becoming friends with...The Loved Ones (2009, Our Feature Presentation)
we come back with korn. not popcorn. korn. so, there is apparently a gathering of the korn, and it stands in direct opposition to the gathering of the juggalos. This is where the movie half begins. that's related to the loved ones, yeah? anyway, then we head into some staples before the movie chat.
trailer trash — another italian one...cheap enough that we’re not convinced any of it is real, about a serial killer who ate what was left of his mother, with a helpfully narrated detour into the limbic system and childhood brain damage. we can't tell if the monster is meant to be human or maybe just wearing a human. more human than human. less human than human. then we venture to species, which immediately gets slotted as the b pick that is so obviously is.
framed — you know, guessing movies off single frames, and we force it as far from the track as we can. one still looks so much like mel brooks, terry gilliam, and bedknobs & broomsticks that the actual answer, chitty chitty bang bang (yes, we sing it), feels like cheating. we debate the pronunciation of pinocchio, i reveal a super popular franchise i've never seen a single film of (not that big of a surprise coming from me), a legitimate photo-op pitch to recreate a four-man barrister-wig tableau as a promo (i called the barrister wig), and then just e.t., which everyone gets instantly, repeatedly, without effort. they didn't even show him until the last frame. slimy little shithead.
our feature presentation: the loved ones (2009) — chris’s pick (although it was named in passing than anything else), and none of the rest of us had seen it. it's australian, so we knew the shape of the pain going in. what wasn't as expected was the ultraviolence not being the grossest thing in it...it's the father and daughter: a man visibly restraining himself, a girl in a prom dress telling him it’s fine, and a mother figure in the corner who may not be a mother at all. and there’s a drill and some boiling water. there’s bleach poured down a throat that i assumed was chekhov’s gun and turned out to be just another tuesday. because there’s a pit of previous attempts.
so we take it apart: how every single adult in this movie is either condoning something or glorifying something, how the cop and the grieving mother are quietly tangled together, how the missing brother is sitting in the cellar the entire time and one of us only figured that out from a plot summary afterward. how grief here spreads like an infection, leaching from one family into the next. how holly is the only person in the film with any empathy left and gets handed everyone else’s healing to do for them. how the escape sequence is the most satisfying thing in the movie right up until you remember you don't know where lola is...and then bang. and how lola is running all of it — that the dad has been wrapped around her finger for years, which is why the prequel we pitch on air ends with them taking the brother. (a24, blumhouse, hit us up. [email protected]
also this:
that wolf creek 2 limerick standoff scene followed by a ten-question australian history quiz where every wrong answer costs a finger. stop it with the fingers, you guys.
i issue a short, confident obituary for bruce willis, who is absolutely not dead, while rene and chris discuss last man standing. i never saw it.
trailers for the devil’s candy (2015) (leading to a potential plan to run sean byrne’s whole filmography), dangerous animals, noroi: the curse, and miike’s audition which got a hard no from us all. that leads to me ranting about why the cat in obsession did not need to be shown to be effective.
we meet and fall in love with cc pazzini, the four-inch-tall steampunk mascot cici’s pizza has hired to represent the inventor of the unlimited pizza buffet. dude looks like the mighty boosh, paul f. tompkins, and melissa mccarthy all mushed together. did he invent pizza, or did he invent the buffet? no clear answer is given.
the only known is that we will be chrisless for the devil’s candy next week. tell us how you feel about that and anything else in these ways:
https://www.becomingfriendswith.com
[email protected]
send gripes to bfw.gripe
send yer symptoms to bfw.doctor we prescribe a movie
voicemails by email, profanity encouraged, photos absolutely not, no matter what rene says.
thanks for listening. we love you.
