The Film Cuts

Home of the overlooked movies.

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Thursday (1998)

In the 90's, every upcoming filmmaker wanted to be like Quentin Tarantino and why wouldn't you? He was the epitome of coolness: He managed to change to way action movies looked AND win the Palme d'Or. Consequently, we went through more than 10 of Pulp Fiction pastiche. Some directors even made a career out of it (yes, Guy Ritchie).

In Pulp Fiction, there comes a point when Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) has had enough of his life as a hitman. He tells his partner that he's done with the violence and he wants to retire, "You know, walk the earth, meet people... get into adventures. Like Caine from Kung Fu". That's the starting point of Thursday. If one day, you left your criminal life behind, could it come haunting you back?

4 years after retiring from the drug dealing business, Casey (Thomas Jane) is now living a peaceful suburbian life as...an architect? His wife ignores everything about his past, but it soon comes knocking at his door - litterally... his ex-partner (Aaron Eckhart) shows up on his doorstep! Refusing to be an accomplice, Casey throws out the drugs that his friend hid in his house. Soon, many criminals will come looking for him, or more precisely, for the drugs that he got rid of. As it is a dark comedy, you can imagine that things don’t go very smoothly.

For a sub-Tarantino, Skip Woods does his best on what appears to be a shoestring budget. The plotline is nothing groundbreaking, but Woods tries to emulate Tarantino’s writing style. The lack of locations reminds us of Reservoir Dogs, but as if Pulp Fiction entirely took place in Jimmie’s House (Tarantino himself). The dialogues are very sharp, to a point where you might almost get fooled sometimes, but they lack in originality. Skip Woods shows a certain talent that, pushed into the right direction, would have been a very interesting filmmaker to follow. Instead, he ended up writing the first Wolverine, both Hitman movies and the infamous Die Hard 5!

The most interesting aspect of the entire film is that you get to see Thomas Jane and Aaron Eckhart share the screen. They're two great actors that, somehow, Hollywood failed to turn into leading mans. Just like Tarantino himself, Skip Woods really struck gold in his casting! There are also a few surprise cameos that I won’t reveal, but i’m surprised Tarantino never got his hands on them himself!

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The Wackness (2008)

The Wackness is the coming-of-age story of a young drug dealer named Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) as he tries to figure out what to do with his life and becomes friends with his therapist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley). 

But stop right there.

It’s not a movie about redemption, there’s no big reveal moment, no intervention scene with a lot of crying. It’s just about a teenager living his life during the summer of 1994, and one man’s quest to regain what he impalpably lost. That...and a whole lot of drug scenes!

Jonathan Levine (50/50) was in a weird position when he made this film, because it’s technically his second one, but All the Boys Love Mandy Lane took five more years to come out. So The Wackness has the feeling of a first time effort, when a director pulls a lot of cards out of his sleeve to get noticed. The soundtrack and the setting, for instance, are great...but pointless. At the same time, all those moments illustrate a teenager’s state of mind quite perfectly.

Underneath those flashy scenes, we can recognize Levine’s talent at creating authentic human drama. Just like in 50/50, he balances really well between comedy and drama and nothing feels forced. As Levine self-admitted, it’s loosely based on his own life (obviously not the drug dealing part). It certainly appears so because everything, from the shitty apartments to the aversion to medication, feels genuine.

“Don't jump for the quick fix”, says Dr. Squires, “This whole fucking city wants a quick fix. Embrace your pain. Make it a part of you.”. There’s a lot of great philosophical ideas in The Wackness, which is great because it defies the movie cliché that all drug dealers are idiots. Levine writes very maturely for a man of 32 years old. Perhaps having Ben Kingsley as a second fiddle helps to elevate the material a tad. Nevertheless, it’s also the proof of a great writer.

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The Matador (2005)

Ask Mark Hamill or Daniel Radcliffe, actors can rarely transcend the persona that we set in stone for them. Just like all the actors who preceded him oin the famous tuxedo, Pierce Brosnan will always be known as James Bond. No drama set in Ireland or Oscar bait biopic could ever shake that off.

The Matador tells the story of an out of luck businessman (Greg Kinnear) who befriends a hitman (Pierce Brosnan) on a trip to Mexico. That’s one way to look at the plot. In reality, the movie is about a total deconstruction of Bond. It asks the question: What would happen to him in real life? Julian Noble, our hitman, lived a superficial and violent lifestyle which transformed him into a lonely broken mess. Panic, made 5 years earlier, also explored the solitude and stressful life of a hitman, but it was far less entertaining.

Unlike what the trailers and movie posters want you to believe, there’s very little action in The Matador. It’s quite admirable that with a star and a subject like that, Richard Shepherd decided to focus on the characters instead. The only problem is that Pierce Brosnan makes Julian Noble so interesting that he overshadows Greg Kinnear’s character. Like in all buddy movies, it’s a question of balance, but Kinnear has very little to work with...even as the straight man of the film.

While there’s no doubt that the best buddy movie of 2005 was Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Shepherd wrote and directed a movie with a lot of command and style that stays entertaining throughout the film. It flows like a breeze.

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Light Sleeper (1992)

Nobody knows nocturnal solitude like Paul Schrader. In the 70′s, he explored the mind of an alienated taxi driver. During the 80′s, he dug into the solitary world of a gigolo. Here, in 1992, he continues on familiar grounds with a drug dealer who wants to leave his junkie universe for good.

