Kick-Ass Film Criticism Goes Here, In This Thread.

One of my favorite scenes in Paul Schrader's script of Taxi Driver (1976) is when Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle seeks out a philosophical cabbie called the Wizard (Peter Boyle) to try to come to terms with his freaky spiritual dislocation. The Wizard regards Travis with fatherly incomprehension, but he makes a stab at framing the problem. "A man takes a job, and that becomes what he is," he begins, and proceeds to ramble on for about a minute in blue-collar existential mode. Travis listens, earnestly, and then says, "I dunno, that's about the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

I think of that exchange—both halves—whenever I see a one-word-title Michael Mann film like Thief (1981), Heat (1995), or the new Collateral (DreamWorks), because Mann is the American crime genre's most Wizard-like existential philosopher of machismo. His thrillers pose the question: What is a man? A thief, a cop, an assassin: That might be what he does—but is that what he is? Is he free to choose, or does a man gotta do what a man's gotta do? One thing that's clear is that Mann's gotta do what Mann's gotta do, and that's give these pointy-headed conundrums a throbbing backbeat and the moodiest visuals in Hollywood. Men's fashion magazines have followed this director ever since his Miami Vice days. The way he frames his characters to bring out both their alienation and their glamour makes you think, "That is God's loneliest man—and where can I get that suit?"

As Gaspar Noé taught us, the gates to hell can be found inside raunchy gay clubs. It's to one such disco inferno that the Woman goes to slit her wrists. Was it the popper fumes and the slutty Gaultier tank tops that drove her into the abyss? Nope: "Because I'm a woman" will suffice. Luckily, a concerned Man (Rocco Siffredi) intervenes, helps bandage her up, and chaperones her on a stroll through her murky Walpurgisnacht. Woman thanks Man with a blow job and a job offer. As an "impartial" audience, she'll pay him to spend several nights at her cliffside mansion critiquing her exposed flesh. "Watch me where I'm unwatchable."

The key word here, in more ways than one, is "unwatchable." What follows is a quasi-Sadean scenario spread - and I do mean spread - over three nights. The first night vividly one-ups Gustave Courbet's epochal crotch-canvas, The Origin of the World, and posits a bold companion piece, Finger-banging the Origin of the World. Night two dispenses with dialogue ("Your words are inept reproaches!") before sounding the swampy depths of the Woman's unmentionables with a garden tool-cum-tuning fork. Night three is an extended meditation on the use of bloody tampons as tea bags. We can be thankful, at least, that the Woman doesn't offer "biscuits." Meanwhile, the ocean outside is "roiling like a bitch in heat," and audiences are starting to roll their eyes.

Personally, as a member of the so-called impartial fraternity, I haven't had this much exposure to a vulva since I was born. So let me come clean: the moist, hairy spectacles of Anatomy of Hell made me say, "Ew!" Busted, homo! Breillat's honorable, if cartoonishly executed, idea here may be to deconstruct this "ew" through the Siffredi surrogate, to verbalize the suppressed thoughts of those who find girl-bits a "malevolent frivolity." And these would be what? Rapists? Psychopaths? Bisexuals? Skanky Italian porn stars? Men in general? Maybe beneath our civilized veneer all men have an urge to ring the thing in lipstick, sodomize the brown bunny, revel in the icky compulsion of the female mess. Maybe, ladies, when your gay says, "Cute skirt!" what he really means is, "You have a froglike obscenity between your legs."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/12846074

that's kinda wtf, no?

Now, actual kick-assedness -- Michael Sicinski dissects Certified Copy, and yes, you have to see it first:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/2986