Willard (2003)
Some movies, you know you'll like right away. The opening credits hooked me here -- done in a ghoulish, Brothers-Quay, Tool-video style with a jaunty haunted-house score laid atop. It set the mood perfectly for what followed. It's ostensibly a horror flick but pitched more like a blackly comic character study, and Morgan & Wong have clearly worked hard to both create a mood and jam little bits of fun into the sidelines. (In fact, there's so many blink-and-miss-em gags and winking references that it almost starts to feel like an especially macabre episode of "The Simpsons".) The real attraction, though, is Crispin Glover's awesome performance. Seriously, it's like his entire career has been marking time until he got to this film. A more tailor-made role just can't exist, and he's damn near perfect in it. He's creepy, yet somehow you're with him every step of the way. He earns the audience's sympathy, which is damn hard to do when you're required to show alarming amounts of feeling towards a white mouse. It's not perfect (the film's a little too insular and has almost no interest in its sparse supporting cast), but after two crappy films, this small nugget of black-hearted deliciousness was muchly appreciated. (I could have done without the scene with the cat, though.)
Grade: B
Some movies, you know you'll like right away. The opening credits hooked me here -- done in a ghoulish, Brothers-Quay, Tool-video style with a jaunty haunted-house score laid atop. It set the mood perfectly for what followed. It's ostensibly a horror flick but pitched more like a blackly comic character study, and Morgan & Wong have clearly worked hard to both create a mood and jam little bits of fun into the sidelines. (In fact, there's so many blink-and-miss-em gags and winking references that it almost starts to feel like an especially macabre episode of "The Simpsons".) The real attraction, though, is Crispin Glover's awesome performance. Seriously, it's like his entire career has been marking time until he got to this film. A more tailor-made role just can't exist, and he's damn near perfect in it. He's creepy, yet somehow you're with him every step of the way. He earns the audience's sympathy, which is damn hard to do when you're required to show alarming amounts of feeling towards a white mouse. It's not perfect (the film's a little too insular and has almost no interest in its sparse supporting cast), but after two crappy films, this small nugget of black-hearted deliciousness was muchly appreciated. (I could have done without the scene with the cat, though.)
Grade: B
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