Thumbsucker

When I saw this movie in the video store I had never heard of it, which surprised me considering it had a cast that was not necessarily to be scoffed at: Vincent D'onofrio (Law and Order CI's Det. Goren, Full Metal Jacket's Pile), Tilda Swinton (The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe's White Witch), Benjamin Bratt (One bad movie after another), Kelli Garner (Dreamland's Calista), Keanu Reeves (more on this bastard later), Vince Vaughn (if you don't know who he is by now you shouldn't even be reading a movie review), and the unknown but amazingly talented Lou Taylor Pucci (who you don't know, but you will).

Now, the casting was a bit off in two respects: Keanu Reeves should be dead. He shouldn't be making movies, and he certainly shouldn't be in a movie so real, funny and poignant that it makes Crash look like a pile of horse crap (granted that isn't very hard for me to say since I wasn't all that fond of Crash). Every nuance of this movie is real, except everything that Keanu Reeves says and does. I honestly expected that at any moment he would bust out and say, "Dude! Most righteous!" and then do air guitar. Honestly. He was that bad. Now, I loved Devil’s Advocate, and Speed and I could absolutely die with happiness when watching Bram Stoker‘s Dracula, but this man can’t act and this movie might as well have had a big flashing Las Vegas size sign pointing at him and blinking “Sucks! Sucks! Sucks!”. End of story. Just take my word for it.

Next is Vince Vaughn. His part was unfunny and totally wienerish. Is wienerish a word? My spell checker says its not, but I defy thee! Vince Vaughn should have had Keanu Reeves part. It may not have been funny, but he wouldn’t have had to act like a wiener. Still, I’m glad he was there. I didn’t like him in Psycho, but he saved Wedding Crashers, and lets face it people, its tough to save anything that Owen Wilson is going south in. (PS If Owen Wilson is reading this I still totally love you and will always love you because you played Eli Cash in the Royal Tenenbaums, one of my favorite movies of all time. Didn’t you help write that too? Jebus! Thank you). Moving on.

When I started watching Thumbsucker, I thought it was going to be so quirky and ridiculous that in the end I would wonder what in the hell I had just watched and what the hell had the damn point been anyway? But if nothing else I feel like I can trust Vincent D’onofrio’s judgment (I even like The Cell. Stop laughing.) So watch I did and I realized that this movie didn’t just delve into the heart and life of a teenage boy (Justin Cobb, played by Lou Pucci) to whom thumb sucking had been an addiction his entire life. No. Get this: it covers drug addiction (both behavioral drugs as well as street drugs), married life in all that it is and seems to be, the alpha male family dynamic, sex and that life is everything and nothing you expect all at once. The movie I was watching was a picture of that same thought: everything and nothing I expected. It managed to cover all these topics in a way that Hollywood has forgotten completely: without utter alarm and panic. Imagine that, if you can.

D’onofrio and Swinton play the parents, who are in a strange mishmash of a marriage, and both play their roles so naturally that you are so happy when their place in Lou’s story goes from dangling subplot to front stage, because you just want to watch them work. Its that good. Kelli Garner plays Justin’s “girlfriend” Rebecca, who comes and goes in the story but is so deliciously sensual and aloof you want to bite a hole through your lip. And lastly, but people he ain’t the least, is Lou Pucci who plays Justin.

Horrified by his addiction to sucking his thumb; which makes his father disgusted with him, is only one more thing for his mother to just roll over and ignore about him and that leads him in the most stressful situations to the bathroom stall to partake in, he decides to part ways with his habit which turns not into a silly journey through a pathetic excuse for withdrawals, but which leads you through the many ins and outs of his life, his school, his family, his future. Can he quit? Should he have to? What is it about being a thumb sucker that marks him in the way he has marked even himself? But what its really about is the world and the people in it, and our perception of them, ourselves and the events and places that make up our lives. NO ONE could have played this role like Lou Pucci. He is the next Leonardo Dicaprio and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean that he’s handsome, and breathtakingly talented. I ate up every word he spoke. If Lou Pucci kicked me in the boob, I’d ask for another. Write that down somewhere, I want you to remember that I said it. Johnny Depp? Orlando Bloom? Lou Pucci. Just watch.

Joon gives Thumbsucker the Joon rating of Awesome. That means watch it. Or someday when you’re watching Lou Pucci on Inside the Actor’s Studio you’ll be thinking “You know, I really should see that movie. They say it was his springboard!”. It’ll be like DiCaprio’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. It’ll be Johnny’s 21 Jumpstreet. It’ll be Basic Instinct for Sharon Stone and The Mask for Cameron Diaz. Only you’ll want to watch it.

Full Metal Jacket

I'd never seen this movie before, which seemed sad, so when there were no good movies on the new releases racks to partake in, I had to indulge. My first clue that this movie was something to be reckoned with was the fact I had never seen it on television. If they can edit down Se7en for cable, then this movie must whoop the FCC's ancient booty.

I brought the DVD out to the car and showed my choice to Mr. Joon. The cover shown a combat helmet, across which was written "born to kill", and was adorned with a peace sign pin. "The duality of man." said Mr. Joon, which meant nothing to me at them time, but set the stage. There's something there, if you can scratch away the grimy surface. Beneath the pussy jokes and the rough exterior of men beating each other with bars of soap and the far too young and bitter Vietnamese prostitutes, there does lie a moral. A moral that tells of just what Joker says: "the duality of man". (I like how everything Joker says if half a joke. Its a truth with a smile. That's beside the point.)

The point is this: we expect our men to be one way and they better be that way or they're in for it. We expect our men to go to war and fight. We expect them to win, because if they don't then not only are they failures, but our country looks like one too, and in turn so do all the people within it. So off they go, and they better smile like they mean it when they do. They have to go where the people are trying to kill them, look through their sights at another person and shoot them down lest they be shot. They shoot again and again.

That's all their life is after a while, you know? This life. These men that try to kill them everyday, who they are supposed to kill first lest they shame their country. When that's your life every day, then dammit, just screw the girl. She doesn't seem to care and you're so drunk with disillusionment and bitterness that you couldn't care less either. What do you do when you hate and kill for your own survival, and can't let morality break that down? You want peace; you want to go home and forget anything that ever was or will be of what you did but at the same time you can't care about that hippie bullshit because that's not the thinking that will get you through the day alive.

That’s what it is. That way of thinking, of living and surviving, that is the layer that surrounds their hearts and thoughts to get them through it with some semblance of humanity. That state of being is their full metal jacket.

Still, if I had to hear one more “gook” or “me so horny” or any of that crap I was going to barf a little in my mouth. So this was a tough movie to rate. Obviously Stanley Kubrick is a genius of astounding proportions. However, to me there’s realism and then there’s just a lot of potty talk and ickiness. By the end I totally thought they were going to rape that girl as she lay shot and dying and begging for death, because that’s how much it all disturbed me. The Joon rating Full Metal Jacket receives is Pretty Damn Cool. Because it is definitely something you need to see once, if only to know where that whole, “Me love you long time, sucky sucky 5 dollah” thing comes from.