Month: September 2020

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) There are a few horror subgenres that seldom work well for me, and The Greasy Stranger seems intent on combining two of them. For one thing, it’s a horror/comedy, which often ends up making me wonder why I’m supposed to laugh at horrible people doing terrible things. Then there’s the aesthetics, which (as the title suggests) wallows in an oily mixture of grime and awkwardness. (If movies smelled, I wouldn’t want to see this one.) The story has to do with a serial-murdering father, his son and the woman that comes between them. Taking liberally from the deadpan Midwestern-gothic style of movies like Napoleon Dynamite and the ultra-gore of video nasties, The Greasy Strangler is a film that, on paper, looks sure to irritate any possible indulgence out of me. While I’m still not too fond of the final result, even I have to admit that the film occasionally works better than I thought. There’s an over-the-top nature to the result that sands off the edge of the gore, while the humour does get understandable after a while. The serial killer bit (slathered in grease, popping eyes out via strangulation, cleaning himself in a car wash) is overdone to the point of being almost funnier than gross. The Greasy Strangler is really not a movie for everyone and it certainly relies on that specificity in how it builds its story. It holds nothing back either in gratuitous nudity (male and female), gross moments and overall lack of morality. I was ultimately defeated by the too-nihilistic ending, but for the longest time, the film played better than I thought. Still, this is more of a one-time joke than a kind of film I’d like to see more often.

(Kanopy Streaming, September 2020) I don’t think I’ll ever love a movie from writer-director Robert Altman (well, maybe The Player), but I can certainly admire a few of them, like Nashville. Of course, Nashville is The Big One for Altman—the one most often referred to as the purest incarnation of his themes and methods, the one selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry, the one with perhaps the biggest scope and cast. It follows no less than 24 characters over five days in Nashville, in between many music performances and one political convention. Equally fascinated with music and politics, Nashville is a messy, unclean film: everything is improvised, everyone has shaggy hair, everywhere you look shows America at its most 1970s. (There’s a very real time-capsule element to this film.) This is Altman at his most Altmanesque, with overlapping dialogue, accidental cinematography, improvised narrative, grainy images and a mixture of artistic and political. It’s not, at 160 minutes, a breezy watch: the need to keep track of who’s everyone and what they’re doing can give brain cells a workout by itself. It’s not, to be blunt, my kind of film: I like cinema to be tight, focused, overengineered and deliberate. But as a demonstration of what’s possible at the antithesis of what I like, Nashville is eloquent enough. Not easy to like, but easy to respect.