I’m gonna start this with a rant. FUCK YOU, NETFLIX. YOU FUCKING MOTHERFUCKERS. Fuck the raised prices, fuck the movies disappearing from streaming fucking daily! I can handle that. I’m a man. What pisses me off is all these movies they used to have, all of the sudden they don’t and now they’re only available to be “Saved”. Fuck those assholes. After I saw the surprisingly able remake of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 film of the same name, I wanted to rewatch the original because I haven’t seen it in years. But I came to find that not only has Straw Dogs disappeared from streaming, but now the DVD has disappeared and it can only be added to the “Saved” section. Goddamn it. Goddamn those motherfucking sons of a thousand bastards. You cock hole motherfuckers cock teased me for two years with all these great movies, and now you fuck me straight up the asshole and take them all away from me. I digress. If you could get past my colorful phrasing, thank you. The good news is that the Straw Dogs remake is mostly pretty good, until a major slip-up in the last act that taints the whole project. The acting is really natural and much better than a generic thriller playing on three screens at a time should be. The tension mounts perfectly to the inevitable explosion of violence at the end. It’s really much better than 90% of the crap turned out on multiplexes this time of year. Rod Lurie, the director, used to be a movie critic and investigative reporter. He exposed unethical practices at tabloid magazines, and also called Danny DeVito a “testicle with arms”. Such is his legend. Lurie made the jump to feature film directing in 1999 with Deterrance. I didn’t know Lurie was previously a film critic, but looking at his filmography it makes sense. Lurie’s body of work has been, for the most part, incredibly solid. He directed the fabulous The Contender, which got Joan Allen an Oscar nomination. Then came the pretty good but too violent The Last Castle, followed by something called Resurrecting the Champ. The best of Lurie’s films, though, is the spit-flying-angry Nothing But the Truth, a riveting fictionalization of the Valerie Plame debacle that featured Oscar worthy performances not just from Kate Beckinsale and Vera Farmiga, but also David Schwimmer. Ross. It was that good. Unfortunately, no one saw it because the release got all screwed up, and that probably cost it a few Oscars. So it’s no surprise that Straw Dogs follows Lurie’s path of pretty good directorial efforts. The only problem is the end. First of all, what made the original so ambiguous was that the sexual assault on the main character’s wife was possibly consensual. But here it’s obviously rape, removing any sort of ambiguity and thus making the wife completely likable. Then, when the violence ramps up, the movie spends a good deal of time fetishizing what effect nail guns and boiling water have on people’s skin. The last third is really a complete waste, save for one interesting addition that appears to be cribbed from Dark Night of the Scarecrow. The intent of the original was to turn you off to violence, and it did. This version glamorizes it and makes the actions of the main character heroic, when in the original they were anything but. I want to like this movie, because it really is a good movie for the first two thirds. It has the unfortunate luck of falling apart at the end. But it’s hard for me to say I liked it when it gets arguably the two biggest points of the original completely wrong. Now it reads as little more than a revenge fulfillment tale about a meek Californian taking on hicks in the south. As such, it comes off a little intolerant and even smug. I haven’t been this let down by a movie in a long time. The first two thirds got me really excited. I felt like I was watching something really special, and I was. Then the brutal and nihilistic climax comes calling, and the movie throws all the good favor it had going for it down the toilet. All the tension it so gracefully mounted is tossed off in favor of an extended sequence of a man’s head getting caught in a bear trap.
C
Unsolicited Criticism 