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why is there a strip club in a comic book movie

posted 10 years ago by fliphop
1 reply | jump to latest

i dont know why this film 'didnt work', for me, but it didnt. mostly.

im not saying i didnt really like parts of it, or think some of it was quite clever or interesting.

however. as a whole... i was lost.

a lot, i mean a lot, of things did not make sense. example. the guy washes the lady's car.
then between the time he is walking from her car to her door, 20 feet, the 'nemesis' character throws paint on her car. then we see him eating fast food in his car. then we pan down to a bucket of paint.

1. it makes no sense, at all, logically

2. why do we care if he is eating fast food. it was a pointless shot and a pointless prop. or i completely missed the point.

3. why is there no reaction shot of the woman?

the whole film is like this. the standard conventions of visual story telling are abandoned, but not in a good way. guys come on screen, do things for no apparent reason, and are gone. their relation to the story isnt clear. who is cary elwes and who is the other guy?

the dialogue also feels weird and doesnt seem to flow. lets take Rapaport and his wife, when she tries to make the deal, and she comes back failed. He tries to encourage her. . . . but the characters arent even looking at each other. Not in a Hal Hartley way... but in some awkward way, like they didnt have time to do a one shot or something. Im not saying the scene is a failure, but i am saying that it didnt seem to flow well to me. It just hit me sideways, took me out of the moment,,,,

I wasnt able to suspend my disbelief. It didnt 'take me there'.

Lets take another thing, Donal Logues ****. Its there, its ridiculous, but its not brought up in the film at all. Not commented on or anything. His **** living quarters arent really focused on either. Why not? They are a background... but nothing is 'done' with them. Just 2 seconds of editing, and a reaction shot from DJ Qualls, could have told us something about the relationship bewteen these two. . . .

The thing is, in a 'voiceover that explains everything' movie... there is so much uncommented on and unexplained. I dont know, maybe im just in a bad mood today, but it hit me sideways!

the end of the film is, as another commenter noted, a giant *beep* on the characters. who are we supposed to identify with then? where is the compassion or humanity? is it a horror film then?

and barcelona - why?

if its a 'coming of age' tale, why do we spend so much time with characters who arent coming of age and are one dimensional backdrops?

[–] ajhart-60432 8 years ago

I think it works as a dark comedy/heist-gone-wrong film. Its main problem is that its most relatable character, Archie, is the least developed of the main characters.

Archie is down in the dumps in the beginning of the film and mentions something vague about his cousin or something moving away and how he feels the town is so boring. Then for 85% of the film, he's a mostly disinterested observer who's only there to remind Raymond that he's slowly going insane. Then he becomes aware of a plot to rob his elderly friend and he doesn't alert her. He does the right thing in the end, and we discover that his lifelong dream was to move to Barcelona.

It was a really ham-fisted way of demonstrating that Archie has apparently matured. He says something about no longer finding the same old comic book debates interesting, which is a significant reversal of his earlier attitude that great writing can be found in any medium.

Another problem is that we don't get a ton of character development with our other characters, either. We're literally told that Raymond is a lover of comics but has no cash. Norman and Judy are interested in the money and don't really appreciate the medium, although we never really see them doing anything to back up that assertion. Nothing is explained about Carter and I was unaware he was a thief until Raymond approaches him. I just assumed he was just wealthy from a successful carpentry business.

In fact, I was very confused about Carter's character for the first two-thirds of the movie. He's outnumbered and assaulted, so they seem to be painting him as an underdog. Then we're shown that he's a carpenter of some kind, so he's skilled and somewhat intelligent. He even offers to dedicate a room to be his stripper girlfriend's art studio, so he's considerate (even if he doesn't think much of her cooking skills). When Raymond approaches him about the robbery, it was completely out of left field.

Overall, I liked it. All I'd ask for is a few more character development scenes.