Tag: movies

The recently released movie If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which is written and directed by Mary Bronstein, might not seem obviously relevant, but it’s worth the effort and the experience.

A therapist named Linda (Rose Byrne) and her unnamed daughter (Delaney Quinn) who has an eating disorder return to their apartment to find a flood in their bathroom and soon thereafter a hole in a bedroom ceiling. Her husband Charles (Christian Slater) is sailing for two months, so Linda is responsible for coordinating these repairs and resettling her daughter in a nearby hotel without disrupting her treatment while maintaining her own private practice.

Linda finds support in the hotel manager James (A$AP Rocky) and her own therapist (Conan O’Brien), who is also her supervisor. However, her shortcomings are exposed when Charles unexpectedly returns, so she runs to the beach and rushes into the ocean only to be repelled each time by crashing waves. She is found stretched out on the sand by her daughter, whom she promises that she will do better.

The lead performance is particularly powerful, and according to Bronstein and Byrne purposely particular, which makes it a puzzle.

For some, it represents the challenges confronting mothers who are told to lean in and have it all. Such an impression is obvious for example in the scene in which Linda challenges the physician (Bronstein) who is treating her daughter and other mothers’ children in a group session.

This movie for others might be an account of the ways that men fail women. Such failures can be found for example in Linda’s husband Charles, who continually minimizes the challenges she is confronting, or her supervisor, who does help with a professional crisis but later terminates her therapy with him.

It could be for still others a story about the ways that women cannot see and support each other. That in addition to the group session scene is also evident in the exchange between Linda and a client named Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), who after abandoning her newborn in Linda’s office later tells her that their recognition isn’t mutual.

This exchange however suggests a larger link among these possibilities, which is the way that anyone can be unseen even by the people who could, and should, see us. Linda not only cannot see this client or for that matter others, but she also cannot recognize the humanity in the hotel manager James, whom she abandons in her damaged apartment after he fell through the ceiling hole and broke his leg.

This movie in other words is more a cautionary tale about the ways that we can miss others’ suffering, and in so doing might make it worse. Even the parking lot attendant (Mark Stolzenberg) in his insistence upon the rules is yet one more person who cannot offer compassion to another suffering human.

Suffering, which might be central to the human experience, is powerfully presented in this movie, which is why it cannot be a comedy even though some think it is. It’s less amusing and more unsettling, and certainly offers no connection or communion at its end.

That isn’t funny or fun, and can never be, which could very well be why we all might need a kick in the pants.

I repeatedly considered walking out of Dead of Winter, which I think is worse than most credible critics think.

This movie, which is written by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb and directed by Brian Kirk, is a story about a widow named Barb (Emma Thompson) who is driving in snowstorm to scatter her late husband’s ashes on the lake where they had their first date when she decides to intervene in a kidnapping. The married kidnappers (Marc Menchaca and Judy Greer) hope to extract a kidney from their hostage (Laurel Marsden), who has previously attempted suicide, and are thwarted by Barb, who eventually drags the remaining kidnapper to her, and their, watery death.

The casting suggests aspirations for something substantial. Thompson in an interview about this movie called for more female heroes presumably of a certain age on the big screen, and suggested that female heroism is existentially essential.

Thompson isn’t wrong. She just has the wrong project. The scenery-chewing performances make some scenes in this movie difficult to watch, but these only make a flawed script seem worse.

Barb’s accent might be distracting, but her strength is implausible. This senior citizen can bust through a locked basement door, tumble down a flight of stairs, and exhibit no effects. Elsewhere, she fashions a needle from a fishing hook with one good arm to stich a bullet hole in her other one and later can lift a water heater or some other large appliance high enough to slip her handcuff beneath its leg.

Her motivation is no more clear than it is for the other characters. Why would Barb for example go to this lake in the middle of a snowstorm, and not wait until it had subsided if not until the ice had thawed? Even their first date — ice fishing when she was much younger — hadn’t occurred in a snow storm.

Barb’s actions are bewildering. For instance, she has the foresight early in the movie to write backwards on a frosted window to communicate with the young woman who has been imprisoned in the basement, which obviously makes it easier for her to read, but doesn’t think to erase it, which later reveals her presence to the kidnappers.

Barb decides to spare one of the kidnappers, who has hypothermia after falling into the hole in the lake she cut and hid, after he agrees to drive to the police before the hospital. In response, he donates additional ammo presumably in gratitude for her risky decision or an affirmation of his intentions or both. Barb, who has realized that she needs more bullets, nonetheless fires blindly beneath a vehicle at this kidnapper’s wife, and only strikes her in the leg, which slows but doesn’t stop her.

Instead, this kidnapper forces Barb to help her take the victim to her makeshift surgical ward atop the icy lake, which happens to be near the fishing cabin Barb had earlier erected. This kidnapper, who has earlier killed her husband after finding him driving away, seems intent upon harvesting her victim’s liver by herself after she also shoots Barb with a rifle in the chest.

Audience members who circumnavigate these script holes eventually arrive at the final confrontation, which concludes when Barb manages to drag the kidnapper into the same hole where the kidnapper’s husband previously had fallen. We never see the victim who nearly lost her liver try to save her savior, who nonetheless manages to open the tackle tin that had previously saved her life — the bullet is buried in her husband’s ashes — and release these ashes that have been hidden beneath the top layer of lures and line.

We’ve never learned why this victim had wanted to kill herself or worse why late in the movie she announces a newfound desire to live. We do watch her as the sole survivor discover a photo of Barb and her late husband from her fateful first date years earlier, which mercifully releases us from this cringe-worthy movie.

Dead might be a B-movie, but that doesn’t absolve it from any and all obligations to its audience.