Brandon's movie memory

Edmond doesn’t love his wife anymore, maybe never has, so he leaves her, just walks out into the night. Goes to a pawn shop, gets himself a nice knife. Walks around getting increasingly frustrated, looking for a woman, but when he finally gets one alone he slices her up. Ends up caught for the crime, in jail.

William H. Macy is Edmond, and it’s a David Mamet script, so of course Macy’s got those stilted speech patterns down as only he can. George Wendt runs the pawn shop, Joe Mantegna probably begged for a cameo, Julia Stiles is the hot girl who gets sliced, and good to see Jeffrey Combs in a non-lunatic role as a faggy desk clerk. That’s Mamet vet Jack Wallace as the priest. Feels great to see a “respectable” Stuart Gordon movie… the guy needs more recognition as expert auteur of slimy and disturbing entertainment.

Edmond is a complicated guy, alternating between meek + wormy and enraged + righteous while on the streets, then unremorseful on his way to prison. He’s almost a hero for how purely he unleashed his thoughts and desires, if only he weren’t so full of hate, misogyny, homophobia and racism. Edmond finds peace at the end, some huge black guy’s bitch, becoming everything he has feared and learning (having) to live with it. Maybe that’s what brings him peace, it’s not confronting his fears but having no choice in the matter, having no free will to worry about anymore. After all, the choices he made when he had choices to make turned out badly. Anyway, pretty great movie, short and shocking.

A novel plot (and supposedly based on a Lovecraft story, so no wonder). Ezra Godden (of Stuart Gordon’s Dagon) is a poor physics student who rents a room in a very crappy boarding house. After some fun about studying the angles of his walls, a hot nude witch appears with her rat-creature pet to take over his mind and make him do weird things like sleepwalk to the university library and kill his next door neighbor’s baby. After he’s arrested for the baby-killing, the cops find the remains of all the other babies that past residents of the room have killed, and the rat-creature sneaks into prison to bite our hero to death. Oh and the crazy old man downstairs kills himself.

A lot better than the plot description sounds. Ezra is pretty convincing and the weirdness and atmosphere and pacing are all well held.

MOH trademarks: naked women, eye gouging (the witch’s eyes / ezra’s fingers), and our hero looks like Edward Norton most of the time (and Ben Affleck the other times).

Katy didn’t watch this one. Katy wouldn’t have liked it.