6/11/15: Don’t Forget About the Power Glove!

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Adam J. Minnick, Alan Longstreet, Animal Trilogy, anti-authority, anti-establishment, anti-hero, Ape, awkward films, Buzzard, cinema, con artists, Cool Hand Luke, Coyote, dark comedies, experimental film, film reviews, films, Freddy Krueger, Harmony Korine, indie films, Jason Roth, Joe Anderson, Joel Potrykus, Joshua Burge, Katie Call, long shots, Marty Jackitansky, Michael Cunningham, millenial angst, Movies, Nintendo Power Glove, odd movies, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Quentin Dupieux, Richard Linklater, slackers, stylish films, surreal, Teri Ann Nelson, writer-director-actor-editor, youthful angst, youthful rebeliion

When Marlon Brando uttered the immortal rejoinder “Whadda ya got?” all the way back in 1953, it’s highly unlikely that he had Marty Jackitansky in mind. 60 years later, however, here he is, ready or not: the heir apparent to Johnny Strabler, Holden Caulfield and “Cool Hand” Luke Jackson, Marty is the anti-establishment anti-hero that our era needs (and deserves), the kind of cynical, self-serving smart-ass who flies the middle finger by default, in the same way that some folks slip on plastic smiles before punching the daily clock. He might never be anyone’s idea of a conventional hero but for any poor sucker caught in the clutches of the modern working malaise, he just might be the only hero we’re gonna get.

Marty and the rest of the colorful oddballs that orbit around him are all residents of multi-hyphenate madman Joel Potrykus’ ingeniously warped Buzzard (2014). Not only does Potrykus write, direct and edit the film (the third part in a trilogy that also includes Coyote (2010) and Ape (2012)), he also has a prominent role as Marty’s delightfully obnoxious, uber-nerdy co-worker. It’s a lot to bite off for any filmmaker but Potrykus, with only his second feature film, makes the whole thing look ridiculously easy. The result? One of the quirkiest, coolest, funniest and just plain out-there films I’ve had the pleasure of seeing all year. At this rate, Potrykus runs the risk of joining such vaunted company as Quentin Dupieux, Harmony Korine and György Pálfi as a first-rate purveyor of outsider cinema.

By day, our humble “hero,” Marty (brilliantly played by Potrykus mainstay Joshua Burge), toils away in the kind of anonymous, homogeneous cubicle graveyard that seems more minimum-security prison than place of work. Well…”toil” is really a relative term: you see, Marty is the kind of fella who internalized the “work smarter, not harder” maxim more than most, turning it into the kind of do-or-die statement of purpose that characterizes the most successful con artists. In fact, virtually every waking second of Marty’s existence is given over to scams of one sort or the other: he orders expensive office supplies from work, “returns” them at a nearby office supply store and pockets the cash…he eats nothing but frozen food, most of which he receives for free after constantly complaining about the “quality,” usually after he already finished licking the pizza sauce off his fingers…he rescues discarded food from a McDonald’s dumpster and returns it to the counter for a “fresh” replacement. Marty isn’t running a game: his entire existence IS a game, one that he seems to be handily winning.

When he’s not constantly scamming, Marty appears to only have three other interests: pounding metal music of any and every variety (Norwegian black metal seems to be a particular favorite), anything horror-related and video games. In other words, Marty is the very picture of arrested adolescence: with his Doritos-and-pizza-sandwiches, constant Nintendo playing and brain-rattling thrash, Marty is every loner who ever lived on their friend’s couch, every “twenty-something-teenager” who ever tried to shuffle their way through this mixed-up world of ours. Hell, Marty has such laser-focus that his prize personal project is a glove that combines the old Nintendo Power Glove with horror icon Freddy Krueger’s razor-bladed weapon-of-choice.

As he yawns his way through a workday that holds absolutely no interest for him whatsoever (Marty’s a temp at a bank, which easily stands as one of the most anonymous, thankless jobs out there), he gets a “golden parachute” dropped into his lap, so to speak: Carol (Teri Ann Nelson), his supervisor, hands Marty a small mountain of returned customer refunds to process. Marty’s job is fairly simple (he just has to call the customers and/or look up their current addresses) but he gives it the same expert touch he applies to any work project: he half-asses it before finally giving up. After a mix-up with the birthday check that his mother mails him, however, Marty is introduced to the joys of signing checks over to himself.

