Stuart Gordon's Stuck

Fuck me. This played at the NuArt a couple of weeks ago. I should have gone.

EDIT: For the record, I remember when this case happened in Texas, and people were nothing short of disgusted and terrified, which was pretty much all there was to be in the neck of the woods that I grew up in. Sadly enough, I forgot about the connection until you mentioned the case in the review.

Awesome to hear that it's great, I was kinda worried about this one for while.

Though it doesn't look like it's gonna be playing around my area anytime soon, I so I guess I'm gonna have to catch it on DVD.

Wanted to chime in that I also caught this yesterday and it really deserves the love. Definitely shows that Stuart learned a lot over the ages.

The ending I found particularly awesome. The dog scene also. Noting anything more would be criminal.

It also has its own share of old-school B-movie style symbolism/analogy, which is something you don't see handled this damn good anymore.

Seriously, needs to be seen by many more people. (I was one of two in the audience I saw it with - strangely, she stayed through the entire thing but did not snicker, laugh, or cheer)

Sounds really great. Pity I'm gonna have to wait a couple of years until the DVD gets released here.

Thanks for the review, I've been dying to know how this turned out. EDMOND was such an interesting turn for Gordon. Hope I'll actually be able to see this someday.

It bothers me this hasn't gotten wide release, because this is a really good one. CHUD people would love it.

Gonna have to add this to the queue when the time comes. This sounds great. Alex doesn't give "9's" out lightly. . . .

This really is a fantastic film, the kind that gets you shouting in the cinema. Is this thing only showing at the Angelika in NYC? A shame... it should be in indie theaters and grindhouses everywhere. Promoted right, it could be a real cult hit. Really sick stuff, shamelessly entertaining, and the best film I've seen so far this year

Interesting to see that people liked this film. I hated the shit out of it.

Well, you're a hateful shitty kind of guy. The movie is excellent.

Warrior Angel retard syndrome: When they come back to the boards using the same name.

Tried to see it over the weekend. Not even out in NY. Weak. Saw Mongol instead. It was okay.

... because...?

It's unmitigated garbage. It looks like a Canadian TV show, the acting is awful (the 'tough' black boyfriend is like a joke), the script is mostly miserable when it isn't just this side of weird when it comes to racial stuff, and the third act is so bad that I don't know where to start. Gordon should have just gone CREEPSHOW on the last act and made the guy a zombie - at least that would have been plausible.

I think plausibility takes a backseat, as the viewer's attempted anger at the lead character AND the cycle of laziness she perpetrates (there's a larger point about America settling for mediocrity- no surprise Bush comes up in conversation) fuel the audiences desire to see Stephen Rea get some revenge. The black boyfriend is SUPPOSED to come across as a joke, and I thought the performances were fine. Would like to know what you thought of the racial undertones of the script- I imagine this is white lower class versus mixed ethnicity middle class? Which I had no choice but to take at face value- I think racially, there's something to chew on there, but I don't see a lot of it in the movie itself. Maybe you're referring to the Hispanic family?

The hispanic family stuff is merely awful in a cartoonish, afterschool special kind of way. That stuff is simply embarrassing. What's troubling is that the white woman who essentially self-identifies as black is the lazy, stupid, selfish villain while the white guy who has been beaten down by the world (Gordon goes out of his way to make Rea a victim of homelessness) is the hero. That dumb wigger bitch is ruining everything that Rea is trying to do. And it isn't just that she's played as a wigger, it's that we're never able to get away from her adopted blackness. She even has African art in her house!

I get that the boyfriend is supposed to turn into a joke - Gordon is emasculating the tough scary black guy - but he was never anything but. He's not a character and the actor plays him sort of mincing and also super broad, like he's in a spoof movie.

As for the third act - plausibility is so key. I can't watch thirty minutes about a guy who is so critically injured that he can't get off the hood of a car and then all of a sudden buy him standing on broken legs and killing people. And that's beside the fact that revenge is cheap, and isn't reflecting the real story (which I think some people may use to defend the weird racial shit - can't have it both ways). I was really hoping for something more penetrating, but the truth is that Gordon couldn't figure out what I knew he couldn't figure out two years ago when he told me about this project in an interview: how to turn this horrible story into a full movie.