland, Kenya, and in the badlands of Alberta where I once roamed as a boy, and its landscapes are beautiful and vast.

There are various tribes in Quest For Fire, representing various stages of man’s evolution. The story follows a trio of Neanderthals who, not knowing how to build a fire, go out in search of one they can steal and bring back to their friends. The Neanderthals resemble an especially hirsute hippie desert death cult whose members drank the Kool-Aid and lived, except that in doing so they lost the capacity to form sentences, seem permanently stoned, and are now forced to constantly breathe through their mouths. Violence is everywhere, and women have it especially tough: rape is a casual occurrence. But we see our heroes improvise peace summits with wooly mammoths and fend off a bear. Ron Perlman (in a role that would threaten him with a strange sort of typecasting) discovers the humour in head injuries. Edmontonian Rae Dawn Chong invents the missionary position. One guy attempts to castrate another with his teeth. Everyone’s always panting, crying, salivating, jabbing, screaming, pointing, humping, waddling, running, grunting: being an actor in this movie would have been awesome. In fact several sequences are very much like some acting workshops I’ve attended.

My special fondness for Quest For Fire probably can’t be entirely explained, but I always visit museums of natural history in every city I pass through (I love the dioramas), and my favourite part of 2001 (1968) by far was always the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence, so perhaps some part of me just instinctively responds to tribal frenzy, inarticulate yearning, and unkempt hair. Edmonton's Metro Cinema is showing Quest For Fire as part of their ‘Turkey Shoot’ series, but this is no turkey. It’s rich and fascinating, and, for obvious reasons, really, really funny.

Don't look back: Irréversible

Doubling back to revisit Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) for the first time since its initial release, after having recently endured Enter the Void, the New French Extremist’s most recent work, offered diminishing returns with regards to the film’s overall sleaze-bag sensationalism while its notorious mid-point rape scene remains genuinely unbearable, which is some sort of accomplishment. Moving chronologically backwards through its deceptively simple urban Straw Dogs revenge narrative, Irréversible begins in what appears to be a dingy flop house where a mostly naked, daughter-molesting ex-con laments how “time destroys all things,” thus announcing the theme from the outset, lest we fail to grasp it on our own. (In any event, the film ends with this dictum appearing as a closing title card. All in caps. Noé is nothing if not thorough.) From here we hit a gay sex club called the Rectum, a Halloween-lit cavernous labyrinth of cock-sucking and flagellation, and rise to our first climax in which Pierre (Albert Dupontel) smashes a degenerate’s face to a pulp before a handful of cheerfully masturbating spectators, among them the director himself. Take that as you will.

From here we jump back to find Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre on their way to said face-obliteration, attacking and insulting both a Chinese cabbie and hermaphrodite hooker along the way. “Off to the Rectum!” shouts Cassel, clearly instructed to repeat the word “rectum” as often as possible. (It is fun to say, I suppose, and, like the film's title, has the added benefit of requiring no translation into English.) After this, which is to say before, Marcus’ unspeakably lovely girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci) is anally assaulted and viciously beaten for eight unblinking minutes in a red-painted underpass—yet another rectal tunnel! After this, presuming we’re still watching, we learn why Alex took the tunnel, listen to a long, banal, repetitive conversation about sexual pleasure on the métro, and discover a secret Alex has been keeping that makes her fate that much more appalling and tragic.

Time diminishes shock value. Irréversible’s structure is cleanly aligned to its themes of entropy and inescapable doom, though, seeing the film again after all these years, its effect-before-cause formalism strikes me as little more than a nihilist-sadist pulp thriller version of Jeopardy!: answer first, question second. This is mostly because once you get the gist of Noé’s concept and adjust your senses to the vertigo-inducing camera work there’s little left to explore and so very much to deplore. The actors are obviously of a higher caliber than those in Enter the Void, but they have little to say (the dialogue is blather) and not much to do besides endure ghastly torment or exact medieval violence. I don’t think I’ll be reversing through this one again.

The Next Three Days: Breaking out is hard to do

Following a bafflingly superfluous teaser prelude, the first scene proper features two handsome couples of apparent privilege seated round a table in a nice Pittsburgh restaurant, getting into a heated—which is to say overcooked—debate about gender roles in the workplace. So, ostensibly serious theme now slapped down on the table, we already know we’re in a Paul Haggis movie, even if the theme’s not entirely obvious relevance to our story seems a surprisingly loose opener for the Crash (2004) writer/director’s typically hyperactive dramaturgy. What this scene tells us is that Lara Brennan’s a woman worth going the limit for, one both smart and amorous—her public cat fight gets her so aroused she leaps upon her husband as soon as they get to their car. Of course, her husband is Russell Crowe.

