Every judgment is relative to something else. I was unhappy with the film because I expected more, based on a review I'd read. I'd expected more of a police procedural. Instead, it's the usual story of a young girl kidnapped, raped, and otherwise degraded by a smiling young maniac who drives her from her home in Kansas to Wyoming, while he quotes Robert Service. ("A bunch of the boys were whooping it up/ in the Malamut Saloon.") I wanted action, not fancy egghead LITerature!
We can believe most, if not all, of her suffering. God knows we see enough of it. Sara Canning, as the real-life victim Anne Sluti, is beaten unconscious, bound with duct tape, blindfolded and teased, sexually violated, half drowned, and made to eat an oatmeal cookie. We don't learn much about James Van Der Beek, as Tony Zappa, except that he was raised by his Bible-thumping grandma, he is a genuine imbecile, and has been a bad boy all his life.
Anne Sluti, on the other hand, is a good girl. She must be, otherwise there might be shades of gray in the movie, which we must avoid at all hazards. The point of the movie is to make the audience weep with sympathy and hate the perp. We don't want them to think. There are endless close ups of Anne Sluti's mother's anguished face. The actress, Diana Reis, seems to have been chosen for the role precisely because the default expression of her features seems to be "agonized preoccupation." And I could almost hear, in my mind's ear, the writers wishing ruefully that the real-life heroine could at least have had a more proper name than "SLUTI". I mean -- after all. Couldn't she have at least been given a decent name? Like Angelica Primrose?
Some of the story, though it's supposed to be real, I simply can't swallow. The villain, Tony Zappa -- that's a proper name for a heavy, and it must have made the writers glow with satisfaction -- forces his captive to make a phone call home, claiming that she simply decided to take off on her own and she wasn't kidnapped. She tells the waiting police, who are taping every word, that "it was time for equality vacation." The cops twig to it at once. It's not a slip of the tongue, not a parapraxis, it's a clue. "Equality." And one of the states next door is Wyoming, whose motto is "The Land of Equality." So that's where she is now -- in Wyoming. A thousand far-flung dots are connected in an intant.
I don't believe it. Do you?
You have never seen such suffering. Except in every other movie ever made about young women in jeopardy.
We can believe most, if not all, of her suffering. God knows we see enough of it. Sara Canning, as the real-life victim Anne Sluti, is beaten unconscious, bound with duct tape, blindfolded and teased, sexually violated, half drowned, and made to eat an oatmeal cookie. We don't learn much about James Van Der Beek, as Tony Zappa, except that he was raised by his Bible-thumping grandma, he is a genuine imbecile, and has been a bad boy all his life.
Anne Sluti, on the other hand, is a good girl. She must be, otherwise there might be shades of gray in the movie, which we must avoid at all hazards. The point of the movie is to make the audience weep with sympathy and hate the perp. We don't want them to think. There are endless close ups of Anne Sluti's mother's anguished face. The actress, Diana Reis, seems to have been chosen for the role precisely because the default expression of her features seems to be "agonized preoccupation." And I could almost hear, in my mind's ear, the writers wishing ruefully that the real-life heroine could at least have had a more proper name than "SLUTI". I mean -- after all. Couldn't she have at least been given a decent name? Like Angelica Primrose?
Some of the story, though it's supposed to be real, I simply can't swallow. The villain, Tony Zappa -- that's a proper name for a heavy, and it must have made the writers glow with satisfaction -- forces his captive to make a phone call home, claiming that she simply decided to take off on her own and she wasn't kidnapped. She tells the waiting police, who are taping every word, that "it was time for equality vacation." The cops twig to it at once. It's not a slip of the tongue, not a parapraxis, it's a clue. "Equality." And one of the states next door is Wyoming, whose motto is "The Land of Equality." So that's where she is now -- in Wyoming. A thousand far-flung dots are connected in an intant.
I don't believe it. Do you?
You have never seen such suffering. Except in every other movie ever made about young women in jeopardy.