I just watched this movie for the second time and, despite the shock value of the first viewing being gone, I still thoroughly appreciated it after another look. I would in fact say I like this and director Kevin Smith's previous film, "Red State," more than any of his Jay and Silent Bob flicks or anything else by him. There's a bit more going on here than merely crazy old guy kidnaps crappy young guy and renders him a monstrosity for his own sick and/or odd reasons. Justin Long is perfectly cast as a narcissistic sleaze and Michael Parks--one of the best character actors money could buy, before his death a few years ago--is too as an isolated psychopath who is perhaps not so much out of his gourd as not a fan of the human race and nostalgic for a happier time; a time spent decades earlier, with a walrus friend.
Part of why I'd wanted to take this film in once more is because it's somewhat haunting. It's a unique nightmare, of the sort that could conceivably transpire, that lodges itself in one's mind. A fellow who (some might say accurately) regards human beings as the Earth's only real beasts, a man who was as a kid horribly abused and went through life with no one, without love or support, turns into a serial killer--hunted by a lone Canadian detective. But his aim seems to be less to inflict suffering as to turn man to animal, or rather the animal that man is into something superior to man: a, to his thinking, higher animal. And to do this so that he might relive, again (though fraudulently) experience, the six months during which he (allegedly) enjoyed the companionship of the marine creature that once saved him physically and then emotionally--the only time he knew connection.
The film--or Parks' "Howard Howe"--suggests that the modern person has lost much of his or her humanity (or never had much to begin with). And Long's character particularly has. But by being forcibly transformed into a walrus-person perhaps, it's also suggested, Long's Wallace Bryton ironically regains some measure of the humanity lost in the quest for success, to the distractions of the 21st century world, an amoral society. To a culture as cheap as the plastic convenience store cup that keeps reappearing, even long after he has come to look forward to meals of whole fish eaten off the ground.
Part of why I'd wanted to take this film in once more is because it's somewhat haunting. It's a unique nightmare, of the sort that could conceivably transpire, that lodges itself in one's mind. A fellow who (some might say accurately) regards human beings as the Earth's only real beasts, a man who was as a kid horribly abused and went through life with no one, without love or support, turns into a serial killer--hunted by a lone Canadian detective. But his aim seems to be less to inflict suffering as to turn man to animal, or rather the animal that man is into something superior to man: a, to his thinking, higher animal. And to do this so that he might relive, again (though fraudulently) experience, the six months during which he (allegedly) enjoyed the companionship of the marine creature that once saved him physically and then emotionally--the only time he knew connection.
The film--or Parks' "Howard Howe"--suggests that the modern person has lost much of his or her humanity (or never had much to begin with). And Long's character particularly has. But by being forcibly transformed into a walrus-person perhaps, it's also suggested, Long's Wallace Bryton ironically regains some measure of the humanity lost in the quest for success, to the distractions of the 21st century world, an amoral society. To a culture as cheap as the plastic convenience store cup that keeps reappearing, even long after he has come to look forward to meals of whole fish eaten off the ground.
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