i started this review four years ago, never finished it, didn’t even complete a
first draft and the end of the review devolves into structural notes and then
it just stops. so what better way to finally open my account as an online
reviewer than to post a long, rambling, broken, completely unfinished review of
a film that no one including myself even remembers or cares about without any additions, corrections or editing to any part of this shit at all.
Toad Road is kind of like a bunch of home movies me and my dumbshit friends used to make when we were really young and fucked up all the time that we had convinced ourselves were awesome and then we turned sixteen and realised how wrong we all were so we disappeared the tapes and now if anyone ever brings them up around us we all get real quiet and weird because what the fuck were we thinking?
in this case what the makers of Toad Road were thinking was that they
would make a movie about some hipster piece of shit named James (played by a
guy named James), and his deeply uninteresting group of friends, getting drunk
and fucked up all the goddamn time and acting like a bunch of jerks and
assholes and the brilliant filmmaking conceit for these parts of the movie is
that the majority of it is actually “real” in the sense that they are really
taking drugs and really getting fucked up on them / lighting people’s butts and
pubic hair on fire / playing “gay chicken” / making you wish that they had
never been born so that the footage of them doing all of this wouldn’t exist.
then James meets a girl named Sara (played by a girl named Sara) and they hook
up after he plays guitar in his boxer shorts and then they roll around together
in a sunny field and that means that they are falling in love and then Sara
says something about wanting to eat psilocybin mushrooms and then James tells
her some idiotic urban legend about Toad Road, which was a road behind an old
mental institution (mental institutions are this generations' Indian burial grounds)
where the seven gates to Hell were apparently located and then Sara eats some
mushrooms in a cave and then some other stuff happens and then they go looking
for Toad Road and then Sara disappears and who knows maybe James killed her or
maybe he didn’t and maybe you will care about the answer to this question or any
of the other shit that happens in this movie but on the other hand maybe you
won’t.
before i go any further, i wanna point out
that i don’t enjoy taking literal of figurative shits on anyone’s work and that
i really do watch all movies with an open mind in the hope that they will light
me up like the burning pubes of a soporous degenerate. i also wanna point out that i will also probably start roasting the movie BELLFLOWER at some point and it may or may not come completely out of nowhere so fair warning about that.
anyway, credit where credit is due, the Toad
Road massive went out there with limited resources and got a crew together and put
a camera in front of objects and people etc and remembered to activate the
record button on the camera so that the things it was pointing at were captured
and stored so that they could later be edited together with music and sound
effects and dialogue into a series of moving images that were collectively
determined to be of feature film length.
in addition to those lofty achievements, there
is one specific instance in Toad Road of a thing happening that evoked a
sensation within me not entirely dissimilar to that of enjoyment: the scene
where the lead actor who isn’t the girl gets punched in the face a bunch of
times for real.
the sequence itself is idiotic and unearned
and plays out like a cheap stunt but it did remind me of all the crazy shit i’d
read about Harmony Korine’s FIGHT HARM over the years, and all of a sudden i
found myself lamenting the fact that that film would almost certainly never be
completed, and then i thought about how amazing it would be to see some of the
raw footage of it, and then i imagined that some fucking legend of a human
unearthed that footage and screened it at a skate park of Harmony’s choosing and
a whole bunch of people (none of them associated with Toad Road) watched it together
and it would be a beautiful, beautiful thing. and then i realised that Toad
Road was still on but that i had missed a few minutes of it because i was
daydreaming about Fight Harm and that made me happy.
so with those positives aspects out of the
way -
i fucking hated this giant windbag of a film.
getting through it was such an ordeal that on several occasions i inadvertently
moaned as though i were grieving the loss of something irreplaceable. full
serious not making that up – actual audible noises came out of me while i was
watching this film. i don’t know if anyone else has experienced this before but
there is a particular combination of stomach pains, hot flushes and nausea that
occurs when you hear that either someone has cheated on you or that you have
cheated on someone and are wracked with guilt about it, and you attempt to
process the situation intellectually but you can’t because your guts keep
churning up and the insides of your head feel like they’re too big for it.
