September 3, 2008: Boarding Gate
I was on a bit of an Asia Argento kick recently. Typically that means that I research and read about someone’s movies/career, think that I’d love to see every single one of their movies, and then I don’t follow through at all, because spending an hour reading about movies is a lot different than investing 40 hours into seeing 20 movies. Such is/was the case with Asia Argento. Daring wild-child auteur, daughter of legendary Italian horror/Giallo director Dario Argento, and acknowledged as one of the most intense and real actresses burning up the screen today, she’s probably best known as “the girlfriend in xXx”.
And then there’s Michael Madsen. I think a lot of people never gave him a second thought beyond his great performance in Reservoir Dogs, and I can’t really blame them, since I can’t name much that he’s done since 1992 other than Species, despite 131 additional IMDB entries in the interim. I generally think of myself as liking him and his performances. This movie made me rethink that.
You see, it seems that all of those tics and gestures that made his Mr. Blond character in Reservoir Dogs so cool, powerful, edgy, etc, were just Michael Madsen’s interpretation of Michael Madsen trying to act. Holding his head at an odd bent-down angle while shooting disapproving looks, a sudden and disapproving sniff, raising his eyebrows in a condescending (and one might say disapproving) way…he’s a bit heavier now, and the lighting’s a bit brighter here, but this is Mr. Blond all over again. Oh well, we all need to scrape out a living.
So we’ve got some intense and pretty solid work from Asia Argento, a cliched performance by Michael Madsen, and a seriously harsh aesthetic, all laid on top of a plot which is so incomprehensible that even skimming through the final 30 minutes of the movie a second time (I will admit that my attention lapsed at times because I was multi-tasking – I take my half-assed-ness seriously, folks) didn’t explain the ending which didn’t make sense the first time through.
Go out and see some Asia Argento movies, by all means. There will be rewarding moments, but it may be a bit of a minefield if you seek consistently high quality.
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