Killer Repels Me
Last night I finally saw Michael Winterbottom‘s The Killer Inside Me. It’s not a “bad” film, but the savage beatings of Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson are certainly sickening and easy to loathe. Most of the audience was in a lousy mood to begin with because the stars arrived so late and spent so much time on the red carpet that the film started 45 minutes late, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch to tip over into animosity.
On top of which I was strongly rooting for Casey Affleck‘s chilly-eyed psychopathic lawman to get caught, especially with his mumbled Texas accent making at least half of what he said indecipherable, which goaded me into wishing it would all end sooner rather than later.
I know the game that this movie is playing. It’s saying “are you going to be a moral milquetoast and take offense at some deeply offensive depictions of violence, or are you going to be cool and get beyond that?” To hell with that game. I am not and never will be cool when it comes to films of this sort, and I’m rather proud of that fact. And I don’t care how milquetoasty that makes me sound.
This isn’t some icky piece of exploitation or some Eli Roth butcher movie. Winterbottom has gone down the wrong path here, but he’s an accomplished director who deserves basic respect. The problem is that The Killer Inside Me is fairly flat and mundane except for the beating scenes and, okay, maybe one or two of the sex scenes. It isn’t especially scary or humorous or suspenseful or thrilling — I know that much. All it allows you to do, really, is wallow in repulsion. Okay, repulsion mixed with amazement.
Just because Winterbottom and co-screenwriter John Curran have closely adhered to the original Jim Thompson novel doesn’t mean it has some special integrity badge. All this means is that they’ve closely adhered to the original Jim Thompson novel, and so what? Thompson is renowned as a great pulp-noir writer, yes, and this movie will make whatever sense of decency you carry around in your heart melt into stomach bile and leak out your anus and dribble down your leg.
All any of this means is that various producers managed to raise the cash on the names of the three stars, and IFC decided to distribute and here we all are with Jessica Alba’s pus and mucus and blood splattered all over our laps….what did we do to deserve this?
I’m amazed, really amazed, that the producers of this thing — Chris Hanley, Andrew Eaton and Bradford L. Schlei along with exec producers Lilly Bright, Chad Burris, Randolf S. Mendelsohn, Jordan Gertner and Fernando Sulichin, co-executive producer Tricia Vam Klaveren and co-producer Susan Kirr — thought it might actually generate interest or sell tickets. Well, it did generate interest on the part of the super-ballsy IFC Films, and it’ll probably sell tickets to the nocturnal Quasimodo types.
Anyone who sees The Killer Inside Me and says to a friend or a girlfriend, “Hey, I want to take you to this cool new noir about this mumbly Texas cop who shuffles around and beats his mistress and his wife to death when things boil to a head”…the person who wants this film to be seen by others is extremely hip and fundamentally diseased. They are a carrier of some kind of spiritual plague with really, really sophisticated taste buds….ooh, yeah.
I suppose that’s a kind of selling point if you want to be perverse about it. I don’t know if it’s an Antichrist-type thing, but maybe it is. The problem is that it’s not sick-funny — no talking fox, no afterbirth. Maybe IFC could go with a slogan that says “are you fucked up enough to want to see The Killer Inside Me?” Hey, I know — maybe the Criterion Collection could release a Killer DVD sometime next fall? Get some high-falutin’ Lincoln Center-affiliated film snob to write the liner notes. The Criterion guys, trust me, are perverse enough. Because you really do need to be a terminal film dweeb and suffering from lupus of the soul to “enjoy” a film like this.
It was clear during the Glenn Kenny-moderated q & a that the audience was doing everything it could do to suppress its dislike of the film for the sake of politeness. I wasn’t convulsing with hatred for this thing, although I was certainly sickened. Here’s the irony: I had heard and read so many ugly warnings that Killer failed to live up to expectations. I was saying to myself, “Gee, this isn’t that disgusting. Well, it is but I’m able to watch it with a certain dispassion. I thought I was going to be retching in the aisles.”
Screen International‘s David D’Arcy wrote last January that Winterbottom’s “staggeringly violent” adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel “reaches a new extreme in the cinematic depiction of a psychopathic murderer. It is hard to watch — and for some will be impossible — regardless of any psychological logic behind its many killings. Audiences up to their ears in serial killers may enter this film thinking they already know them all. Winterbottom will prove them wrong.”
The video below the first paragraph is actually part 2 but I ran it first because it leads off with Affleck talking about why he wanted to do the film. He basically said that he was impressed by the fact that both the Thompson novel and the screen adaptation offered a psychological explanation for his character’s murderous acts. Hudson decided to do the film, apparently, because she hasn’t made a quality film along the lines of Almost Famous in ten years and her name is synonymous with “empty formulaic chick flick” so she figured what the hell, do an artistically downbeat film for a change. I don’t know why Alba agreed to do this, but I’ll bet she regrets it on some level.
Did anyone ask Kate Hudson if she had gone under the knife for implants.
“this movie will make whatever sense of decency you carry around in your heart melt into stomach bile and leak out your anus and dribble down your leg.”
pure Bukowski, I love it. It’s great when a film touches a nerve with you like this.
It’s obvious what the movie needed was… more producers. 11 just aren’t enough.
Wells to Corey: That was Glenn Kenny’s lead-off question, actually. I thought it was amusing at first, but then Kenny and Hudson wouldn’t get off the subject, talking about various clinics and treatments and whatnot. No, seriously — the subject wasn’t broached.
I like the book a lot, but reading it I certainly didn’t get any transgressive most-violent-thing-ever vibe. Seems like a strange place to take it. I suppose though that there’s lots of pulp fiction that if you wanted to transcribe them literally would be pretty rough on the movie screen. Just about every Mickey Spillane would be NC-17 if adapted that way.
What I’d really like to see is a literal adaptation of Thompson’s The Getaway. As much as I like the Peckinpah version, by chopping off the end of the story it completely misses the point. The Getaway without cannibalism and houses made of shit is not The Getaway at all.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think a turning point (in attitudes towards screen violence) was reached when Al Queda started posting decapitation videos on the web.
Fictional depictions of violence — like TKIM — stopped being transgressive, or even interesting in a shock-the-bourgeoisie way, because reality had surpassed them. All this stuff — from Antichrist to Eli Roth — feels like an art school wank off now. Thompson’s extreme violence was ground breaking when he wrote it 58 years ago, but rehashing it now just seems trite and banal.
Is it worse than Funny Games? That was a chore to sit through. Or the last 20 minutes of Antichrist?
It’s not as irritating as Funny Games — it doesn’t try to deliberately agitate you the way Haneke’s film did. It’s a fairly low-key drama that kind of moseys along in a kind of a “yup, nope, I guess so, whatever, I’ll have some eggs and taters” way and even flirts with boredom now and then. The distinction is that it steps out twice for two extremely serious beat-down scenes.
Follow Jessica’s hypnotic bouncing foot in the video.
Yay! (Hudson’s legs aren’t bad either.)
Good video.
I really dig Antichrist. And Funny Games (remake) was insufferable, coming from someone who cherishes the recent work of Michael Haneke (Cache,The White Ribbon).
However violent, the trailer promises Alba BAREFOOT IN LINGERIE SPORTING A COWBOY HAT.
That image alone, even if it’s only onscreen for 30 seconds, makes this one of my most-wanted of the year.
ALBA POWER. Probably has the distinction of being my second-longest actress crush, since I’ve been down since Idle Hands and Never Been Kissed over 11 years ago. Only Jolie has outlasted that. When you consider both are married with kids, that is a SCORCHING level of sex appeal and beauty to still be so HOT after being in the public eye that long.
Hey, is this anything like AFTER DARK, MY SWEET? Talk about underrated, and awesome, and James Foley, and Jim Thompson. PATRIC POWER (though Rachel Ward was pretty dreary in that one.) Shit, I might break out that DVD tonight. See it if you haven’t.
LOL, Lex, I was doing the same thing.
“Thompson is renowned as a great pulp-noir writer, yes, and this movie will make whatever sense of decency you carry around in your heart melt into stomach bile and leak out your anus and dribble down your leg.”
Wouldn’t that make it a good adaptation of a pulp-noir book, then? These things weren’t written to provide you with fucking rays of sunshine, yanno. Exaggerated analogy perhaps, but isn’t this a little like watching some classic ZAZ film and complaining that you’ve seen some of these setups in other movies before?
And what’s up with throwing Eli Roth under the knife (zing!)? I thought you respected the Hostels — at least relative to other movies in the “torture-porn” genre (which it is sort of unfairly associated with, IMHO) — for their craft, wit, and underlying commentary? Did you just inexplicably sour on those experiences, or am I misremembering?
I also don’t understand why someone that can find the merits in work that you don’t is suddenly deemed “morally repugnant” or “lacking a soul” — unless they’re Transformer fans (I keed. Sorta.). Whatever happened to just spewing all your hatred for a movie into the actual plot elements, pacing, characters, directing, casting, lighting, gaffing, etc.?
Anyway, good review. Excellent use of the word “milquetoast.”
I saw the film last night too but I disagree with Jeff’s take on the film. The violence is rough, it made me wince, but I do think it added to the character. Anyone who goes into this thinking its going to be brutally violent is going to come out asking, “That’s it?” Maybe I am diseased but I thought the film worked a hell of a lot better than I expected it too. Affleck is surprisingly perfect for this character. The girls acting isn’t quite up to his and the rest of the cast but they do make up for it in their own ways. The tone is what surprised me the most, dry dark humor a la Fargo. Winterbottom power.
Geez, man. When I spoke with you about the film last night, you weren’t in nearly so much of a lather about it. How’d you get yourself so worked up? And also: which is it, man? Am I a moral leper or a major dweeb?
I do know one thing: I look GOOD in that video. If only I could grow some fucking hair…
Wells to Kenny: What you say in conversation and what comes out when you put hand to pen are sometimes two different things, as you well know. In any case, “It’s not a ‘bad’ film…this isn’t some piece of icky exploitation or some Eli Roth butcher movie. Winterbottom has gone down the wrong path here, but he’s an accomplished director who deserves basic respect.”
I saw the 5 minute promo video and that was enough to convince me that this is one that I most definitely don’t want to see. Talented cast and director, but no thank you. I’m still scarred by seeing a french film called “A ma soeur” several years back. Nasty stuff.
I loved your reply to corey 3rd.
Saw it at the Boston Independent Film Festival Sunday night and while I cannot say that I “enjoyed” it, I did like the film. Yes the two beating scenes are brutal, more so the Alba scene, but I felt it was the most faithful of all the Thomson films made to date. One thing I don’t like about all the uproar about the violence in this film is that I saw “The Losers” the next day and I thought the fight between Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Zoe Saldana was just as brutal, yet no outcry over that?
Also, I feel that it’s only because we have “name” actresses getting brutalized, while hundreds of obscure actresses have endured worse over the years, particularly in the disgusting films of the aforementioned Eli Roth.
What does it say about me that the idea of this sort of violence doesn’t really bother me, but told a friend today that I wouldn’t go see “The Human Centipede” with her if my life depended on it?
Awesomeness Alert:
Jessica is 29 years awesome today.
There will be much celebration tonight when I get home. If you know what I mean.
For one, it tells me that she wasn’t very hot, Circum…;)
Damn, Lex, do you like any actresses with actual, you know, talent??
Jessica Alba?
Jessica fucking Alba.
Uh, yes, Jessica Alba. What’s wrong with Jessica Alba? CHARMING, sexy, fun, vibrant, engaging, compulsively watchable. Maybe she’s not gonna tear up the boards at the Globe Theatre, but if you’re looking at THE MOST STUNNING BODY AND FACE IMAGINABLE THAT ISN’T KRISTEN and thinking about acting chops– and Jessica’s are perfectly fine anyway– you should have your Man Card revoked.
Delightful/charming/sexy in: The Fantastic Fours, Honey, Into the Blue, Paranoid, Never Been Kissed, Idle Hands (my hand sure wasn’t Idle when I saw this), Dark Angel (BOW DZ), MEET BILL (very underrated, very good Eckhart performance too), Sin City.
Did you complain about Ann-Margret (also born today, just like Jessica) and her acting? Raquel Welch? Marilyn Monroe? Alba is the sex bomb of her generation (or alongside The Fox) and could coast on that, but she has real presence and vulnerability on screen. Maybe not the most technical performer, but check out her STUNNING WORK as a skimpily clad native girl in the EARLY ALBA classic “The Sleeping Dictionary.” You won’t need a dictionary to describe the sensation you feel looking at her gorgeous tan 18-year-old frame, but hint, it begins with a “B.”
Oh, and I forgot Awake and ESPECIALLY The Eye, which is particularly sexy because she is very VULNERABLE in it. Always sexy. Wounded, vulnerable, damaged, demure = sexy.
>but if you’re looking at THE MOST STUNNING BODY AND FACE IMAGINABLE THAT ISN’T KRISTEN and thinking about acting chops– and Jessica’s are perfectly fine anyway– you should have your Man Card revoked.
And if you give a pass to subpar acting, you should have your Catholic Card revoked, so a bit of a conundrum isn’t it?
Alba isn’t terrible, but she isn’t perfectly fine either. She is beautiful, though.
No conundrum.
When it comes to women, looks trump everything. Everything.
This is a universally accepted truth.
ALBA POWER.
I like Alba. She’s funny and game for anything movie-wise, it seems, which is a good quality. If you look at her career, everything hasn’t been solid gold, but at least she’s mixed it up.
I would pay good American money to see her team up with Megan Fox in Betty And Veronica: The Movie.
LexG: Always sexy. Wounded, vulnerable, damaged, demure = sexy.
No offense, Lex, like pretty much everyone else here I look forward to reading your shtick in comments but this makes me gag a little. Sexualising victim-hood is spurious beyond belief.
Who is that slim fellow on the far left? Clearly a man who does not partake of KFC slab-grease.
If for nothing else, this post reaffirmed and validated my contempt and dislike for “Funny Games”. Thank God others viewed the film as insufferable and practically unwatchable. Damn I hated that film. So completely unrealistic and reviling. The family’s reactions and responses. The torture for sake of torture and….
OK, I’m done because as I sit here thinking of all the horrific things I could write about that movie I realized I’m getting waaaaaay off topic.
btw – I really HATED Funny Games. Sorry.
FUNNY GAMES was a masterpiece. (The American version, that is… I don’t watch foreign movies usually).
One of the best of ’08, one of Watts’ best performances.
And it adheres to my rule that ANY MOVIE WHERE THEY SHOOT A KID USUALLY IS A MASTERPIECE.
This rule is pretty much airtight.
Hudson looks like Nikki Finke in that picture.
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