Wild Sound

This review will first be a review of the unrelentingly brutal hotness of
Sean Penn. He is the prototype that plucks that primal nerve in me, the one I know is a baaaaad impulse to follow…and in fact he has always held a special allure due to his striking resemblance to my very first boyfriend in high school, a notorious juvenile delinquent known to all the police in the county, not excepting my father. And this film brought those old old old memories rushing back, the pinnacle being when Penn strolls into the bar with vigilante murder on his mind, wearing the shiny circa-1976 black leather trenchcoat and turtleneck. I kid you not, my high school delinquent boyfriend had that EXACT SAME trenchcoat, and I remember very clearly becasue I thought it was kinda  ridiculous-looking. This was the 80s, and a 70’s-style black leather trenchcoat was not yet retro enough to be cool–too freshly uncool to loop back to cool just yet. At any rate, the last time I saw him he was wearing a big honkin’ turtleneck too, to make matters even more perverse. His was white, though. So here’s Sean Penn, the hothothot spittin’ image of my first boyfriend, the one who ruined my tastes in men forever, and I had to stifle a giggle. He looked fucking ridiculous.

And this movie, in general, was fucking ridiculous too. I was kinda into the suspense for awhile, and managed to coast along waiting for the next shot of a shirtless Sean (or at least tight-shirted in short sleeves with tattooed biceps bulging) but then it all became a trainwreck at the end when Laura Linney gives her embarassingly horrifically stereotypically shit-for-brains stand-by-your-man speech about her husband being a “king” who “always knows what to do” and who “could own this town” and, the kicker, she disdains Dave’s wife for daring to doubt her husband. So you see, it’s really all her fault. BARF BARF BARF. Oh and RETCH. I wish Linney was the one sliced up and thrown into the Mystic and not poor Dave. Oh and then to top it off Dave’s distraught wife gets left out in the cold–the evil woman who didn’t blindly stand by her man, a man who came home covered in someone else’s blood–as the monster men smile knowingly across the street at each other and the truly evil Linney gives Dave’s wife a truly evil steely dismissive smile. Fuck them all. I will write the final chapter to this film, wherein Dave’s wife takes a flame-thrower to the whole neighborhood after turning Jimmy in for murder and then runs off to France with her kid and becomes a famous novelist whose bestseller becomes a hit movie that forever turns public tastes away from macho bullshit male writing. The end.

Filed by cynthia rockwell at 6:22 pm under Uncategorized
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