Well, now I know what Movie 43 it's about and I can honestly say that it's probably a shoo-in for next year's Razzie Award for best picture. Critics absolutely hate it. It's a series of sketches, each one trying to be grosser and more disgusting than the last. For instance, in the first sketch, Kate Winslet goes on a blind date with Hugh Jackman, who has a pair of testicles growing out from his Adam's apple. Another one: Naomi Watts and Liev Schrieber play parents who home-school their son and insist that they try to replicate the emotionally-scarring experience of a normal school, so before long Watts is making out with him, Schreiber is making sexual advances at him, and both are calling him "fag."
Umm...
It's rumored that a lot of the stars who took a few days out of their schedule at various points (for instance, Winslet and Jackman shot their scene five years ago), didn't know this film would ever be released. It was a quick easy paycheck, and the filmmakers, inspired by gross-out comedy, anthology films (Kentucky Fried Movie, the 1977 omnibus by the filmmakers of Airplane), and Saturday Night Live-style sketches), try to push the boundaries.
And, yes, I want to see it! Where else will you find Richard Gere playing a thinly-veiled version of Steve Jobs, running across Snooki (yes, that Snooki), who is doing a live reading of Moby Dick?
*
And speaking of disgusting...
In the opening scenes of The Paperboy, the lurid, provocative, hot, but ultimately pointless adaptation of Pete Dexter's 1995 novel, Macy Gray, as a maternal but lippy maid, re-enacts what she thinks Zac Efron's character does all day in his room: masturbate.
Later, Efron gets bitten by a smack of jellyfish and Nicole Kidman's character is forced to pee on him to alleviate the sting.
If that's not enough, Kidman then pleasures herself in front of John Cusack's swamp-trash prisoner, while Cusack relieves himself in his pants.
Want more? What about the scene where Efron and Matthew McConaughey (they play newspapermen brothers) visit a swamp family, only to watch this disgusting family pass around a vat of melting ice cream that they have been communally spooning out of?
Should I even mention the scene where McConaughey's character gets tied up and brutally beaten to within an inch of his life by two homophobic African-Americans in a seedy motel?
So what exactly is this movie about? Well, some of the the above scenes are there in Dexter's novel, which was a melodramatic but atmospheric look at the ethos and morals of newspapermen in north Florida in the late 60s. Despite its faults, the novel definitely portrayed the life, the bravado, the weariness, the ambition, and the queasy corruptibility of those dedicated to the print life.
Director Lee Daniels' film, which plays up the trash and the racial elements, gives us plenty of milieu, but, as it was in the book, the plotline is a little sketchy. It's a mystery without a mystery, a procedural without a procedure. If you haven't read the book, you might be unclear as to what a lot of the characters are doing or who they even are. For instance, you might not know that Scott Glenn's character, Efron and McConaughey's father, is himself a small-town newspaperman. The mystery itself - whether or not Cusack's character killed a corrupt, hated sheriff - is almost an afterthought. No groundwork is laid out, no clues, no evidence, no snooping...
Instead, what Daniels is most concerned about is the titillation. And, for better or worse, I was okay with that. This is one trashy film, the kind of film some of us actually - though we would never admit it to ourselves - want more from in the movies. We get plenty of everything here. And, boy, do the actors come through. Cusack, spookily hollowed-out and gross, is creepy incarnated. McConaughey, as the Miami Herald reporter who comes back home to northern Florida to try and set Cusack's character free, is full of sweaty, straightforward, earnest charisma; it's almost eerie how Efron, lit in a gauzy, dreamish way, seems to have stepped right out of the book. Macy Gray, with her one-of-a-kind-voice, is a strong screen presence, sly and slightly impertinent.
The real star, of course, is Nicole Kidman, as the Louisiana woman who writes to hardened, hopeless prisoners and forges connections with them. ("My boys.") Are there real women like this? I don't know, maybe. Heavily made-up, in short, sequined dresses, vampish and playful, Kidman is a highly sexual figure - as she was in the book- but the actress captures the desperation, the abandonment, and mystery of this lost but certain woman. What a fearless, up-for-anything actress! It's as good a performance -as boundary-breaking, as much of a naked revelation - as Monique's was in Daniels' last overheated melodrama, Precious.
So...
Q: Is this a good movie?
A: How do you define good?
Images courtesy of:
http://butlerscinemascene.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/paperboy-efron-kidman1.jpg
http://collider.com/wp-content/uploads/paperboy-movie-image-matthew-mcconaughey-zac-efron-2.jpg
http://www.aceshowbiz.com/images/still/movie-43-04.jpg
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