How much blood is really in A Bucket of Blood? Pete Trbovich blows the lid off another Roger Corman scam.
Tag Archives: Black Comedy
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MOTHER, COUCH (2023)
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DIRECTED BY: Niclas Larsson
FEATURING: Ewan McGregor, Ellen Burstyn, Taylor Russell, Rhys Ifans, Lara Flynn Boyle, F. Murray Abraham
PLOT: A mother refuses to get up from a furniture showroom couch despite the best efforts of her three children—each, incidentally, from a different father.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The spanner ratchets up the pressure on poor David and his siblings, making for a whimsical-into-menacing story flow with waves of absurdity. In other words, the Beau is Afraid archetype, but with a happy ending.
Kind of.
COMMENTS: What does it take to break one mild-mannered Scotsman? Niclas Larsson’s film, Mother, Couch, explores this question, among several others. From the starting gun, however, it was clear that this was the question that would be on my mind, until it was either answered or the credits rolled. The opening scene pulls us into the awkward and uncomfortable world of David, as he uneasily navigates a run-down parking lot and then enters “Oakbeds Furniture,” a similarly run-down home furnishings department store where his mother has permanently ensconced herself, on the second floor, in the seat of a (rather expensive) Italian sofa. From there, events turn with an increasingly jittery surrealism.
The humor found in Mother, Couch is, not to mince words, a bit “Swedish.”1 Those of you who know, know, but to explain briefly: sitcom by long-suffering ordeal. (Not to stereotype this flavor of Scandinavian, but my admittedly limited experience suggests Swedes possess a heavy streak of wry fatality.) David—a magnificently middle-aged Ewan McGregor, neither the gung-ho heroin kid nor the sage Jedi—politely, and a touch pathetically, lets everyone roll over him: his laid-back-but-glib Welsh brother, his snarky American sister with permanently-affixed cigarette, and his dotty mother whose tongue is as sharp as the penknife she, inexplicably, brought with her. In true Buñuel–Dupieuxiène style, the links in this chain of events grow to such a weight as to bring David to bursting point (apologies for the semi-spoiler that answers my opening query).
Mother, Couch is soft-spoken in its eccentricity, allowing its quiet oddities space to breathe. F. Murray Abraham’s turn as both Marcus and Marco, Oakbeds’ twin owners, is a delightful two-fer of talent, with Marcus something of a David-double (calm, deferential, doormat), and Marco eventually threatening our hapless protagonist with a chainsaw when price negotiations for the titular couch hit the rocks. At times, Rhys Ifans and Lara Flynn Boyle each appear to be performing in a different film—for reasons which become clear as events progress. As for Ellen Burstyn, well, I alternately loved and loathed her, as her “Mother” character occupies perhaps three different narrative planes.
The movie kicks off with a glib bit of foreshadowing: the on-screen quotation, “It was all very simple, they were looking for a dresser. Blood wouldn’t spill until later.” Larsson positions the furniture motif throughout, with an unlikely key (given by mother to son) failing to open the half-dozen or more dressers littered around the store and the mother’s apartment. The simplicity of the premise gets things rolling. There’s hope in Mother, Couch, though it’s nearly crushed by a long history of lies and creeping irrationality. As Mother says, “You don’t stab someone in the back, that’s for sure. Not even family!” Ultimately (another semi-spoiler) she fails to follow her own advice, but I believe she tries. When she veers from this maxim, though, it doesn’t stop the first finale’s last supper, as family, old and new, gather together just before David suffers a (literal) sinking feeling.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
- As it well might be: Swedish director Larsson here adapts a novel by Swedish novelist Jerker Virdborg. ↩︎
A DIFFERENT MAN (2024)
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A Different Man is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.
DIRECTED BY: Aaron Schimberg
FEATURING: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson
PLOT: Edward, an aspiring actor who suffers from disfiguring facial tumors, is cured by an experimental treatment and starts a new life; he then seeks to be cast in a play about his previous life, but becomes jealous when the charismatic, disfigured Oswald—a better actor and a better fit for the part—enters the scene.