The following morning Lara finds blood on her coat. Four seconds later cops burst in and arrest her for a murder we just sort of presume she didn’t commit. Before you know it, Lara’s behind bars and all out of appeals, sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of avoiding a very bad dye job. Now desperately spouseless and stuck with a morose six year old to raise alone, John Brennan’s only recourse is bust Lara out. He teaches literature at a community college, so there’s a scene where he lectures on Don Quixote, in case we didn’t catch on to the fact that he’s about a hatch a plan that’s positively quixotic!

The title of The Next Three Days reads like a fleet thriller, but it actually needs to cover about three years worth of story before those three days arise. That’s a lot to burn through, and the perhaps inevitable result is that each of its central characters, Lara and the little boy most especially, never emerge as anything more than ciphers, mere props in a complicated plot. This isn’t such a bad thing if the focus were to stay firmly on the action, but Haggis, working from a 2008 French movie called Pour elle, has to have it both ways, so we get scenes like the one where we first see John visit Lara in prison. I’m guessing that Haggis wanted to use the scene to strengthen our sense of the couple’s intimacy and John’s fathomless devotion—there’s not much of a movie here without it—yet their every exchange is almost comical in its slavishness to exposition. What we get is somberness without the satisfaction of emotional depth. What we get is a waste of Brian Dennehy in umpteen scenes where he does nothing but gaze portentously. The other thing we get is a thriller that’s 133 minutes long.

There’s a nice cameo from Liam Neeson and some clever twists. Things are most interesting when John’s forced to descend into Pittsburgh’s underworld to collect the necessary illegal items on his conscientious prison-break check list. He has dangerous run-ins with RZA, a deaf pessimist, and some really nasty dudes in a meth lab whose lives we’re to regard as expendable if their termination should facilitate Lara’s liberation. You sometimes wonder if there couldn’t be something in John’s totally insane adventure that might be fun, but that would be in the Tony Scott version, and we already got a new one from him last weekend.

Out of Sheer Rage: the road not taken

Geoff Dyer, not writing about D.H. Lawrence

Geoff Dyer negotiated with the inexplicable allure of great music by invoking moments in the lives of several giants of jazz through fiction-like prose in But Beautiful, one of my favourite books about music ever. Now back in print, Dyer’s 1997 book Out of Sheer Rage (Picador, $15 USD) takes a very different approach to writing about D.H. Lawrence, the writer who made Dyer want to be a writer. Dyer’s approach to Lawrence however is largely about avoiding any approach whatsoever. Out of Sheer Rage is a memoir of perpetual procrastination, addiction to anticipation, and despair. Steve Martin says it’s the funniest book he’s ever read. I’m rather fond of it myself.

D.H. Lawrence

Dyer’s considerable feat is to sustain our interest in something he’s promised from the beginning is going nowhere by actually going all over the place: to Italy, Greece, Mexico, to the US, and back home to England, to survive an island moped crash, illness, dubbed movies, the temptation to masturbate in public, and, echoing a choice passage from Don DeLillo's White Noise, the inevitable disappointment of standing in a place intended to radiate significance, or more precisely, to stand in the place where some dead admired person once stood, trying to conjure nonexistent emotions. This is something Dyer does especially well, dissecting conflicted responses to ostensible grandeur, always with a wit every bit the equal of Dyer’s titular rage.

There is of course plenty of literary commentary in Out of Sheer Rage, its belated arrival feeling almost subversive. Dyer considers his youthful reading and in some cases refusal to reread much of Lawrence—save the entire collected correspondence—as well as the work of Thomas Bernhard and Milan Kundera. He makes a compelling case for the writing of a book being only slightly ahead of the research for a book, for a writer’s notes for a novel sometimes being more valuable than the novels themselves. In one passage of just a few pages, Dyer eloquently sums up much of what David Shields spent all of Reality Hunger, his fascinating and frustrating manifesto-by-collage, trying to say—partially through pulling quotes from Out of Sheer Rage. This might explain Dyer’s own wry appraisal of Reality Hunger: “Reading it, I kept thinking, ‘Yes, exactly, I wish I’d said that,’ and then I realized I had.” Shields only included citations in his book because his publishers forced him to, so all readers who hungered for more of the reality Shields used as his source material owe the old farts at Knopf a great favour, because they at least had the courtesy to include the information that might lead us to read Out of Sheer Rage.

What Ophüls wants...: Lola Montès on DVD

It is perhaps too easy to dismiss the celebrity whose ascent is fueled by dubious artistic talent and “mere” sex appeal. Is the cultivation of celebrity not a talent in itself? We never actually see the eponymous heroine of Lola Montès (1955) exhibit her ostensible skills as dancer or singer. While her story is framed by a dazzlingly baroque circus act of which she is both star and subject, she barely addresses her public, leaving the extolling of her legacy to Peter Ustinov’s wonderfully cynical ringmaster, who introduces her as “a bloodthirsty monster with the eyes of an angel.”