that’s how i felt for the majority of the time that this was on. the fact that
this movie exists and that i have seen it makes me feel genuinely miserable. this
may all sound like hyperbole (not to be confused with “hyperBoll” - noun. the
incorrect assessment that Uwe Boll is the worst director of all time and that
his films are the worst ever made) but if any of you watched this trash for
yourselves then you would know that i was dropping nothing but truth bombs all
over this piece (p.s do not watch this trash for yourselves)
big deal, though – i saw a terrible film
and i hated it. so what.
but something weird has been happening
since i endured Toad Road – i’ve been getting really irritable and crabby whenever
i see any favourable reviews for it online that echo the filmmakers sentiments
whenever they won’t shut up about Toad Road’s “authenticity”. on the one hand, this
is definitely a case of me being totally unreasonable because it is no business
of mine what kind of fictional or factual entertainments people find themselves
enjoying (within reason of course – if someone told me they enjoyed watching
child pornography or videos of animals being tortured then i probably would
struggle to keep my opinions to myself) and so what if the Elijah Wood is
online somewhere talking some bullshit about how 70 or 80 percent of the movie
is a genuine documentary. and it isn’t like i was forced to watch it at
toadpoint or anything. for about a year before it got a release i would see it
mentioned online and think “man, i‘ll have to remember to check out that druggy
horror-film-that’s-not-really-a-horror-film when it eventually drops because it
sounds like exactly the kind of thing that i am into” (i.e movies that don’t
really fit into any specific genre and during which nothing much really
happens). And it’s not like i’m spammed by reviews of Toad Road while i’m just
casually browsing the webbynets to determine if an uncut Blu-ray of Return of
the Living Dead III has been officially announced yet (it hasn't) or that all of
the reviews have been glowingly positive (they haven’t).
i am actively and knowingly searching for
these reviews and reading all of the positive ones that i can find even though
i know that doing so will seriously piss me off. but why? and why am i crapping
on about it so much here? why would anyone give a tenth of a shit about my sprawling
review of a film that they probably don’t give a tenth of a shit about in the
first place? why do i give a tenth of
a shit? why do i give ten tenths of a
shit?
well, I’ve narrowed it down to two
possibilities that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. one – i’m
disappointed that it turned out to be such vacuous, amateurish, quasi-existential
garbage because i was really looking forward to it and was hoping that it would
be great and now i am sulking because i didn’t get my own way. two – i think that
the film itself, and probably also the people who made it, are totally full of
shit and that no one has really called them out on that aspect yet .
most people like to see charlatans get
royally fucked over for being fraudulent bastards, or at least i and other
people who like things that are awesome do. i recently read this http://impossiblefunky.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/the-strange-case-of-char-hardin.html piece by Kristy Jett (i originally came across the link here http://www.brutalashell.com/2013/12/bah-celebrates-2013-the-most-wtf-moments-of-the-whatfuckiest-year-thus-far-in-review/)
about a recent incident in which Char Hardin, “Horror Personality and
Journalist”, was attacked outside a Best Buy, beaten half to death and then
thrown into a dumpster. Kristy Jett smelt bullshit though and the article i
linked to above details her admirable pursuit of the truth. i really found
myself pulling for Kristy to totally blow the whole ridiculous story wide open
even though i had no idea who Char Hardin was at the time. i barely even know
who she is now but that isn’t the point. the point was that someone had done
something dishonest and not only were they getting away with it but they were profiting
from it. if you believe a story as transparently fabricated as Char Hardin’s
then you are probably a moron of some kind so who cares what you think but on
the other hand someone needs to call these assholes out occasionally just to
level the field a little. so thank you Kirsty for sticking it to Char Hardin, thank
you Mugatu for sticking it to Blue Steel, etc
thing is though, BELLFLOWER (i.e one of the
most hateful and misogynistic and also just boring and stupid movies ever made and yep i'm not even going to transition into talking about it)
and Toad Road’s notices were mixed to say the least, and actually pretty damn
negative in a lot of cases, so it isn’t as though these punks pulled the sheep
over everyone’s wolves or anything like that. so really there should be no
reason for me to wanna crucify their asses so bad.