COMMENTS: In one of the wickedly funny moments of A Different Man, Edward is passed over by an agent specializing in casting actors with “unusual physiognomies” in favor of a crazed, but relatively normal looking, subway provocateur. Edward’s neurofibromitosis has disfigured his character even more than his face: he prefers to slink into the background, he’s understandably paranoid, and he’s jumpy from constantly being on alert to incoming social threats. And yet, he harbors a vanity: to be an actor, despite the fact that he can barely remember his lines and has no sense of the appropriate register for the one job he does land, playing a disabled employee in a corporate inclusivity training video. The only bright spot in his life is his crush on Ingrid, a cute aspiring playwright living in the next apartment, but even she instinctively recoils from his touch (while remaining unfailingly friendly). So miserable Edward can hardly be blamed for volunteering for an experimental therapy that might reduce his tumors: “the risk may be worth the reward.” And when the treatment works miraculously well, not merely reducing his blemishes but completely healing them and turning him into a handsome man, he can hardly be blamed for indulging in unselfconscious socializing and casual sex—although some of his post-cure decisions will prove questionable.
But when dashing Oswald, another man with neurofibromitosis who has all the talent and social capital Edwards craves, but without having cheated through surgery, bursts onto the scene, Edward (now called Guy) is chastened and again filled with self-doubt. A Different Man is not a literal doppelgänger film—-Oswald not quite a literal double, but an independent individual who simply happens to share a rare characteristic with Edward—-but he serves the same symbolic story function as William Wilson or James Simon. It is a fittingly twisted take on the trope of the double. The weirdest thing about the film is Oswald’s sudden omnipresence—he pops up at rehearsals, at the bar, in Ingrid’s apartment—as if he’s being summoned by Edward’s guilty conscience. And Oswald’s appearance ignites the film’s central irony: Ingrid writes an off-Broadway play with the role Edward was born to play, but because of his successful surgery, he’s no longer right for the part.
A Different Man posits what appears to be a simple moral: changing your surface appearance will not change your essential nature. And yet this simple fable plays out in anything but a simple fashion, because the characters of Edward/Guy and Ingrid are so complex. (Oswald is not complex: although Pearson’s performance is unimpeachable, he’s a one-note symbol here.) Edward does some bad things, but we are predisposed to forgive him because we know where he came from and how he suffered in the first act. Our empathy for him shifts with the plot twists. Ingrid, too, is not the angel she first seems, but just another flawed specimen of humanity. The screenplay pulls the viewer in so many different directions that, as you watch the film, the seemingly simple message plays as psychologically complex. While mostly a comedy, it begins by generating a deep empathy for Edward’s condition. When he goes through the painful experimental treatment and literally rips ribbons flesh off of his face, it briefly becomes a horror film. When Oswald mysteriously pops in, it toys with becoming a psychological thriller. As Edward’s jealousy grows, it angles towards satire. And all the while the film doesn’t shy away from self-reflection: discussing the play within the film, Ingrid wonders out loud whether it is wrong to cast someone because of their disfigurement, rather than in spite of it. Schimberg keeps the viewer off balance, disguising the simplicity of the scenario in a way that seems to fully explore the story’s implications and yet leave something mysterious unsaid.
Writer/director Aaron Schimberg clearly created the movie as a showcase for Adam Pearson, who impressed him on the set of Chained for Life, and whom he described as “one of the biggest extroverts I’ve ever met: very much the life of the party, everybody loves him. He could be a cult leader if he wanted to.” Pearson obviously doesn’t get many feature film roles written for him, so the existence of two Schimberg/Pearson movies is a great bit of cinematic history trvia. If Schimberg comes up with a third unique role for Pearson, their collaboration may become legendary, in the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood vein.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: CRUMB CATCHER (2023)
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Crumb Catcher is available for VOD purchase or rental.
DIRECTED BY: Chris Skotchdopole
FEATURING: Rigo Garay, Ella Rae Peck, John Speredakos, Lorraine Farris
PLOT: Two newlyweds are tracked down by a gregarious waiter who has an unlikely business opportunity to pitch.
COMMENTS: Skotchdopole’s directorial debut features the movie prop I’d most like to own. That’s not only because it has a sleek design, precision-engineered components, and is a fetching shade of cadmium red; no, not just that. It’s also the absurd centerpiece of a fun little home invasion thriller—one in which the home in question doesn’t even belong to the victims, and for which the “invasion” is a troublingly enthusiastic sales pitch. Crumb Catcher, like the titular invention, is a strangely compelling endeavor, devised with unsettling earnestness.
Shane and Leah have just married, and it quickly becomes clear that their shaky union is grounded upon some rocky relations beforehand. Shane is a promising new author of a collection of short stories; Leah works for a publishing house, and was instrumental in signing him. Despite the post-wedding awkwardness and reception headaches, its pretty clear they want to make a go of things. But among Shane’s weaknesses, drinking looms large, and during a blackout drunk wedding night he makes a big mistake. Enter John, the waiter. An eager beaver if ever there were one: eager to chat, eager to please, and eager to bring his long-simmering dream to life.
