The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Girls Gone Dead (2012)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 19 July 2012

  There’s a fine line between satirizing the exploitation of something like Girls Gone Wild and becoming that which is supposedly being satirized. In other words, when your film has nearly as many scenes of topless debauchery and lipstick lesbianism as an actual Girls Gone Wild video, it may be time to reconsider your approach. This process does not seem to have occurred to the filmmakers behind Girls Gone Dead, a direct-to-disc slasher that delivers tons of T&A and very little else. In fact, the best thing that can be said for Girls Gone Dead is that it’s not another zombie movie, although the title sort of hints that it might be.

  Rebecca (Katie Peterson) has just returned home from her freshman year at college and is prepping for a weekend reunion with her best friends from high school. Her mother Rosemarie (Julie Kendall) is worried that Rebecca will fall into sin and debauchery and attempts to set Rebecca up with her grade-school boyfriend Todd (Vincent Chimato). Despite Todd’s tempting offer of tickets to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (starring Willy Aames), Rebecca takes off for her friend’s beach house for the weekend. A beach house that just happens to be a short drive away from where the latest “Crazy Girls Unlimited” video is being shot with special guest Beetlejuice (playing himself).

  Unfortunately for the girls, the stretch of beach on which the house is located is not exactly party central. They go to a nearly-deserted bar and luckily run into some guys driving through town on their way to the “Crazy Girls Unlimited” shoot, and they plan a house party for the next day. Early in the day, a killer strikes the “Crazy Girls Unlimited” party before moving on to the beach house. Can Sheriff Jackson Cole (Jerry “The King” Lawler) stop the killer in time, or are Rebecca and her friends all going to end up on the wrong end of a very large, very sharp instrument of death? Anyone who’s ever seen a horror film will be able to guess the answer to that question, and probably also figure out who the killer is well in advance of any of the characters in the film.

  The bad luck keeps coming, though, as it takes Girls Gone Dead a full 106 minutes to stagger across the finish line; in low-budget horror film terms, this might as well be Magnolia. The film takes what seems like a full twenty minutes establishing the fact that Rebecca’s mom is a crazy Christian prude, and the action– regardless of what it might be at any given time– grinds to a halt every 8-10 minutes to show another presumably hilarious “Crazy Girls Unlimited” commercial. Girls Gone Dead doesn’t skimp on the nudity, and by the time the killing actually starts there are some decently gruesome practical makeup effects, but it’s far too little and way too late. There are hints that the film was perhaps originally envisioned as a satire of “Girls Gone Wild,” but the grating misogyny of the “Crazy Girls Unlimited” bits and the huge chunk of run time they take up indicates a more mercenary intent. Cut down by about 30 minutes, there may be a decent by-the-numbers slasher hiding in Girls Gone Dead, but as it is, it’s just a mean-spirited slog.

  The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 24 March 2014

  Wes Anderson is perhaps best known to both his ardent fans and hateful detractors for using each of his films to create little shoebox-diorama worlds in which his characters, speaking in cadences now as familiar as those of Hal Hartley’s, deal with class issues and any number of Anderson’s other narrative preoccupations. Sometimes this is literal: see the cutaways of the Belafonte in The Life Aquatic, the titular Darjeeling Limited, and much of the world of The Fantastic Mr. Fox. With each film, Anderson’s obsessive attention to detail has become more and more focused, resulting in Moonrise Kingdom, a film that took place entirely in a small geographic area that Anderson fleshed out so thoroughly and carefully that it may as well have been real. Moonrise Kingdom was perhaps the logical culmination of Anderson’s style leading up to that point in a way that made it difficult to imagine where he would go next. As it happens, The Grand Budapest Hotel continues to deal with all of Anderson’s obsessions, but exponentially widens the increasingly narrow scope of his previous films to encompass an entire alternate history Europe, with an impressive ensemble cast led by Ralph Fiennes in one of Anderson’s most fully-realized characters yet.

