Movies |
Wristcutters
directed by Goran Dukic
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Comedy
The funniest film I saw last year started with a suicide.
Zia — played by Patrick Fugit, the appealing kid journalist from “Almost Famous” — lives in a post-grad mess. And he appears never to have cared about the place. Today, however, he’s methodically cleaning every surface, sweeping away months of dust. And when everything’s tidy, he goes into the bathroom and…
This is funny? No. Not yet. But as he’s face-planted on the bathroom floor, he looks to the corner and sees… a dust kitty.
And then he dies.
I find that funny. You? Watch. Then decide.
Even funnier comes seconds later, for when you kill yourself, Zia learns, you don’t go to fire-and-brimstone Hell, you go to a place that’s “much like this — just a little worse.”
Zia, for his sins, is dispatched to a small town in what looks like the barren land between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. There, he works at Kamikaze Pizza. And there are other reminders of his status: like the blue mark on the forehead of the guy who shot himself, the zig-zag scar on the arm of….
Everybody’s got a story. Here’s an entire family of suicides — how these Russians all came to off themselves is one long giggle. Best of that lot is Eugene, the last to die. He was a musician who decided, in mid-gig, to….
Goran Dukic, who wrote and directed this film, is very sharp. Long before he exhausts the suicide jokes, he produces a plot: Zia killed himself because his girlfriend didn’t love him. A month later, his girlfriend joined him in death. She’s…here. Zia must find her.
Thus begins a road movie. With antics made funnier by the fact that everyone we meet is dead.
Only just when the road trip gets good, it ends. Now we’re in a mad religious movie, with none other than Tom Waits as a cult leader who’s selling love of death as a theology.
No wonder “Wristcutters” was a hit at film festivals and is a cult favorite now — it’s not like other movies.
Well, except in this way: It has a happy ending.
But to learn what that is will require 88 minutes of your life.
And a sense of humor that has a high tolerance for the unthinkable.
To buy “Wristcutters” from Amazon.com, click here.
To rent “Wristcutters” from Blockbuster.com, click here.
To see the preview of “Wristcutters”, click here.
