or, “Misanthropic Thanatophiles in Love”: A spoiler-free mini movie review.
3.5 out of 5
“Kissed” is a bizarre but on-brand Canadian film, with Molly Parker (from Global TV’s “Doc”) in her first major appearance. It’s a drama that skews closer to video art, with a striking premise that eventually plays second-fiddle to a middling obsession plot.
But damned if it exists at all: a straight-faced movie about necrophilia.Jörg Buttgereit’s “Nekromantik” this is not – though both films share the same fleeting duration of just over an hour: an unheard-of runtime in today’s feature market. Plenty for director Lynne Stopkewich to poke her head in, make her points, and leave, in – fingers-crossed – the most memorable way possible.
The prologue is laudable: a snapshot of heroine Sandra’s youth & learned Wiccanness, growing from a respect for the dead into intimacy. Getting these details about the protagonist so early made me emotionally invested in the unorthodox subject matter – as did Parker’s fearless, Genie award winning performance as the adult Sandra (Genies are the Canadian Oscars, now called the “Canadian Screen Awards”).
or, “Waiting-Out Your Shift on the Toilet”: A spoiler-free mini movie review.
1 out of 5
“Life is like an onion. Peel it back one layer at a time. Sometimes you weep.”
– Carl Sandberg
Recently, I went to a boring live drama where the players hardly moved – not even to monologue. In media, you shouldn’t have this problem because editors exist, where theatre fills that gap with the ‘live’ experience.
Jack-of-all-trades Tyler Perry’s new Prime collaboration “Duplicity”, however, is so top-loaded with actors in closed rooms retching phlegmatic dialogue, that Perry seems overwhelmed by his own cinematic mediocrity, and reverts back to his theatrical training. This results in stagers either sitting or standing across from one-another completely stationary, endlessly overstating their positions. It’s the filmmaking equivalent of waiting-out the end of your shift on the toilet.
You are forgiven for thinking “It Ends With Us” (aka. IEWU) is an ‘important’ movie, what with all the rigamarole behind its scenes. Trust me to tell you like it is, and IEWU did not end soon enough.
Lion’s share of blame is awarded to director/star Justin Baldoni, and not for the same reasons as his now-mangled future career prospects: long passages are staged & shot flatly like community theatre, with a never-ending rooftop meet-cute beheading the pacing right out of the gate; line-readings recall Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” built on plot reaction rather than action; and Blake Lively’s Lily Bloom is fitted into tight, sexy tops that certainly made me envious of her current beau Ryan Reynolds, but are a betrayal of the self-taught defences of her character on-screen.
Original author Colleen Hoover ain’t no saint neither, and IEWU’s greatest fault is its disingenuous take on domestic violence. These handful of scenes are told with an unreliable presentation, tricking the audience into wondering whether Baldoni’s toxic neurosurgeon Ryle isn’t such a bad guy… until the contemptuous slow-motion reveal in the third-act spells it out.
It’s hard to say whether IEWU would have benefitted from an unflinching eye opposed to the choppy PG-13 implications we got here instead. What’s crystal-clear, however, is both leads’ reverse dramatic-irony that would be overanalyzed in literary form (such as Ryle’s shoulder-shrugging in the climax) lands here with a thud because of the meandering cinematic handling of the core narrative. The hot & heavy courting Lily puts Ryle through is starkly contrasted to how easily triggered she is, despite his adamance of love, and neither’s behaviour is ever studied beyond its broad strokes.
This isn’t to fault Lively’s performance, which is about as good as the material will allow, but I only ever had empathy for Amy Morton’s underused Mama Bloom. Certain people in life continue to make poor choices despite being compulsively aware of the signs, but a romance centered around these otherwise well-educated, well-intentioned one-percenters who all run their own businesses is perhaps the wrong podium.
It Ends With Us is an overlong message movie that fails in its amateur, sanitized telling. Only you, the potential viewer, know whether you would have paid full price to see this in theatres. At what point can I walk out and still get a refund?
Poster sourced from impawards.com.What do you think? Keeping up with all the drama, I was expecting an oral sex scene after Lively’s lawsuit mentioned that Baldoni wanted more, only to find there wasn’t any simulated sex in the movie at all. Are you telling me that Justin wanted an oral sex scene just because? Does its feuding leads impact your impressions of the film itself? Are you like me, and the drama is the reason you decided to watch it in the first place? Let us know in the comments below!
“The night of Cassidy & Arthur’s dinner ‘date’ & its aftermath, and the story ends.” Click Here for Part One & Part Two.
x
“Arthur? Is that you?“
Cassidy was confused to see him. She hopped on twenty minutes in to his bus ride, knapsack in-tow, to see him sitting near the front of the bus on one of the benches parallel to the aisle, wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up. She recognized his stubble. There wasn’t a spot next to him, so she hovered, still sporting her knapsack, holding on to the grip bar with clammy palms.
