Lessons of Darkness

Horror, Porn, and Iraq

I've got three new reviews of three very different films for this Monday morning. Over at Slant magazine, I provide the lowdown on this past weekend's number one movie, Boogeyman, the upcoming NC-17 documentary Inside Deep Throat, and Bahman Ghobadi's Iraq-set drama Turtles Can Fly.

Boogeyman (Slant magazine)
Inside Deep Throat (Slant magazine)
Turtles Can Fly (Slant magazine)

Also, my less-than-thrilled review of Hotel Rwanda can be found directly below this post.

Hotel Rwanda (2004): C

It’s difficult, simply because of its subject matter, to be totally unmoved by Hotel Rwanda, the based-on-real-events account of Paul Rusesabagaina (Don Cheadle), the manger of a posh African luxury hotel who heroically sheltered Tutsis during the 1994 genocide orchestrated by the majority Hutu population. Yet more often than not, Terry George’s film proves itself incapable of honestly confronting its ugly subject matter. While Rusesabagaina’s stirring story is certainly worthy of respect and admiration, Hotel Rwanda – when not providing Cheadle with shirt-tearing moments of Oscar-baiting histrionics, or Nolte (as a sympathetic U.N. commander) with embarrassing monologues about the racist West’s indifference to the Rwandans’ plight – is ultimately a Schindler’s List treatment of the Rwandan genocide, choosing to focus on a unique example of courage and selflessness amidst tragedy rather than the grisly realities of the crisis itself. That said, even Spielberg’s film didn’t shy away from presenting a frank portrayal of Nazi atrocities. George’s film, however, refuses to even momentarily show the machete-inflicted brutality that raged throughout Rwanda, instead depicting the actual genocidal murders only once (on a grainy video!) and obscuring the repugnance of a corpse-strewn street with a shroud of fog. To not show, with blunt, uncompromising gruesomeness, the racially motivated butchery, is to whitewash what was nothing less than wholesale slaughter. By so egregiously soft-peddling what actually took place, the film dismayingly offers disingenuous, sanitized valor when it should instead be shocking and shaming us with candid, sincere visions of unfathomable horror.

Polyester (1981): B

While it might be a tad simplistic to state that every John Waters film is, at heart, exactly the same, Polyester certainly shares fundamental similarities to many of the director’s prior and subsequent offerings. Waters’ 1981 freak-a-thon was “filmed in Oderama,” meaning that, during its initial theatrical release, moviegoers were provided scratch-and-sniff cards to use at prompts throughout the film. While enjoying the film on DVD doesn’t afford such odorous participation (one is simply left to imagine the stench of farts and skunks), this swift 86-minute farce still serves up plenty of nasty fun. Divine is the alcoholic matriarch of a supremely dysfunctional family that includes an adulterous porn theater-owning husband, a son whose foot fetish compels him to stomp on women’s toes, and a floozy daughter looking forward to having an abortion. Toss in Divine’s best friend Cuddles (Edith Massey) – a retarded former maid who, after inheriting a fortune, is driven around by a German chauffeur in a limousine and is planning a debutante ball for herself – and you’ve got a typical Waters three-ring circus. The film’s gross-out outrageousness aims to skewer the “normalcy” of suburban-dwelling nuclear families, and bits involving Divine’s picnic in the country and a disastrous robbery that proves fatal for her money-grubbing mother keep the goofy quotient high. Though it’s not Waters’ funniest or most accomplished effort, Polyester definitely stinks in all the right ways.