The real Lola, née Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, Irish-born, Spanish by shtick, dancer and actress by trade, mistress to powerful men by vocation, never toured the world in quite such spectacularly self-objectifying fashion as is depicted in this, Max Ophüls’ final masterpiece, mangled upon its initial release, newly restored in all its unspeakable gorgeousness, and now available from the Criterion Collection. The movie, which can be called a bio-pic in only the loosest sense, plays jazz over the very foggy historical facts of Montès’ life, yet Ophüls evokes truths that more fact-based accounts could never hope to grasp. The project was originally meant to be more modest, but as the producers insisted on hoisting such intrusions as Technicolor, Cinemascope and sex goddess Martine Carol upon Ophüls—who utilized each of these items masterfully—Lola Montès increasingly became a kind of critique of itself. As Marcel Ophüls, the director’s son, said, the more they tried to turn the project into a grandiose commercial spectacle, the more Lola Montès became a movie about grandiose commercial spectacle. See Lola being serenaded by Franz Liszt in a horse-drawn carriage the size of a Winnebago as they glide through rural Italy; see Lola bid farewell to Anton Walbrook’s King Ludwig and escape a Bavarian uprising by being ushered through a labyrinth of catacombs by a lovesick young Oskar Werner; see Lola dive from the peak of the big top way down onto a little mattress placed by an army of acrobatic multi-colored midgets…

We see Lola whisked through numerous opulent settings, always beautiful, sumptuously costumed, and a little melancholy, always captured by Ophüls’ relentlessly mobile cameras, their fluid movements emphasizing the transitory nature of being and the sweep of memory and theatre. But we never see inside Lola’s heart and mind. Two hours after being regaled of her feats of seduction we hardly know a thing about her, hardly penetrate her exquisite exterior. If this feels uncomfortably like vacuous pageantry, well, that’s kind of the idea. This is biography as high wire act, with Ophüls concocting one breathtaking, elaborately staged episode after another, and the sadness of it all accumulates only in the margins. It’s a bizarre cinematic experience, audacious, enthralling, and frustrating. There’s nothing like Lola Montès. It cries out for the big screen, but Criterion’s package is the best possible substitute, and the extras are terrific. It’s their fourth such packaging of Ophüls’ French output. I’m now crossing my fingers that they’ll start dipping into his underrated Hollywood films.

Hot Docs 2009: strange weather, slow death, violent crime, and private confessions

To say there was something electric in the air this year as North America’s largest documentary film festival commenced eleven days ago would be more than a mere platitude. Springtime is typically fraught with electrical storms in Southern Ontario, but the charge felt during the first night of Hot Docs 2009 was generated most prominently by the new film from Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, whose Manufactured Landscapes made such a deep impression both at home and internationally after premiering at Toronto’s other major festival back in 2006.

Act of God uses stories of being struck by lightning as a foundation for meditations on our urge to invest meaning in the most seemingly random events. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to discover that the film feels a little random or rootless itself, but while frustrating desires for a more unified thesis and deliberately ignoring any exploration of the science, it delivers some enlightening profiles and, best of all, a duet of sorts between novelist Paul Auster, who eloquently recalls his experience of witnessing another child’s death by lightning during summer camp, and guitarist Fred Frith, who improvises a magnificent performance meant to invoke the primal drama of a tempest billowing over the landscape.

The equation of death and nature was also central to Swiss filmmaker Peter Liechti’s The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy, where heavily associational images accompany the story of a man who ventured into the wilderness to commit suicide by starvation. The voice-over reading of the man’s journal—the English version comes courtesy of Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler—alternately chronicles bodily collapse in increasingly disturbing detail, offers hints of the life he left behind, and muses on the bizarre choice of method, fasting in solitude ostensibly being the best way to witness the process of one’s own death. Based on a novel inspired by the real event, yet visually realized through a bank of images that feature no actors or recreations, The Sound of Insects playfully haunts the frontiers of documentary and fiction. It’s chilling, funny, hypnotic, and totally draining.

Private confessions are similarly the driving force behind Canadian filmmaker Alison Rose’s Love at the Twilight Motel, which features interviews with various clients of a pay-by-the-hour Miami love nest, many of whom are disarmingly lucid and affecting. The repellent yet admirably frank adulterer and closet junky who wants to protect his wife’s innocence; the Cuban massage therapist who feels it’s his duty to service sexually dissatisfied married women; the prostitute and exotic dancer desperate to reclaim custody of her children: each of Rose’s subjects is able to testify at length and with dignity intact in one of the Twilight’s anonymous rooms. Yet the film leaves you with questions regarding Rose’s intentions. What was she after? Who did she think she was going to fool by only showing portions of her subject’s faces as a method of disguise?

