CLAY PIGEONS is yet another in a long line of movies that has received its British television premiere channel 4 at an ungodly hour . If you stay up late to watch one of these very late scheduled movies wondering why channel 4 has waited to the wee small hours to broadcast it you eventually end up going to bed at dawn usually wondering Channel 4 showed it in the first place since they're nearly always crap art house movies . This movie however is different because while not being a great movie is at least watchable
Joaquin Phoenix plays Clay Bidwell who's best friend commits suicide before the title credits come up , so Clay is at a loose end and he befriends a drifter called Lester Long in a bar . One day the new friends go fishing and discover a woman's body , the first in a series of bodies that that are starting to turn up in town .
This is often very entertaining , especially for film fans as they play spot the reference . When a body turns up in a river we here banjo music playing , the same tune that was played during the banjo duel in DELIVERENCE . A female/male team from the FBI arrive to investigate the burgeoning death toll a bit like in THE X-FILES and most self referential of all Clay pushes a truck over a cliff and curses when it doesn't explode because as everyone knows when a mode of transport crashes in a movie it ALWAYS explodes
Everything is set for a very memorable black comedy but the script stops the movie from achieving its full potential . You often have to suspend disbelief for a movie to work but CLAY PIGEONS relies far too much on coincidence to work , like FBI agent Shelby realising who the murderer is because she comes across a cigarette butt , or the murderer visiting Clay in prison because he knows the sheriff deputy is asleep , how would he know this . But right from the start I was puzzled by a niggling plot hole very early into the movie where a victim of gunshot wounds is found dead in a burned out truck . No matter how fierce the fire or how hard the impact of a car crash if someone has been shot dead before the crash then the bullet wounds would still so up in a post mortem . This plot hole isn't helped by the low budget where after the truck has exploded in a massive fireball all the subsequent scenes show a truck that while bashed about a bit shows no scorch marks ! . Obviously this scene was filmed before the truck blew up
Joaquin Phoenix plays Clay Bidwell who's best friend commits suicide before the title credits come up , so Clay is at a loose end and he befriends a drifter called Lester Long in a bar . One day the new friends go fishing and discover a woman's body , the first in a series of bodies that that are starting to turn up in town .
This is often very entertaining , especially for film fans as they play spot the reference . When a body turns up in a river we here banjo music playing , the same tune that was played during the banjo duel in DELIVERENCE . A female/male team from the FBI arrive to investigate the burgeoning death toll a bit like in THE X-FILES and most self referential of all Clay pushes a truck over a cliff and curses when it doesn't explode because as everyone knows when a mode of transport crashes in a movie it ALWAYS explodes
Everything is set for a very memorable black comedy but the script stops the movie from achieving its full potential . You often have to suspend disbelief for a movie to work but CLAY PIGEONS relies far too much on coincidence to work , like FBI agent Shelby realising who the murderer is because she comes across a cigarette butt , or the murderer visiting Clay in prison because he knows the sheriff deputy is asleep , how would he know this . But right from the start I was puzzled by a niggling plot hole very early into the movie where a victim of gunshot wounds is found dead in a burned out truck . No matter how fierce the fire or how hard the impact of a car crash if someone has been shot dead before the crash then the bullet wounds would still so up in a post mortem . This plot hole isn't helped by the low budget where after the truck has exploded in a massive fireball all the subsequent scenes show a truck that while bashed about a bit shows no scorch marks ! . Obviously this scene was filmed before the truck blew up