The Gamer's Quarter

[helicopterp]

I saw it last night and I want to talk about it. It's fascinating, if inconsistent. It is the only Todd Field film I have ever seen.

If no one else has seen it, I'm just going to write about it here by myself tonight or tomorrow.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Ethoscapade]

yeah, i saw it over the weekend.

..definitely inconsistent. it must work better as a novel, i think, but hey, not bad.

[helicopterp]

Parts of it were uncannily effective. The stampede to get out of the swimming pool and the subsequent stampede back in was almost frightening. Check that. It was frightening. And somehow the NFL films parody worked wonderfully.

The book club discussion about Madame Bovary was pretty worthless, though, and I hated the note that the film ended on. I sort of wish the tone was a constant uncomfortable simmer instead of coming to a boil.

How did you feel about Ronnie McCorvey?
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Wall of Beef]

Saw this in the theater back in January. Easily my second favorite movie relesed in 2006. Todd Field rules, if you have not seen "In the Bedroom", see it, its amazing as well. I would say I prefer Little Children, but In the Bedroom is nearly its equal.

Is Ronnie McCovery the dude who played the pedophile / bad boy dude in Bad News Bears? If so, he was awesome. Deserved his Oscar Nod. He just seemed so genuine as a pedophile, which really is not a compliment I would imagine anyone would want.

[helicopterp]

Ronnie McCorvey isn't the actor playing the pedophile, he is the pedophile. I don't know what the actor's name was. I'm still not sure how I felt about the character. On the one hand, he was genuine, and we learned enough about him that he didn't fit into any one trap of an interpretation (e.g. evil or sympathetically misunderstood). On the other, there was something unpleasantly Freudian surrounding him--loving mother who treats him like little boy, him thinking of himself as a child. When he smashed the collection of clocks and figurines of gnomes and boy-children after his mother died (perhaps the most heavy-handed moment of the film, for better or worse. I think worse) it was evident that we're supposed to understand his pedophilia as a product of his being stuck in a pre-pubescent stage of mental development. The ending, of course, which had been foreshadowed in the dialogue ever since the opening scene of the movie, only cements that psychoanalytic interpretation. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth because I don't like to think of psychoanalysis as a hard-and-fast template for anyone's behavior, which seems to be how this film treats it.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.