In no time, Marty is supplementing his other (ill-gotten) income by depositing the customer refunds into his own account. After his supremely geeky co-worker, Derek (Potrykus), uncovers the scheme, however, Marty’s paranoia begins to kick in. Once Carol casually drops the bomb that she, personally, monitors the account that the refunds are drawn from, however, Marty’s whole world begins to collapse. Despite the lack of any sort of organized investigation, Marty goes on the lam, convinced that his scams have finally caught up with him. Armed with only a pocketful of stolen checks, a combo Power Glove/blade weapon and a sneer that could wrap around the planet twice, Marty is bound and determined to make it out, on his own terms. He’s gonna have to stay sharp, though: in a world full of idiots, phonies, squares and drones, any nail that sticks out is guaranteed to hit hammered down.

As a bit of disclaimer, I’ll begin by saying that I have a particular fondness for anything where a clever, roguish anti-hero sticks it to our modern shit-storm of a society: blame it on too many viewings of Cool Hand Luke (1967), Caddyshack (1980) and Stripes (1981) during my formative years but I always back the rebel, regardless of the situation. In this regard, Buzzard hits the bull’s-eye dead-center, presenting me with one of those unforgettable shit-disturbers that I prize so highly.

Marty Jackitansky, to cut to the chase, is a great character, one of those literary/cinematic creations that is so instrumental in helping us make sense of the world we live in. Like many presumed drones, Marty is as deeply mired in the system as his peers: the major difference, of course, is that they’re merely marking time, whereas he’s trying to carve out his own bit of reality. In many ways, Marty is the very best kind of role-model one could have: he, literally, spends every waking moment of his life indulging in all of the things that he loves, without giving much thought to the stuff that doesn’t matter.

Unlike Derek or the other temp, Stacy (Katie Call), Marty has no interest in “doing a good job” at work: this kind of work doesn’t matter, ultimately…it has no inherent value, beyond the meager paycheck, and brings no great worth to his life. Rather than pretend that worthless things like his office temp job actually matter, Marty treats them like the ridiculous jokes that they really are: it’s not so much that Marty is an eternal optimist as that he, literally, doesn’t sweat the small stuff (including all of the societal niceties like “hanging out” and making small talk).

The kicker, of course, is that Potrykus is much too clever a filmmaker to simply present us with a “lovable ruffian” (although, to be fair, nothing about Marty really says “lovable”) and take easy pot-shots at society. Rather, we get a no-holds-barred view of Marty’s process, which means that we get a front-row-seat to his inevitable paranoid breakdown. Potrykus (and Marty) know that you can only flip off life for so long before you get as good as you get: his downfall doesn’t have as much to do with his slippery moral slope as it does with the fact that, in the end, none of us can escape the machine. The film’s brilliant final image isn’t so much a marvelous bit of magical-realism as it is the realization that nothing is ever quite what it seems: you can break out of one “prison” only to find yourself right back in another.

While the filmmaking here is absolutely top-notch, there’s no denying that Burge shoulders an enormous amount of the burden. His portrayal of Marty is so perfect, so wonderfully insular, that he immediately vaults into the upper-echelon of cinematic outsiders like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s (1975) Randle McMurphy or the aforementioned Holden Caulfield. There’s not much margin for error, here, since Potrykus’ style leans heavily on extreme close-ups and awkwardly long takes: if Burge wasn’t always completely invested, if we couldn’t see the spark of Marty’s rebellion in every single smirk, squint and chortle, this would all get old ridiculously quick. Instead, we get brilliant scenes like the one where Marty shovels spaghetti into his face while wearing a pristine, white hotel bathrobe. In and of itself, the scene means nothing: when you factor in Burge’s complete mastery of his character, the scene becomes something much more…it becomes triumphant, the perfect synthesis of mania and joy, a “final meal” consumed at a crossroads that leads either to victory or oblivion.

Burge isn’t the only one to watch here, however, even if he’s undeniably the film’s focus. Just as great, for different reasons, is Potrykus’ performance as the unforgettable Derek. Quite frankly, Derek is an awesome character, sort of the unofficial patron saint of basement dwellers everywhere. Between his “party zone” (the sad-looking basement in his dad’s house plus one of those cheap colored-light things from Spencers), his self-important proclamations on everything under the sun and his Bugles/Hot Pockets/Mountain Dew diet, Derek is a gaming-culture Everyman. He’s the kind of person who tries to turn co-workers on to terrible pop music, takes every opportunity to show he’s not “gay” and forces his house-guests to watch him play video games. Derek is the kind of character who could have been unbelievably insufferable and hateful yet, thanks to Potrykus’ all-in performance, he becomes an integral part of the film. It also helps that the side-splitting scene where he munches Bugles in faster and faster succession is, without a doubt, the single funniest gag like this since Lucy tried to eat all those chocolates.

There are so many layers to Buzzard that it’s difficult to get everything on the first go through, despite the apparent simplicity of the film. While it’s tempting to view the movie as a series of Marty’s adventures, the contrast with the “real world” is just too cutting to ignore. This becomes especially true once Marty goes on the run and his actions become increasingly violent and more unpredictable. Similar to the moment when we first realize just how disturbed Travis Bickle really is, it takes a while before we “wake up” to the reality of what Marty’s done. It’s quite telling that the film’s finale can be read as either abject success or failure, depending on the individual sensibilities.

As should be quite apparent, I absolutely loved Buzzard. The film has a great look (even the extreme close-ups eventually won me over), is genuinely funny (Marty’s “White Russian” response to “Is your name Polish?” might be my favorite quip of the month) and carves out its own path with ruthless focus. In many ways, the film reminded me of Quentin Dupieux-lite (despite seeming like a negative, that’s actually quite the positive) or a slightly warmer, friendlier co-mingling of Richard Linklater and Harmony Korine. While there are some genuinely strange elements to the film, it never quite hits the surreal heights of something like Wrong Cops (2013) or Gummo (1997), although there are certainly elements of both to be found here.

What the film absolutely does not remind me of, however, is Rick Alverson’s odious The Comedy (2012), another recent odd to aimlessness in the modern youth. The reason for this, I think, is pretty basic: while The Comedy sought to portray a group of privileged, self-obsessed hipster assholes waging war on “polite society” through a series of pranks and un-PC jokes, Buzzard gives us a genuine, counter-culture irritant who seeks to realign the modern world to his favor. Marty Jackitansky may be rebelling against everything but he’s got a reason: when the whole world is full of shit, sometimes you just gotta make your own reality. While I can’t say I always (or almost ever) agreed with Marty’s methods, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t respect his goal. The most I could say for the assorted schlubs in The Comedy, however, is that I probably wouldn’t think about mowing them down with a steamroller.

Many of us were raised on the old maxim “an honest pay for an honest day’s work.” When the return isn’t “honest,” however, what does that say about the work? Marty Jackitansky knows that you can never get ahead playing someone else’s game, so he brings his own to the party. If that ain’t something worth celebrating, well, I don’t know what is.

10/8/14 (Part Two): The Ties That Blind

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31 Days of Halloween, auteur theory, Chan-Wook Park, Chung-hoon Chung, cinema, Clint Mansell, coming of age, Dermot Mulroney, dysfunctional family, English-language debut, family secrets, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, Flannery O'Connor, flashbacks, Harmony Korine, insane asylums, insanity, Jacki Weaver, Lady Vengeance, Matthew Goode, Mia Wasikowska, mother-daughter relationships, Movies, murder, Nicole Kidman, Old Boy, Phyllis Somerville, psychopaths, psychosexual, Stoker, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, Uncle Charlie, uncompromising voice, voice-over narration, Wentworth Miller

Pitched somewhere between Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothics and Pedro Almodovar’s psychosexual jaw-droppers, Korean auteur Chan-Wook Park’s English-language debut, Stoker (2013), is quite a piece of work. Long known for films that are as impressive to look at as they are often difficult to watch, Park’s newest film pulls few punches and holds even fewer hands, coming off as more fairy-tale influenced than any of his previous films, achieving an intoxicating, if confounding, atmosphere that’s fairly close to a fever dream. For anyone who expected the transition to Western films to “tame” park, Stoker stands in towering confirmation to the idea that Park, like all true film auteurs, will always follow his muse first and popular conventions second. While the film won’t supplant Park’s classic “Vengeance” trilogy anytime soon, Stoker is a meticulously crafted, often beautiful, treatise on the destructive nature of obsession and the familial secrets that haunt us all. While the movie seems slightly more subdued than films like Oldboy (2003) or Lady Vengeance (2005), it still packs a pretty vicious bite, albeit one informed by a particularly chilly sensibility.

Stoker centers around the surviving members of the titular family, namely the neurotic Evelyn Stoker (Nicole Kidman) and her odd, 18-year-old daughter, India (Mia Wasikowska). India’s father, Richard (Dermot Mulroney) has just been killed in a car accident, an event which has, effectively, shattered what remains of Evelyn and India’s lives. At the funeral, the Stokers are introduced to Richard’s long-lost brother, Charlie (Matthew Goode), a handsome, intense young man who claims to have been traveling the world for many years. He wants to stay and help Evelyn and India make it through their current tragedy, although his motives seem to lean more towards romancing India’s mother than to helping to soothe their mental wounds.

As Charlie hangs around, India begins to pick up little hints of things that may be…well, just a little askew, as it were: a strange argument with the housekeeper, Mrs. McGarrick (Phyllis Somerville), that seems to come out of nowhere; Charlie’s strange, knowing glances at India; Aunt Gwen’s (Jacki Weaver) seeming distrust and unease around Charlie; a piano lesson that hovers at the acceptable boundaries between instruction and seduction…indeed, trouble seems to follow Charlie around like a second skin, facts which are certainly not lost on young India.

To complicate things, however, India appears to be just as mysterious and complicated a figure as her uncle. She’s a dour, serious young woman who’s constantly bullied and harassed at school (one obnoxious student draws naked pictures of India and shoves them in her face, while constantly “punching at” her face, always stopping just shy of actually making physical contact) and doesn’t seem to have any friends whatsoever. There’s one telling scene where India spends her art class drawing the detailed pattern on the inside of the vase, rather than the vase, itself, as her other classmates do: as with everything else, India just doesn’t see things in the same way as the rest of the world.

As Charlie continues to stay with the Stokers, however, the psychosexual storm gets whipped into a veritable frenzy: India’s sexual awakening seems to coincide with Charlie’s increased interest in both Evelyn and India, although her coming-of-age has started to take on certain violent aspects, not the least of which is the explosive moment where she finally strikes back at her bully. As events progress, India gets ever closer to deciphering the mystery of the key that hangs around her neck, a key that will help explain not only Uncle Charlie’s strange behavior but will also set India upon a path of self-discovery, a path that will ultimately lead to both salvation…and destruction.

As with all of Park’s films, Stoker is so carefully crafted as to seem almost like a clockwork marvel. The film is a constantly moving, evolving puzzlebox, a tricky construction that purposefully obscures key information, leaving the audience in the dark for a majority of the proceedings in a similar manner to Oldboy. This sense of complexity extends to every aspect of the film, from its narrative structure to its visual language, although the cinematography ends up being the most identifiable aspect of this structure. Quite simply, Stoker’s cinematography and shot construction, courtesy of long-time Park collaborator Chung-hoon Chung, is a complete marvel. It goes without saying that Stoker is frequently beautiful and always interesting to look at: more impressive are the myriad ways in which Park and Chung use the visual language of film to get across their subtextual themes and ideas. The scene where India is completely encircled by identical shoeboxes…the bit where a spider crawls up her leg and between her thighs…the gorgeous, surprising shot where brushed hair suddenly becomes a flowing field of waist-high grass…unrelated imagery juxtaposed in ways that seem to indicate that everything, no matter how irrelevant is interconnected…Stoker is all but bursting with subtle nuance and just-out-of-eyesight symbolism.