Right from the opening shot, Light Sleeper gives the wrong impression that Paul Schrader might be trying to rival Martin Scorsese on his own turf. As if, like a sibling rivalry, he secretly sought praises. We could blame Schrader for essentially writing a variation of a similar plotline, which is true, but he’s just exploring his own palette. Nobody ever complained that Bukowski kept talking about self-destruction.

The problem is that in comparison, Light Sleeper feels weaker. On surface, they might appear similar, but the overall tone is different. Whereas Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver was a man despising the outside world, John LeTour (Willem Dafoe) realizes that his life choices bring sadness and danger around him. It’s a different form of solitude. One caused by occupation, rather than a wish for self-destruction. As a result, Light Sleeper is much more contemplative, as it should be.

LeTour’s sadness is only heightened by Willem Dafoe's performance. For a man who played villains and scumbags for most of his filmography, it’s rare that we get to see his softer side. The man moves like a shadow, from customer to customer. His face alone communicates more than any line of voice over narration in the film.

Unlike Taxi Driver however, Light Sleeper aged very badly. The music sounds a like very subpar version of Angelo Badalamenti’s work on Twin Peaks. It’s not surprising, since he composed music for Schrader's previous picture. Susan Sarandon's character is also seriously underdeveloped and makes the entire third act feel unearned.

Light Sleeper is still a very fascinating meditation on solitude. It's one of those rare American auteur movies, a last remnant of the 70's, the type that would never exist today.

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The Seven Five (2014)

"Welcome to the land of fuck”

New York before the 90′s was something else. It was dirty and filthy everywhere. Over the years, politicians slowly but surely transformed the Big Apple into a tourist-safe destination. But in order to do so, some sweeping needed to be done. If crime and corruption disappeared from the naked eye, it’s because they pushed it somewhere else. The Seven Five is a documentary about some of the dirtiest cops in recent NYC history; cops from the 75th precinct.

Sometimes, documentaries just beg to get adapted into a feature film. With Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker) by the Rolling Stones blasting through the end credits and the New York City setting, The Seven Five feels like the best movie Martin Scorsese has yet to make.

When asked during his testimony if he was a cop or a drug trafficker, dirty police officer Mike Dowd answered: “Both”. As Tiller Russell exposes in his documentary, the 75th was such a crime-heavy precinct, that it was easy to blur the lines and get away with it. Even if he lets him brag a little bit about his crimes, Russell is very careful in the way he depicts Dowd. However, he ends up looking like a legendary crime figure, like a cop version of Henry Hill (Goodfellas). 

Making a brilliant use of old black and white pictures and archival footage, the city of New York itself becomes a character in this documentary. It helps to explain how Mike Dowd and his partners were thinking, how they justified their actions. From their point of view, they were stealing criminals, not real people.

You might have seen this story told countless times, but rarely did we truly explore the logic behind police corruption. If anything, this documentary exposes the reality that sometimes the “culture” of an environnement can shape you into a corrupted individual. Sadly, even if the streets of New York are cleaner than ever, the problem still remains.

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Happy Accidents (2000)

Wrong place, wrong time; there’s really no other way to sum up this movie.

On one hand, the film tells the story of Ruby (Marisa Tomei), a neurotic 30-something woman who keeps dating messed up guys. She calls herself a fixer and keeps pictures of her exes in a big box called the Ex-Files (clever, but dated joke). That’s until she meets Sam (Vincent D’Onofrio), a very peculiar man. Her new boyfriend claims to be time travelling back from the year 2470 to protect her from an eventual tragedy. It sounds like a real disaster pick-up line, but is it?

On the other hand, the film got a wide release on the week of 9/11. Very few people went to the movie theaters that week. Also keep in mind that the story takes place in New York City and is titled Happy Accidents. You couldn’t invent such bad luck! If you wondered why you’ve never heard of Happy Accidents, now you know.

It’s a shame because Brad Anderson really pushed the rom com in a different direction. The early 2000′s may have been a few years before the cluster of bad Matthew McConaughey or Katherine Heigl movies, but it was already getting formulaic.You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all! In many ways, it feels like Anderson tried to use the romantic comedy aspect to lure in a wider audience into a science fiction story. This is not an easy pairing, but it was one of the first steps in a subgenre which would later find echoes in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Safety Not Guaranteed.

The twists in the screenplay and the quirky animated sequences add a bit of freshness, but it’s clearly Vincent D’Onofrio who keeps us on our toes throughout the movie. Sam Deed is a hard nut to crack and that because his performance is incredibly layered. Is he crazy or a manipulator? We never really know. It somehow balances very well with Marisa Tomei’s hidden vulnerability, as she also keeps doubting her new lover. It’s a very unconventional romantic pairing, but it works wonders.

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Welcome to the Film Cuts

Every weekend, movies compete for the number one spot on the box office. It’s survival. The movie industry is extremely agressive and doesn’t treat the losers very gently. For every great success, like Avatar or Titanic, some of them get crushed and rapidly pushed aside to let room for the next big movie. It’s the nature of the beast.

But what about the good ones that were overlooked?

I’ve created The Film Cuts to give a second chance to movies that were unfairly treated. I’m talking about films with good reviews, ignored on imdb, that got no awards or nominations at the Oscars or Cannes and that are not part of the Criterion Collection. 

Real underdogs.

See it as a collection of curated suggestions that are just begging to be watched. You never know, you might just discover your next favorite movie in there...