in this great review of Bellflower by Ian
Buckwalter http://dcist.com/2011/09/bellflower.php,
which is pretty much dead on apart from the overall score being about two
points too generous, he admits that he wanted to talk to other people about how
angry the film made him feel. not only do i completely empathise with this, but
i actually told people to go out and watch the goddamn thing themselves because
i had never come across a movie that had made me quite as furious as that one
had.
and that’s the crux of it i think – that
these movies felt like such specific, personal affronts that it made me
recommend them to other people just so i wouldn’t feel like i was the only one
suffering. there are plenty of shitty, boring, poorly made movies out there
that i were hugely unenjoyable but after they were finished i moved on, i would
rarely if ever willingly expose others to them unless a) i was feeling
particularly sadistic or b) i sincerely thought they might get something out of
them even if i didn’t. these motherfuckers are next level though. i honestly
feel that the unpleasant qualities that both of these films possess are
directly representative of the attitudes and personalities of the people who
made them, which would make those people absolutely fucking unbearable.
i decided to re-watch both movies in
preparation for this review, which is something that i promised myself i would
never do in a million years. i wanted to see if they would throw me into a hate
rage again or if i’d just find them distasteful and boring this time around. i
also wanted to address the very real and terrifying possibility that, and this
has happened before, i might end up kinda liking them.
additionally, i’m not gonna write too much
about Bellflower as it has been out for a while now and plenty of good shit has
already been written about it, but Toad Road is relatively new and there aren’t
a ton of reviews for it kicking around so i’ll go into a bit more depth with
that one. i’m just grouping them together for the sake of this review because
they have seemed to fuse in my mind and whenever i think of one i can’t help
but think of the other. they’re not even that closely linked thematically,
unless you consider unbearable douchebag asshole guys doing reprehensible
things to women a “theme”, but they are
both abject and pretentious failures that think they have depth and merit so
i'll run with it.
i did attempt to write a review of BELLFLOWER at one point though -
BELLFLOWER / 2011 / 106 minutes
** Bellflower is about two of the worst pieces of worthless shit on the planet
doing a bunch of idiotic nonsense that you won’t care about and then at the end
of the movie one of the guys (writer/director/star/mechanic/”I don’t have anger
towards women”/knife-rapist Evan Glodell) goes on an imaginary rampage because
his ex-girlfriend gave him a face tattoo and then another girl shoots herself
in the head because he curved her.
(the bit in Bellflower where the
main guys are sitting around bitching about some shit or whatever (sorry i
can’t be more specific you wouldn’t believe how many scenes revolve around
these guys sitting around and bitching about things) and the best friend of
Knife-Fucker sort of timidly makes a little “fuck everything” speech and then
he picks up his bicycle (with rear basket) and really pathetically throws it
into a drainage ditch. that part made me laugh a whole lot and it would have
really reinforced the filmmaker’s contention that these assholes were immature,
hateful, petulant monsters if that was a contention he had ever thought to
make. i’m pretty sure that this scene was not supposed to be intentionally
funny by the way.)**
that's as far as i got. but i'm gonna start talking about it now for some reason and because i don't have a completed review to refer to I’m just gonna have to assume (not hope) you’ve seen
the movie and if not I’m sorry for how confusing and lacking in context this next part is going to be.