Into this beautifully realized visual tapestry, then, Park pours a trilogy of performances that manage to accentuate and support each other in some nicely organic ways. Mia Wasikowska, currently making quite a name for herself in just about every type of role imaginable, is pitch-perfect as the morose, guarded India. In the hands of any other actress, India might have come across as more enigmatic than necessary, a “real-life” Wednesday Addams who exists purely to pour Pernod on everyone’s ice cream. Wasikowska is amazingly subtle, versatile performer, however, and India becomes a full-realized character in her capable hands. I won’t lie and say that I found India to be likable, at any point in time, but it wasn’t hard to see things from her point of view, as twisted as it may be: her continuous voice-overs were also well-handled, allowing us insight into her cluttered little brain.

For her part, Kidman turns in another dependably solid genre performance: there’s always a thinly concealed streak of insanity running through her controlled performance but Kidman’s Evelyn never comes across as a certifiable nut. If anything, she’s a wounded, needful mother who foolishly pines for the one thing that mothers take for granted: the love of their own children. Evelyn is never a completely pathetic character, however, mostly thanks to the cold steel that Kidman brings to the performance, as if one could see the metal framework just below the skin.

Special mention must also be made of Matthew Goode’s performance as the sinister Uncle Charlie. Although I must admit to being far less familiar with his career than either Kidman or Wasikowska’s, I was completely taken with Goode’s performance. Like Wasikowska’s take on India, Goode brings an overriding sense of barely contained neuroses to his depiction of Charlie: he’s able to convey a world of information with just the barely perceptible uptick of an eyebrow or a smile that’s just slightly too curdled to instill much warmth. Goode’s performance is the epitome of restrained tension: you know that he’s going to uncoil and explode, at some point, but you’re damned if his eyes give any indication as to when that might be. By the film’s conclusion, Goode and Wasikowska make an almost unbeatable pair, playing off of each other’s mannerisms and tics in some truly impressive, startling ways. Park is definitely an “actor’s director” and his newest film comes top-loaded with some typically impressive treading of the boards.

As with almost all of Park’s films, Stoker is incredibly easy to respect, although it’s just a little more difficult to really love. While the film is constantly twisted and the narrative always unpredictable, this complexity sometimes translates into moments that are pure-headscratchers: by the conclusion, I found myself second-guessing a few “facts” that previously seemed pretty solid, mostly because I felt a little lost in the back-and-forth of the flashback-heavy narrative. The film is also just about as bleak and chilly as a film can possibly get: this sense of frigid sterility may be a little off-putting for many Western audiences, although there’s nothing in here that will challenge Western taboos in quite the same way as the plot twist from Oldboy does.

Ultimately, Park’s Stoker is an impressive English-language debut and a mighty fine film on its own rights, even if it’s not quite as incendiary or feral as the Korean films that preceded it. On a craft-level, the film has few equals: quite frankly, it’s one of the most astoundingly beautiful films I’ve ever laid eyes on. If the narrative/thematic elements of the film don’t get me quite as jazzed as the visual/aural elements…well, that’s alright, too. I respect and trust Park enough to stay with him on his cinematic journey into the darkness of the human soul: in a world where more and more things seem to get “dumbed down” for the masses, it’s always refreshing to find an uncompromising voice who trusts that we’ll “get it,” even if we’re not quite sure what “it” is.

4/26/14: To Project and Swerve

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absurdist, Arden Myrin, auteur theory, bad cops, Best of 2013, black comedies, cinema, comedies, cops, cops behaving badly, dark comedies, Eric Judor, Eric Roberts, Eric Wareheim, favorite films, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, French cinema, French films, Grace Zabriskie, Harmony Korine, Marilyn Manson, Mark Burnham, Movies, Mr. Oizo, Officer de Luca, Officer Duke, Officer Holmes, Officer Rough, Quentin Dupieux, Ray Wise, Rubber, Steve Little, surreal, Terry Gilliam, Tim & Eric, Wes Anderson, Wrong, Wrong Cops

Quentin Dupieux gets me. He really does. If any filmmaker operating in our modern age can really be tuned in to my bizarre little wave-length, Dupieux is definitely it. While I may hold Refn and Wheatley in the highest regard, never having seen one of their films that I haven’t adored, Dupieux is the crackpot auteur who seems to view the world with my eyes. Beginning with Rubber (2010), the French writer/director/musician (he’s also Mr. Oizo, the French electro artist) has seen fit to depict a world that’s one part Lynchian suburb, one part dystopic wasteland and one part absurdist stage play. While 2012’s brain-melting Wrong serves to set-up the bizarre wonderland that’s finally unleashed in Wrong Cops, Dupieux’s newest is a completely stand-alone triumph, an absurdist nightmare that manages to be both hilarious and disturbing. Basically, Dupieux is up to his old tricks.