  The film opens with a series of framing devices. The first introduces the audience to a young girl visiting the Old Lutz Cemetery in the small country of Zubrowka (“Once the seat of an empire,” an opening title card explains) to hang a hotel key on the headstone of the Author of The Grand Budapest Hotel, which she has brought along to read. Anderson then segues into the Author (Tom Wilkinson) in the 1980s, beginning to tell his story of his encounter with the owner of the Grand Budapest Hotel. From here, the film delves further, following the young Author (Jude Law) in the 1960s as he visits the hotel in hopes of treating a case of Scribe’s Fever, “a neurasthenia common among the intelligentsia of the day.” Here, he meets Zero Moustapha (F. Murray Abraham), the owner of the hotel. The Author asks Mr. Moustapha about how he came to buy the hotel, and Moustapha offers to tell the Author his story, which is where most of the action of the film takes place: Zubrowka, 1932, when Zero (Tony Revolori) worked as the Lobby Boy at the Grand Budapest hotel under the tutelage of its famous concierge, Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes). Once the stage is set, the story begins to quickly accumulate a large cast of characters and an increasingly complicated series of incidents, and anyone not paying careful attention may find themselves hopelessly lost in short order.

  However, more so even than any of Anderson’s previous films, it is almost impossible to imagine any viewer not paying careful attention. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a gorgeously shot film, utilizing the cinema screen to mimic the style of images from different eras in film history and exploding with beautiful colors and carefully framed and choreographed shots and camera movements. The opening framing shots and 1980s are presented in a standard 1.85:1 “widescreen” aspect ratio used by most contemporary films. The 1960s are represented in the wider “scope” ratio of 2.35:1, and the 1932 section is presented in “Academy” (or “square”) aspect ratio of 1.37:1. Aside from the aspect ratios, each era is given a particular look through the use of different lenses, the present and 80s presented in relatively sharp detail, the run-down Grand Budapest of the 1960s shot with a softer image with an almost fisheye distortion around the edges, and the 1930s represented in deep focus and vibrant color. Anderson’s obsession with symmetrical composition is particularly well-suited to the 1.37:1 image, and nearly every frame of the film is flawlessly composed. The sound design of the film is just as intricate, and the constant forward movement of the storyline is propelled with Alexandre Desplat’s excellent score, which incorporates sound effects accompanying the on-screen action in the musical cues. Any of Anderson’s detractors who find his previous work overly concerned with technique (or, less generously, “fussy”) will likely not be able to sit through 20 minutes of The Grand Budapest Hotel.

  This is also due to the fact that more than ever before, every single tiny detail of everything in the frame of the film has Anderson’s stamp all over it. Signage, costuming, jewelry, newspapers, street cars, ashtrays, every conceivable object contributes to the utterly convincing illusion that this alternate-universe Europe exists and has been lived in for a very long time. The exterior of the Grand Budapest Hotel itself is frequently represented by a beautifully false model, complete with lights and painted backdrops, while its interiors are jaw-dropping in their size and detail. However, here the hotel is just the centerpiece in a larger world, and each location is just as completely realized. Not only do these places and objects immediately call to mind Anderson’s aesthetic, but the film is thick with visual references and allusions to other films, filmmakers, and actors. The camera traveling through the Grand Budapest often calls to mind Kubrick’s steadicam explorations of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Willem Dafoe, as the menacing thug Jopling, has sharpened teeth and his face permanently set i
n a Boris Karloff grimace. The brilliant colors of the film bring to mind Powell & Pressburger, while Harvey Keitel brings a touch of hard-boiled film noir dialogue in his small role as a thoroughly tattooed inmate who helps Gustave during his incarceration.