“Hm?“
She reached for his hood and flipped it off his head. He had some very noticeable scratches at the base of his nose and along his eyebrow line, but it was him, “What are you doing taking the bus?”
“Oh hi.”
“What are you doing taking the bus?”
“I couldn’t get my car started.”
“Oh.”
“…What are you doing taking the bus?”
“Somebody said they were driving later.”
“Oh. You couldn’t get a ride?”
“I didn’t think I needed one.”
“Oh. I had figured I’d just drive us wherever from the restaurant and then take us back to your car.”
“Never mind. I’m over it.”
“…We’re still going out after though, right?”
“How am I getting home?”
“…The bus?“
“Heh, you’re funny.” He wasn’t.
“I’m sorry, Cassidy. It kind of threw me for a loop, too. You’re on my route, though, so I guess we can just come back the same way together, when we’re done.”
“Sure.” They puttered silently for a minute as the bus rolled along, “How much longer does it take?”
“Only, like, ten more minutes.”
“That close, huh?”
“Yeah, it just rips by when you’re driving yourself. You don’t get all the little detours.”
“Actually, I usually have to take the long way around on the highway. If I could take the one-way roads like a bus, I’d never be late for a shift.” She snorted. Arthur grimaced.
The bus went over a bump, and Cassidy lost her balance and stepped backward, smooshing her knapsack against the face of someone sitting on the chair behind her, “Get off of me!”
Cassidy looked behind her, “Oh, I’m so sorry!” She took her bag off and put it on the floor next to her. She started to think of another one of those absurd porn videos she’d seen in those brief, intimate exposures online, where it looked like the Japanese schoolgirl was getting raped on a public bus full of salarymen. But those would-be idiots had better watch out this time! She had pepper spray ready! She just had to kneel down, reach into her knapsack after she took it off, and fish for it – in the meantime, her ass would be sticking out. She’d be a sitting duck.
Arthur started to stand, “Did you want to sit down?”
“…No. No, thanks, I’m fine. It’s not much longer anyway.” He could have offered earlier, “So what happened to your face?”
“What about my face?”
“Your face! You have scratches all under here.” She motioned around her nose with her finger. Arthur flipped his hood back up.
“I just cut myself a few times while I was shaving. It’s no big deal.” They didn’t say anything else for the rest of the ride. Both justified the silence by being comfortable enough with one another to share the moments when neither had to speak. Or something.
“A flashback to the year before their encounter, when Cassidy was pining & unemployed, and Arthur wasn’t single but still wasn’t happy.” Click Here for Part One.
v
Cassidy was nineteen. That she was on the Principal’s List her Senior year meant nothing now she had graduated.
But if strangers didn’t have a hard time ignoring her giant, six-foot-five-inch stature, then her double-d breasts were the deal-breaker, which she tried to offset from an otherwise tiny frame by only ever wearing dark tops.
She had ash-brown hair that fell to her waist, which she never combed as much as the time she spent considering she should, and as a result the ends were split and messy. Her mother offered to comb it for her, but it took too long when Mom did it, and it was painful, in more ways than one: Cassidy was at the age now that, if mother & daughter sat together too long, then the younger would get interrogated about all the maternal standards, like what it was Cassidy wanted to do now that it was approaching a full year that she was out of high school – motherly bundled with a few other unsolicited suggestions.
Cassidy’s jeans were two sizes too big for her athletic core, and today’s pair wasn’t any different. But that was her prerogative: if they were any tighter, they would accentuate her hips, and a lower body toned from taking PE class seriously. She didn’t need anything else on her person to stand out. She looked down at her belt: it didn’t feel so tight on her, but it was too tight for the pant, as the loose waistline hung all scrunched-up below the buckle at the front.
Did she lose weight? Again? She loosened the belt by a notch, grabbed the pant by the button, and pulled the baggy garment back up over the buckle, resting the space between her pant and the button on the top rung of the buckle, like a shelf.
She liked the way working out made her feel, and she loved the camaraderie of a friend group who all enjoyed spending time outside and away from their phones, unlike a majority of their peers. This afternoon, as she looked at her reflection in her family’s rose-trimmed bathroom mirror while wearing a simple black t-shirt, Cassidy grabbed her hair by its tuft and guided it through a tie and into a bun, stuffing its true heft within itself. She leaned forward and checked again for acne, in the small, inflamed clusters of blackheads that lingered near the caves of her eyes. She straightened up, and standing tall her eyes met the top edge of the mirror. It was like that for two years and counting, and she still wasn’t used to it.
theory of a daskeman 