It is best to get it out of the way that much of Crumb Catcher is by-the-numbers, but the piece is painted so well that it’s still quite the beaut. (Which is more than might be said for some of the art festooning the walls of the newlywed’s remote hideaway.) This has much to do with the performances. Ella Rae Peck and Rigo Garay have a fractured chemistry, as their characters are both trying to feel the other out, while also working through their own complications. John Speredakos, as John the waiter, always steals the show—and I am happy to let him do so. When his character contrives to crash the couple’s vacation, his earnestness is tinged by deranged menace (morphing later to deranged menace tinged by earnestness). Lorraine Farris, who plays Rose—John’s wife and sales partner—rides her own razor line between dominance and desperation.
Crumb Catcher also succeeds from the production standpoint. Skotchdopole’s team is purposeful, but playful, with its lighting and camerawork. The film’s major set-piece—John and Rose’s presentation of the exciting new restaurant dining experience—is disorienting, claustrophobic, and a bit gigglesome. Shane and Leah’s harrowing escape attempt (driving to Kingston, NY, of all places) perfectly captures the drunk driving experience. A parting shot of Rose bathed in the red rear light of the couple’s vintage sedan is a moment of dark beauty. Throughout the production flourishes all the characters oscillate around their set axes, making for a vibrant inter-character dynamic to match the vibrant on-screen look.
Yessir, ma’am, child: you can tell I’m very excited. And you, too, should be excited as well: Crumb Catcher is an wickedly wonderful entertainment opportunity.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
FANTASIA 2024: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE TENANTS (2023)
세입자
Seibja
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DIRECTED BY: Eunkyoung Yoon
FEATURING: Kim Dae-gun, Heo Dong-won, Park So-hyun
PLOT: A looming eviction forces Shin-dong to sub-lease his bathroom to a pair of eccentric newlyweds.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The Tenants is Kafka à la Korea, with a home invasion scenario playing out as a paperwork nightmare.
COMMENTS: Shin-dong is not very popular. He has a work acquaintance, who only chats with him because they’re desk neighbors. Outside the office, he talks with just two people. His landlord, labeled “Mr. Bastard” on his phone address book, is a too-cheery little kid eager for a better clientele. And his friend, labeled “Mr. Dork,” is as antisocial as Shin-dong. Our protagonist is trapped: cramped apartment, cramped job, all playing out on a cramped screen and with a claustrophobic sound design. So it is with more trepidation than relief that we meet a tall man with a double-feathered chapeau, and his short trad-clad wife, who are interested in renting out Shin-dong’s bathroom. Because the government’s “Wolwolse” program ties the hands of landlords, this sublease arrangement will help Shin-dong, while also helping these newlyweds with the space they need—as well as a sly opportunity they take advantage of after some months of tenancy.
The Tenants occupies a dreary space that makes Terry Gilliam‘s Brazilian vibrancy appear sensible. Shin-dong’s day (and increasingly, night) job as a low-level office functionary is the epitome of a corporate grind. The wealthy CEO’s inspirational messages drive the point home: it is not passion, innovation, or ambition by which his artificial meat company succeeds, oh no, but work, work, work. And that’s just about all Shin-dong has time for, especially when the prospect of a company transfer to “Sphere 2” is on the cards: the newest, cleanest, bestest place. But his tiny dream grows increasingly precarious the longer his tenants tenant.
This pair: the tall, crisply suited, always gloved, and invariably be-hatted husband is a man out of place, and not just because his well-blocked fedora sports matching bird plumes on either side, giving him an antenna’d appearance. He crowds the frame’s vertical space, and is capable of strength. His reassuring use of the term “bro” whenever speaking with with Shin-dong is creepy from the start, and he has a tendency to speak with two meanings. A misunderstanding between he and Shin-dong—regarding the wife’s mysterious appearance in Shin-dong’s bedroom—is both amusing and troubling. The wife is nearly non-verbal, but always happy to offer a deeply cut, eye-shutting smile.
But this peculiar husband and wife duo are not nearly so troubling as the layered and growing paperwork and procedure which threatens to consume our hero. As Mr. Dork observes, cities are dying, and pursuing ever more drastic means to procedurally chain their citizens. Though the Wolwolse program starts as a blessing, its complications become a curse. From the start, director Eunkyoung Yoon shovels sheaves of postmodern evil on Shin-dong through her dark and darkly comic means; and when he learns why his Wolwolse tenants were so keen on the bathroom, their disclosure about a sub-tenant of their own might be just enough to break him.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: