Friday, April 14, 2023

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Rubber (2010)
Lieutenant Chad: In the Steven Spielberg movie "E.T.," why is the alien brown? No reason. In "Love Story," why do the two characters fall madly in love with each other? No reason. In Oliver Stone's "JFK," why is the President suddenly assassinated by some stranger? No reason. In the excellent "Chain Saw Massacre" by Tobe Hooper, why don't we ever see the characters go to the bathroom or wash their hands like people do in real life? Absolutely no reason. Worse, in "The Pianist" by Polanski, how come this guy has to hide and live like a bum when he plays the piano so well? Once again the answer is, no reason. I could go on for hours with more examples. The list is endless. You probably never gave it a thought, but all great films, without exception, contain an important element of no reason. And you know why? Because life itself is filled with no reason. Why can't we see the air all around us? No reason. Why are we always thinking? No reason. Why do some people love sausages and other people hate sausages? No fuckin' reason.

In this house we worship director and birthday boy Quentin Dupieux, who's never made a bad movie yet -- I recommend every single one. Granted I haven't seen them all, but I've seen more than I bet most of you have, having seen seven of his eleven full-length features to date. Including the just-recently-released (typically) bizarro superhero comedy Smoking Causes Coughing with Vincent Lacoste and Gilles Lellouche and a few others as Power-Rangers-esque do-gooders who spend more time bickering over nonsense than they do fighting rubber-monsters.

It's a lot of fun but I loved Incredible But True even more, which also came out in the past year -- that one's about a couple who buy a new home that they discover has a time-portal in it, which leads to, yes, even more nonsense. Nobody is doing goofy surrealism like Dupieux is today...

... you get the feeling he just lets his little ideas take him where ever the hell they want to go, saying "and next" and "and next" as he writes the scripts, with nothing off-limits. It's absolutely invigorating. I come out of his itty-bitty small-budget always-90-minute movies feeling the limitless nature of imagination far more than I even have from a single MCU or DC film. Go watch something like Deerskin or Mandibles and tell me that's not truly living!


1 comment:

Paul Adams said...

OMG I loved Rubber! It's one of the few not-mainstream films that I managed to get my husband to enjoy...