  Keitel is just one of many familiar faces who pop up throughout The Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson has populated the film with a cast of regulars as well as newcomers: Tilda Swinton appears in alarmingly convincing old-age makeup as Gustave’s lover Madame D., Adrien Brody plays Madame D.’s villainous son Dmitiri, Edward Norton all but reprises his scoutmaster role from Moonrise Kingdom as Military Inspector Henckels, Jeff Goldblum brings a humorous gravity to his role as Kovacs, the executor of Madame D.’s estate, Jason Schwartzman is great in a small part as the hotel’s 1960s concierge M. Jean, and Saoirse Ronan is well cast as Zero’s young love, a brave and inventive pastry chef. Young Zero is played with good-natured deadpan by Tony Revolori, but this is inarguably Ralph Fiennes’s show. His performance as Gustave is absolutely perfect, and he absolutely nails the depiction of a basically good-hearted man who presents the illusion of elegance while not actually being all that smart, or particularly principled in many ways. The relationship between Gustave and young Zero is genuine and touching, and indeed the film closes on a note of unexpected but entirely appropriate melancholy delivered expertly by F. Murray Abraham as the older Zero Moustapha (an interesting complement to his small but integral part in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis).

  The Grand Budapest Hotel represents a huge leap forward for Anderson as a totally idiosyncratic filmmaker, a hugely ambitious film that could only have been made by Anderson. It is also a joyful celebration of cinema that is gorgeous, frantically paced, hilarious and surprisingly poignant. This will certainly be one of the best films of this year, and is arguably Anderson’s best film yet. Although his previous work had already established him as a hugely popular and important American filmmaker, The Grand Budapest Hotel cements Anderson’s reputation as one of the absolute best filmmakers currently working.

  The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol (2010)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 27 March 2012

  I feel compelled to explain up front that I did not watch all of The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol. I made it through a little over 70 minutes of its 93-minute running time before I could not watch any more. I’ve been writing reviews for Film Monthly for four years now, and this is the first film I’ve received for review that I literally could not sit through. If you believe that automatically invalidates anything I might have to say about the film– and really, I don’t necessarily disagree, hence this caveat– feel free to click away and read something more worthy of your time. But if you take away nothing else from this introduction, let it be this: The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol is very possibly the worst, most infuriating and disgusting narrative film I have ever seen, and I seriously doubt anything in its last 20 minutes would change my mind about that. This is not going to be a review so much as an explanation of what made me stop watching the movie. Consider yourself warned.

  Even explaining what The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol is about is exhausting and disheartening. Written and directed by porn actor Tommy Pistol (under the name Aramis Sartorio), who also stars in the film as a character named “Tommy Pistol,” Gruesome Death takes the form of an anthology of short stories that place another “imaginary” Tommy in different situations. These stories play out while the Tommy in the “real” world is over pumping a penis pump– the “gruesome death” referred to in the film’s title is when his penis finally explodes at the end of the film, after all three of these stories have played out. Have I mentioned this is a comedy yet?

  “Tommy Pistol” (played by Tommy Pistol) is a failed actor who can’t get to auditions on time or hold down a job because he’s a horrible asshole to everybody. After his last firing, he returns home to his angered wife (Gia Paloma, Pistol’s real-life spouse), who takes their kid (again, their real-life kid) and leaves. The action then jumps forward a year for some reason, with Tommy still somehow living in the same really nice house despite presumably not having a job. He settles in for a night of eating microwave hot dogs and masturbating; he apparently uses the penis pump for the same amount of time that his hot dog is in the microwave, and on this fateful night he accidentally puts the hot dog in for 20 minutes. Cue the hilarity.

  In the first story, “Tommy Pistol” is a complete idiot, fresh off the train to Los Angeles who has answered an ad on a snuff film site to star in a snuff film of his own in which he will murder women. Tommy is so stupid that he does not understand this is not an acting job, and that he will actually be murdering people. Once on the set, he kills one woman with a cheese grater and uses a Slap Chop on another’s breast before pulling her heart out. Before any of this happens, though, we get extended monologues of Tommy talking directly to the camera about how he’s going to be a big star and prove wrong all those people who made fun of him and his dreams. One of his intended victims escapes and kills all the other behind-the-scenes guys on the snuff film set, but Tommy inexplicably outsmarts her and builds a slip ‘n slide that runs on her blood– this isn’t entirely clear because of the film’s incredibly ugly digital video, so we hear her voiceover screaming “Tommy, you idiot! That’s my blood!”