Whereas Wrong told a more linear, complex but, essentially, traditional (or as traditional as Dupieux can get) narrative, Wrong Cops functions more as a bat-shit crazy Pulp Fiction, wherein we are introduced to a disparate collection of characters who we then follow about as their stories eventually intertwine. In the case of Wrong Cops, we’re introduced to the titular characters, a ragtag collection of “law enforcement” personnel that are sort of like Police Academy filtered through It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, by way of Harmony Korine. We have Officer Duke (Mark Burnham), who has sex with transsexual prostitutes, delivers the pot he sells to locals by stuffing it in dead rats, carts around a “75% dead” body in his trunk and needlessly hassles a poor teen nerd who just wants to listen to his headphones (Marilyn Manson, in a role that must, literally, be seen to be believed…and yes…he is playing a teenage boy). We get Officer de Luca (Eric Wareheim), who holds yoga students at gunpoint in order to get their phone numbers and his partner, Officer Holmes (Arden Myrin), who uses her young son as bag-man in a money-drop involving the blackmail of a fellow cop. Said fellow cop, Officer Sunshine (Steve Little), has an active side-career in law enforcement-themed gay porn, a business venture which he’s managed to successfully hide from his adoring wife and daughter. Meanwhile, Officer Rough (Eric Judor), is just trying to make the best damn dance track that he can. There’s something missing, however, and Rough just can’t quite put his finger on it. Good thing that the “75% dead” guy (Daniel Quinn) has a thing for beats, though: with a little luck, he may just be able to give the cut the extra oomph it needs to secure Officer Rough a meeting with a top record exec. That is, of course, if he doesn’t bleed to death first. Throw in Eric Roberts as Duke’s drug supplier and Ray Wise as the group “who gives a shit” Captain and you got yahtzee, folks!

Like all of Dupieux’s films, Wrong Cops is easier (and better) experienced then explained. He has a particular skill with enveloping viewers completely within the reality of his films, something that Wes Anderson and Harmony Korine are both experts at. There’s never a point in the film, regardless of how strange, random or absurd, where the viewer is taken out of Dupieux’s reality: for my money, it’s one of the most impressive displays of world-building I’ve seen this year. The film has a sun-bleached, washed-out color palette and tone that recalls not only Rubber but, almost subliminally, Alex Cox’s outsider classic Repo Man (1984). I actually see several parallels with Repo Man in this film, not least of which is the almost mundane way in which the characters all deal with the strangeness massed around them. There was definitely this feel in Dupieux’s previous film, Wrong, but that movie was also a much more explicitly fantasy/sci-fi oriented project, as was Rubber. Wrong Cops, by contrast, is set wholly within a world that could, technically, be ours, albeit one in which everything was tweaked a few degrees…a world in which everything was just a little wrong, as it were.

Part of the joy with Wrong Cops, similar to watching exploitation films or anything by Lloyd Kaufman, is seeing just how bad things will get. As with everything else, Wrong Cops doesn’t disappoint on this count: things start bad and get steadily worse until the whole thing becomes a roaring tsunami of bad taste, bad choices, bad behavior and bad, bad people. Truth be told, there isn’t a single character in the film that you can truly “root” for, not one person who passes the sniff test as a “hero.” We spend the most time with Duke but he’s the furthest thing we’d want from a protector. Ditto Officers de Luca and Holmes, a potential sexual assailant, on the one hand, and a cop so dirty that she even “feeds” on her own peers, on the other. The closest we get to an “innocent” cop in the film is Rough who wins by default: he doesn’t really do anything terrible (outside of some hanky-panky with his neighbor’s married wife, that is) but he also doesn’t lift a finger to help anyone, least of all the poor dying guy sitting in his living room.