I know that the scenes of
sexual violence and suicide etc at the end of Bellflower are the wish
fulfillment fantatsies of some dude with brain damage, but the film genuinely
seems to believe that she did him wrong, she got what was coming to her, she
realised the error of her ways and then forgave him and he kinda saw that he
had been acting like a bit of a dick too. except she really didn’t do anything
wrong at all until Woodrow attacked someone with a baseball bat , and even then
it was arguably in retribution for that, and as payback Woodrow threatened her
into having sex with him and then stabbed her in the vagina with a knife.
That’s what gets to me about a lot of the artwork for this fucking thing –
Woodrow being embraced by Milly as things explode in the background. The way it
plays out in the film is that Milly hobbles up the street, covered in blood
from injuries that Woodrow has inflicted on her, finds Woodrow and then pretty
much begs his forgiveness as his friend Aiden voice overs something about Lord
Humungous and “bitches”.
I just think this is an incredibly confused
film in many unsettling ways and by that I don’t mean that the moral compass of
it is slightly skewered and that it is making me feel uncomfortable because I’m
not sure if I should support or condone the actions of the characters, I just
mean that all the parts in the film that seem to be casting a critical eye on
the male characters come across as bullshit, and all the bits about flame
throwers and women being bitches come across as earnest and genuine.
Evan Glodell apparently started writing Bellflower
when he was 22 after going through a particularly bad break-up. When asked
about the violence and apparent misogyny in the film, Glodell said “It’s the
first script I wrote. I was really young. I got older. It’s told from an angry
point-of-view. Young men are crazy, strange, emotional beings.” Okay fair
enough, but does this mean that he altered the script to better represent his
subsequent maturity and it was that version that they shot, because if so the
results are truly fucking troubling, or did he just film the version that he
wrote when he was 22 in the hope that audiences would understand where he was
coming from when, following the dissolution of a serious romantic relationship,
he wrote a screenplay in which a character that he plays, and that is based on
himself, rapes a character that is based on his ex-girlfriend with a knife.
But it’s an undeniably fascinating film. I
hate its fucking guts and think it is, juvenile, pretentious, facile, repellent
and genuinely misogynistic. But it is a one-of-a kind, it did shake me from the
doughy mire of audience complacency that I so often find myself in after
watching so many forgettable films, and it made me want to find the girl he was
dating when he was 22 and give her $17,00 and a custom made camera to go and
make a spitefully ugly film about him.
back to TOAD RAOD. there’s this thing I like to call the Unplanny Valley – where in movies that incorporate “real” and “fake” footage, the more we are expected to accept all this footage we are watching as real, the more time we spend searching for the seams. so having the actors in Toad Road burn each others groins and butts and puke and drink too much and get fucked up on all kinds of drugs for real makes all of the narrative scenes around those ones seem so much more false. it also doesn’t help that all of the actors in this thing are atrocious, including Sara Anne Jones who i have seen praised in enough reviews to know that a bunch of people have given her a pass but jesus fucking christ are you kidding me? her performance is absolutely appalling. i’m pretty sure she improvised all that dialogue about the shit that is supposed to pop off when going through the gates of hell too because it just doesn’t work or make any real sense, and the phrasing of it is clumsy beyond belief.
“eat mushrooms” who the fuck says that.
People who take a lot of drugs do not talk like that. The only people who talk
like that are people who do a lot of drugs in movies phrasing things in a way
that the possibly non- drug-taking members of the audience will understand. so
again, why bother filming real people taking real drugs if you are then going
to make those people discuss the experience during the narrative portions of
the film like they don’t know what the fuck they are talking about. The two
things clash too much. It is even harder to suspend disbelief in this case than
it is with found footage films for example because in this case the
verisimilitude is broken every time the movie cuts from the obviously real (guy
getting knocked the fuck out) to the obviously fake (Sara Anne Jones making
words come out of her mouth)
this shit is just the worst combo of
self-importance and incompetence
i heard the warning bells within the first
minute of the movie, including opening credits, when Sara recited the following dialogue (the first we hear in the film) in a
stilted voice over: “I met a guy once.
