The Loveless

I am pretty sure I saw Willem Dafoe's balls. Time to freeze frame and inspect even closer. I will crack this case soon.

Sleazy Rider? It fascinates me that the weird cowboy from Mulholland Drive and Point Break's Kathryn Bigelow co-wrote and directed this guided meditation on 50's diners and bikers in small town America. Almost through sheer style does it manage to be relaxing instead of boring. Dafoe is fun to watch in his first role, it's hard to tell where he'll take it knowing he can go anywhere from Jesus to Bobby Peru.

Kathryn starts her career with an amazingly edgy -- Dafoe makes sex with a teenager and later she commits suicide after killing her incestuous father -- genre exercise that pays homage to old films with slow-paced, morally fuzzy contemporary filmmaking. This is like early Jarmusch shooting a script by Nicholas Ray. It's sexy, intense but with a deliberate sense of framing characters in situations that just exhale style -- Dafoe getting his motorcycle started, his pals buying and drinking Coke.

The movie that single handedly made me want to be a 1950's biker.

This isn't EASY RIDER or THE WILD ONE. Its moody atmosphere plays more like a meeting of Kenneth Anger and David Lynch. Eerie bright colors, an aura of sleazy cool, homoerotic imagery, long lingering shots, smoky score and hip soundtrack. I found it fascinating and it unexpectedly drew me into its world. Some of the performances are weak and some of the writing is corny, but ultimately these flaws just add to the sense of iconography at play, a mythical recreation of archetypes from another era.

Dionysian affirmations

Strange film. The stilted dialogue comes across deliberately awkward, but also awkwardly deliberate, which makes it really awkward. Throw in the mix Willem Dafoe screwing around with a girl represented as barely pubescent, who wears tight fitting clothes that reveal both nipples and genitalia, and you have a really awkward time on your hands. Awkwardness is certainly among my least favourite things to feel for the duration of a film.

The Loveless estreava há 40 anos no festival de Locarno. Primeiro longa oficial da Bigelow e do Dafoe, é um grease estilizado a ponto de acharmos que todos os personagens saíram de algum filme do Kenneth Anger, mas talvez force a mão e não seja tão cool assim. BlurayRip no MakingOff.

I think people who slather their scrambled eggs with ketchup are disgusting animals, but Willem Dafoe sure does look cool doing it...

74.500

Didn't really like this, I'm not into bikers or the '50s, I only saw this because I added all of Bigelow's movies to my queue a while back for some reason that I've forgotten. I also really didn't need to see Willem Dafoe's balls.