WILD 90Plot in a Nutshell:
Norman Mailer’s rambling 1968 improv experiment about three mob guys shooting the shit and fantasizing about shooting each other during a week holed up in a tiny unfurnished room somewhere in New York.
Thoughts:
I first heard about this movie more than 25 years ago in Harry and Michael Medved’s The Golden Turkey Awards, where Mailer won the prize for “Worst Performance by a Novelist.” I was pretty young and had only a vague idea of who Norman Mailer was, but I remember being powerfully struck by the notion of someone shooting a movie without a script. I can remember wanting so badly to make a movie of my own that the idea that you could leapfrog over the entire process of writing a script or lining up a gigantic cast and crew was tremendously appealing, and for years I harboured ridiculous fantasies of going out one night, walking around the streets of my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario and just saying whatever came into my head into the camera. Yes, that’s how fascinating I thought I was when I was 15.
So I found it pretty funny to watch Wild 90 and realize that Mailer never quite grew out of this adolescent phase. Playing Prince, the alpha male in the film’s trio of “Maf Boys,” Mailer never lets having nothing to contribute to a scene stop him from demanding the audience’s attention: the moment he senses the camera drifting away from him and towards his co-stars Mickey Knox and Buzz Farber, he starts punching the back of his chair with his fists or smashing a crate to pieces or simply yelling inarticulately at the top of his lungs. Halfway through the movie, Mailer inexplicably adopts a belligerent quasi-African-American voice, all the better to bark out obscenities with.
I think I may be echoing something that Pauline Kael wrote about this movie, but I’ll say it anyway on the off-chance I’m actually being original: as a movie about mob guys, Wild 90 is pretty tedious (and the murky photography and muddy sound recording, which made about two-thirds of the dialogue unintelligible to me, don’t help matters), but after about 20 or 30 minutes, the film subtly changes into a documentary about a bunch of swaggering actors and writers pretending to be mob guys, and on that level, it exerts a certain limited fascination as a cultural artifact.
Also, if that’s actual alcohol Mailer is consuming throughout the film—and Mailer was such a macho guy that I have no reason to doubt that it is—then Wild 90 surpasses Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Leaving Las Vegas as the drinkingest movie I’ve ever seen.
And while Mailer comes off as a supreme asshole in this movie—when he gets on all fours and starts barking at a German shepherd, you actually feel sorry for the dog—I can’t imagine Jonathan Franzen or Michael Chabon ever exposing himself to the public the way Mailer does here. Rest in peace, Norman Mailer. I hope you’re having a helluva time up there in Drunken Asshole Heaven.
RATING: 2/5
IN BRUGESPlot in a Nutshell:
Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are Irish hitmen cooling their heels in Belgium after a botched job.
Thoughts:
In Bruges is an infinitely better constructed, better acted, more watchable, and sheerly enjoyable movie on every level than Wild 90, and yet while I’m rating it higher, somehow I respected it less. When Norman Mailer decided he wanted to pretend to be a gangster for a few days, he didn’t feel like he had to rope a gigantic British/Irish film crew into helping him, or shut down half an entire Belgian city.
I had the same reaction to In Bruges that I had to many of writer/director Martin McDonagh’s plays, like A Skull in Connemara and The Beauty Queen of Leenane. They’re all wildly entertaining, with lots of amusingly testy interplay among the characters, a volatile mix of violence and black comedy, and a knack for creating plots that may not be plausible, exactly, but which obey a certain relentless theatrical logic all the way to their bloody climaxes... and yet, I’m not sure there’s all that much to take home with you intellectually after it’s all over. That’s especially true of In Bruges, which flirts with themes of grief, sin, and morality, but which throws away any claim to seriousness with its utterly ludicrous final act, which wobbles between black comedy and tragedy without ever finding its footing.
At least McDonagh writes great parts for actors. Ralph Fiennes coasts through his extended guest-star role as a crime boss, but Brendan Gleeson has a lovely, jug-eared avuncularity that really sells the notion that this gangster is seriously considering moving to Bruges permanently; and Colin Farrell’s little-boy-lost routine, guiltily scrunching up his mouth and knitting his thick black eyebrows, is as affectingly vulnerable here as it was in a similar part in Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream.
I wonder: does Farrell use that face whenever his girlfriends catch him cheating on them? If it is, I bet they forgive him every time.
RATING: 3/5
0 Yorumlar