Love at the Twilight Motel is compelling, but a vaguely similar tack is used more rigorously and satisfyingly in Canadian filmmaker Alan Zweig’s A Hard Name, which features Zweig’s more transparently interactive interviews with several middle-aged ex-convicts, many of them with violent pasts. While talking to a former crackhead, a guy who grew up sleeping in abandoned buildings in Detroit, a guy who extended his prison sentence by 20 years just for the sake of stabbing Clifford Olsen 21 times with a pair of scissors, Zweig stays off-screen but remains very present, prompting the more tight-lipped, cracking jokes to ease tension, gathering advice on prison life, and gradually revealing that every last one of his subjects suffered sexual abuse as children. A guy named Art tells a particularly harrowing confession about feeling less capable of dealing with life outside than in. My heart went out to him. Before the screening I attended Zweig declared his hope that after this film his subjects would simply “be welcomed back into the family of man and just disappear into the crowd.” Of course, this didn’t keep Zweig from bringing a number of them up on stage afterwards. Sadly, Art was not among them.

The most sensational tale of going from brutal youth to violent adulthood and prison however would easily be that of Tyson, James Toback’s gripping profile of the eponymous former heavyweight champion. Even if you remember each of its key events (ear biting, et al.) as they unfolded, when you put it all together like this Mike Tyson’s biography is truly incredible, alternately inspiring and disgusting, a living essay on some deeply precarious notions of American race and sex. And Tyson ultimately emerges as a sort of poem about human contradictions, with constantly overlapping interviews in which Tyson gives glaringly incompatible testimonies on things like his rape conviction. Toback never interjects and seems totally uninterested in guiding us toward any conclusion. This movie is too ablaze with fascination for its subject and desire to provoke its audience to settle for anything as simple as closure.

Assault and batteries: Crank: High Voltage

Having been mortally poisoned at the start of Crank, which ends with his falling from a helicopter and landing with a cartoon splat on the asphalt, we could be forgiven for assuming we’d seen the last of Chev Chelios, the indefatigable adrenaline junky and hired killer played by Jason Statham. Yet, taking implausibility and audacity as its chief criteria, Crank: High Voltage elevates Chelios from mere super-sadist to something virtually indestructible, the Terminator with a hard-on, an electric Lazarus raised from the dead to wreak havoc upon Los Angeles once more.

Chelios wakes to find himself in some seedy Oriental massage parlour. He’s had his heart ripped out and replaced with an electrical one, so, after squeezing some information from a fat thug who’s gaping anus he shoves a tar-smeared rifle into, Chelios steals a car and begins the hunt the baddies in possession of his second-most vital organ for what nefarious purposes we can only imagine. But Chelios needs fuel to stay alive, so he must regularly recharge via booster cables, Tasers, defibrillators and transformers, his hunger for juice providing ample opportunities for creative hedonism, including feats of imagination such as sexually assaulting an elderly woman to generate a little body contract friction.

More of a remake than a sequel, Crank: High Voltage essentially revisits the same territory of its predecessor but with even greater absurdity and even less focus. There is the revenge narrative that takes us on a colourful tour of the LA scumbag underground. There’s a reunion with Chelios’ beloved Eve (Amy Smart), who’s apparently become a stripper in the three months since Chelios’ ostensible death and is thus able to pass some action sequences wearing only pink hotpants and duct tape on her titties, and there is another scene of them having public sex, though this time not initiated as an act of rape. There is the open hostility to minorities, homosexuals, women and the sex trade, not to mention EMS workers and gentle gardeners. Yet because Crank: High Voltage has moved into the realm of full-on bananas, its crudity and misanthropic aggression to all beings below Statham on the food chain is somewhat tempered by pure silliness, for better or for worse.

Returning writer/directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor still can’t seem to make a movie so much as a fidgety mash-up, heavily dependent on freak-out guest appearances, spastic editing, a strained, self-conscious grindhouse aesthetic and the dumb, fleeting rush of video game nihilism. But there are vaguely inspired and entertaining bits, including an unexpected homagette to Belle de jour and a picket line of porn stars protesting low wages—surely the most implausible episode in a movie driven by implausibles. “Do you want me to fuck this car?” one of these impoverished performers asks. It is arguably a sign of the filmmakers’ subtly discriminate taste that amidst such mayhem such a potentially spectacular feat of autoeroticism fails to occur.