Films like Wrong Cops walk a very fine line: on one hand, they only work spectacularly well if they push the envelope as far as it will go. On the other hand, however, there a definite difference between crudity with a point (see Blazing Saddles) and crude-for-its-own-sake (see pretty much any Troma film). Earlier this year, I lambasted The Comedy, a hateful hipster-skewering/lauding film that also featured Eric Wareheim in a prominent role. In that case, I was never sure which side of the issue the filmmakers were actually on: more often than not, The Comedy seemed to be celebrating their terrible behavior, while also trying to half-heartedly tsk tsk it. There’s no such hemming and hawing in Dupieux’s film, however: he’s all-in on the various officers terrible behavior but he makes no bones about what unrepentant assholes these people are. There’s nothing to look up to, here, no sense of cool cats thumbing their noses at a square world: these people are part of the problem, not any part of the solution, and Dupieux knows it. He also, however, knows that they are a seriously funny bunch of misanthropes (similar to that lovable bunch of apes in It’s Always Sunny) and gives them plenty of room to work their funny magic.

And the film is funny. Very funny. Unlike the ultra-dry, high-concept Rubber or the wry, tricky Wrong, Wrong Cops is all loud, belching, farting id, the Sam Kinison to the previous films George Carlin. Perhaps this speaks more to my sense of humor than anything else (remember…Dupieux gets me) but I laughed my way through the entire film. Hard. There are so many great scenes in the film that picking out favorites is a little hard but there’s stuff that still makes me crack up, even as I type it now: Eric Wareheim’s hair getting blown back by a tornado of pepper spray from a decidedly bored wannabe “victim”; Mark Burnham tossing a drug-filled rat onto a diner counter like it was no big deal; Officers de Luca and Holmes walking into a murder scene and proceeding to raid the fridge, featuring the priceless exchange, “Aren’t you going to ask any questions?” “I do have a question: how old is this mozzarella?”; the record executive dismissing Officer Rough’s efforts with the revelation that he doesn’t think “anyone’s going to want to listen to music from a black, one-eyed, slightly monstrous DJ.” Wrong Cops is like a bottomless treasure chest, constantly spewing forth glittering new comedic jewels at frequent intervals.

The acting, across the board, is dead on. All of the cops are pretty much perfect but there isn’t a single actor/character in the film that feels off, regardless of how much/little screen time they get. Marilyn Manson, in particular, is utterly fantastic: he plays the part of David Dolores Frank with absolutely zero hint of his more famous day job and the result is a pretty realistic portrait of a hassled teen. It’s a brilliant, metaphysical move that should have been nothing more than silly sight gag (oh look: the Antichrist Superstar is wearing jeans and a t-shirt) but plays like an honest-to-god directorial choice. This, in a nutshell, seems to sum up the Dupieux method: treat everything, regardless of how absurd or meaningless, with the utmost respect. Dupieux may be a court jester but he’s a smart one, perhaps as smart as Terry Gilliam, in his own way.

As previously mentioned, the film looks great and the sparse, dry electro score compliments everything perfectly. Truth be told, I just can’t find anything to really dun the film for: if this was a baseball game, this would have been a home run, no questions about it. As such, I’m pretty much left with just deciding where the film fits into Dupieux’s existing oeuvre. I actually like it quite a bit more than Rubber, which is easily the most “difficult” film in Dupieux’s catalog, but not quite as much as Wrong. While Wrong Cops is a much funnier film than its predecessor, I also think it’s a slightly smaller film: Wrong was working with some truly mind-blowing concepts and metaphysics, whereas Wrong Cops is a peek into an insane world. By the time Ray Wise showed up in a role that couldn’t help but remind me of his turn as Satan in Reaper, I had begun to wonder whether Dupieux’s whole point was to plop us down into a kind of purgatory while his various characters continued their slow shuffle into Hell.

A sentient tire…a talking dog…a collection of the worst police officers in history…if there’s a method to Quentin Dupieux’s exquisite madness, I’ve yet to see it. This, of course, is what makes waiting for his next film so excruciating. At this rate, the next movie could, literally, be absolutely anything under the sun. That’s kind of terrifying, if you think about it, but that’s also pretty damn exhilarating. It’s what creativity should always be. It’s what the movies should always be. It’s why I’m still here…and it’s why you should be, too.