  If any of this sounds remotely amusing, you should probably just stop reading and go buy this movie immediately. However, the tone of the film is just cruel, and all of the humor comes from a place of disgust and hatred. I didn’t even mention the “Pakistani” hotel owner played by an actor in blackface, but he’s there in this first section, too. What do we learn from this first dream sequence? I guess we learned that you have to do horrible things to be in the porn industry, and maybe Tommy Pistol feels guilty about it, so this is his way of working that out instead of going to therapy and saving the rest of us 93 minutes.

  In the second story, “Tommy” appears to be himself, but he doesn’t show up until after two security guards have what looks like an entirely improvised argument over their lunch that goes on for what feels like about ten minutes. We become painfully aware that the editing is at the same level of technical competence as everything else in the film. “Tommy” sneaks onto the set of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, has a scene in a kitchen shot with a completely different camera than the rest of the film, then kills Arnold and wears his skin in the hopes of taking over his career. Instead, everyone instantly realizes what has happened and panics, so Tommy starts killing everybody. An Asian production assistant named Lynn (Camilla Lim) is confronted by her spirit animal– a dog who has to take “a massive shit”– and returns to the set to fight Tommy with her martial arts abilities. Also, half of her lines are subtitled.

  So to keep score, non-whites in this film have been presented as: a Pakistani hotel owner played by an actor in blackface, the lady who had her breast Slap Chopped off and her heart ripped out, and an Asian woman who knows martial arts and has half of her lines subtitled. If there are any other non-white characters in the last section of the film, I did not see them, but I doubt they fare any better than those in the first two. Tommy, meanwhile, seems to be working out his disappointment that he couldn’t make it in Hollywood, where people treat each other really badly. Now we’ve learned two things from Gruesome Death: First, being in the porno industry requires you to do horrible things, and second, it’s really hard to make it in Hollywood.

  Something else we learn as a sort of side effect is that Tommy Pistol doesn’t give a damn about how his film looks. First is the kitchen scene, obviously shot with a completely different camera than the rest of the film, and second is the fact that there are recurring severe interlacing artifacts in the image when there’s a lot of action on the screen. This is especially bad during the “martial arts” shots. Interlacing happens when shooting with digital video, and I’ve seen it in a few independent films before, but I’ve never seen it in an actual commercially released DVD. It’s one more techn
ical distraction that could have been fixed if anyone involved in the production had taken a few minutes to Google the issue and figured out what was going on, but again I seriously doubt anybody cared at all how the film looked, so it’s still in there.

  The final section of the film casts Tommy as a porno director. His starlet (Daisy Sparks) is having a conversation with him about how she likes doing double anal with black guys because she gets paid more and that she doesn’t like using her vagina, and how she wishes she’d “been raped up the ass when I lost my virginity.” Shortly after this, she is bitten by a radioactive spider, and the disgusting spider bite explodes in pus in Tommy’s face. This is where the film’s misogynist “humor” and gross-out shock tactics proved too depressing for me to deal with any further, and I stopped the movie.

  After cooling off for about ten minutes, I watched the rest of this short on fast-forward, and it appears to turn into a sort of zombie movie on a porn set, where the spider pus infects everyone and there’s slimy junk everywhere and some guy licks pus off a toilet bowl where Daisy Sparks left it behind and seriously, this is the worst movie I have ever seen. When we return to “real world” Tommy, his penis explodes and then there’s a sad coda where home videos of Tommy and his son play while a voiceover says “I’m sorry I couldn’t see you,” and a touching dedication to Tommy’s father appears before the end credits roll.

  Wait, what!? We’ve just spent 90 minutes having our faces shoved into what a worthless moron this guy is, how he’s done terrible things and constantly failed and how horrible he is to everybody, and now we’re supposed to feel sad that he’s not going to be able to see his kid any more because he was too stupid to not kill himself with a penis pump? No. Tommy Pistol made damned sure we have absolutely no sympathy for “Tommy Pistol,” and I don’t. I can’t imagine anybody would. The film’s ending is just one more indication that Pistol had no idea what he was doing making this film.