Who told me about a place that contained the seven gates that lead to Hell. I
thought that it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.”
bullshit. bull fucking shit. there is
nothing beautiful about some asshole telling a chick he wants to fuck about the
seven gates to Hell, especially not if he describes it to her in the same
pandering metaphorical way that Sarah blabs on about it later in the film. Sara
only thinks that it is the most beautiful thing she has ever heard because
writer/director Jason Banker said she did. It is the first of many unearned
moments like this in Toad Road, in which a reverence is applied to something
which really doesn’t deserve it. Of course an argument could be made that
nothing these characters seem to revere are actually important, but seeing as
Sara is portrayed as somewhat transcendental, and the emphasis they place on
her recounting the stages of the seven gates as it parallels James’s descent, make
me think that they actually do think this shit is kinda important, but i have
no idea why. the initial idea was an adequate, if obvious, one – local urban
legend as metaphor for emotional and physiological stages of addiction and
trauma. It simply is not a strong enough
concept to withstand the new-agery that Banker keeps piping into it. it’s the
kind of thing that works best when it is mentioned once or twice, briefly, early
on and then later when the shit starts to go down we the audience will maybe
think “hmm – kinda like that dumb story that loser told his weirdo girlfriend
earlier in the film”.
The film strives for mystical resonance but
totally fails to achieve it because of the shocking lack of effort it puts in.
combining abstract images with dime store philosophical musings in an attempt
to achieve a notion of consequence that never lands.
and as a cautionary tale it is about as
insightful and effective as this is http://www.thelockinmovie.com/
i also don’t agree that these films are
particularly visually unique either. Bellflower appropriates the
ultra-saturated, high-contrast “Lomo look” of films like Domino, and Toad Road
is rough, almost exclusively hand held and under-lit. i don’t mean that as a
negative, by the way. but aside from the intercutting of
also let’s be honest here, most non-actor’s
can’t improvise for shit. they deliver the same clunky line readings as they always
do but with the added discomfort of struggling to freestyle their own dialogue
on the fly as well. this shit just doesn’t work, especially during lengthy
intimate scenes like the one between
Maybe add this part later?? (don’t be an
apologist for budgets – plenty of movies suck / are awesome with huge budgets
and plenty of movies suck / rule with tiny ones. Use the best resources you
have to your advantage and ditch the ones that are a hindrance. If your actors
aren’t great, rework you film to not rely on them as much. If the locations or
costumes or effects or whatever else are not going to undermine the story you
are trying to tell, then either modify the story to work around these things or
tell a different story. These things can all be overlooked though but budgets
should have no impact at all on the quality of the screenplay and a good writer
should be able to adapt to whatever constraitnts or li itiations are placed n
their work. Apparently The Battery cost $6000 a bunch of reviews I read said
things like “great film considering the budget” etc but I think that’s
bullshit. I thought it was a not great but okay I guess movie irrespective of
the budget. Was it impressive that they were able to accomplish so much with
such limited resources? Of course, they did a kick ass job in that respect. But
appreciating someone’s efforts os totally dfferent to thinking that the product
of those efforts is worthwhile. The two
things are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they sure as fuck aren’t mutually
accordant either. – shorten all this to
: while extreme budgets, both mini and maxi, are certainly noteworthy and of
course impact the production of a film in positive or negative ways, I
personally don’t think that they should be used to excuse or validate blah blah
plus saying shit like “pretty good considering the size of its budget” is
pretty faint praise.
Films don’t get separated by budgets when
they’re reviewed or catalogued or sold etc so why the fuck should they have
such a big impact on the way that we are supoosed to absorb them? micro and
maxi budgets are impressive I guess as technical info but I think it’s sort of
sad how much emphasis, both positive and negative, is placed on them in
general.
Toad Road is populated with characters i
can’t relate to doing things i don’t care about.
The End i guess
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