Tusk man the Barbarian

A week ago, I saw Barbarian, a horror film starring Justin Long that has a lot of different tones and things going on. 

Yesterday, my son and I carved our jack o' lanterns for this year, and although he was trying to make a vampire, he said it looked more like a walrus.

These two events in combination could lead me to only one conclusion:

It was time to watch Tusk again.

I'd actually tried to watch Tusk again earlier this month, before I knew Justin Long was in Barbarian and before I knew my son would carve a pumpkin that he thought would look like a large flippered marine mammal. (Not its whole body, just its tusks.) But it wasn't streaming anywhere I could find, not without paying to rent it -- which shouldn't be such a surprise, as I don't think the movie was anything more than a morbid curiosity to most people. 

Me, I love morbid curiosities, and toward the end of this month, I'm not conserving money the way I thought I needed to earlier in the month. (We accepted an offer on our house in Los Angeles, a topic that probably deserves its own post some other time. We're still in escrow but the end now feels in sight.) So when the universe was telling me to rent Tusk from Amazon on Saturday to watch it on my projector that night, I complied.

The first time I wrote about Tusk on this blog, it was in this post, in which I bemoaned that the main thing about Tusk was being spoiled by people saying "Without getting into spoiler territory ..." and then basically just saying the thing. Eight years later, I don't feel the need to still preserve this sort of secrecy about the movie, though I'll still talk around it if possible -- before totally spoiling it with a photo at the end of the post. So this is your SPOILER WARNING for Tusk, even though the poster above, which obviously existed at the time, does a pretty good job previewing the morbid curiosity you are about to witness. (I can talk around Barbarian more easily but there could be mild spoilers for this too.)

So just some context about why I appreciated Tusk as much as I did the first time, which I think was out of sync with people's general thoughts on the film. Kevin Smith's most recent film before this had been Red State, which was my second favorite film of 2011. Especially on the heels of that unexpected pivot toward serious filmmaking, Tusk confirmed for me that Smith might be entering into a whole new period of cinematic exploration.

Alas, it was short lived. His next film, the Tusk spinoff Yoga Hosers, was one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and he's followed it with a Jay and Silent Bob movie and a Clerks movie, neither of which I've seen, which could not be more a case of staying in his lane. Given that Smith has always been a fan of distributing by independent channels, one wonders why he couldn't also explore the new weird streak he established in his consecutive collaborations with actor Michael Parks. But it looks like that new Smith has well and truly vanished.

Barbarian, though, put Tusk back in my head. It was in my head more than it might have otherwise been because I edited and posted a review written by other writers later in the week. There are more similarities than you might imagine:

1) Both star Long in a screwed up horror that leaves you no idea where it's going, assuming you have not been exposed to spoilers.

2) In both movies Long plays an entitled douchebag. In fact it could almost be the same character if the character in Tusk made an unlikely comeback from what happens to him.

3) Both characters are going to get what's coming to them. 

4) Both movies are going to take us around in time a bit, and splice together things that would not necessarily seem related to one another. 

5) Both movies have multiple "oh no that's not right" moments that rely on something gruesome happening that you don't want to watch. (You could probably say this about many horror movies but maybe it particularly applies here. Part of the advertising campaign for Barbarian has shown stills of people recoiling from what they're seeing on screen.)

Anyway.

For me, Barbarian was a little overhyped. I definitely enjoyed it, but there are so many thematic issues going on that I felt like I failed to see the big picture, and I had questions about some loose threads that left me wanting more of an explanation -- not because they didn't provide answers that we deserved, but because certain occurrences in the plot, like the mix-up that informs the movie's first third, seemed to have little to no ultimate function in the narrative. But yes, the scene that's grossing out that audience in the ad is good, as are all this movie's disparate elements taken individually.

Tusk also has some really disparate elements. Last night reminded me of that strange, tonally jarring scene where Genesis Rodriguez gives a teary direct address to the camera about her boyfriend cheating on her. Where did this come from? I have no idea, but it renewed my sense of how alive Smith's cinematic engagement feels in this film.

And then there's just everything related to what happens to poor Mr. Long. I've talked around it but you certainly know by now.

So now it's time to include that photo of my son's walrus jack o' lantern, which was getting its trial run in our garage last night next to the one I made, along with the "real" walrus in the film:

The world's douchebaggiest ringtone

"Ah ah ah hooah hooah
Ah ah ah hooah hooah
Ah ah ah hooah hooah
Come on now, more margaritas!"

If you recently saw Tusk, you may have this little ditty stuck in your head, just as I do.

It's the ringtone belonging to the main character, Wallace Bryton (Justin Long), a douchebag podcaster who likes to laugh at famous freaks on the internet. And it's such a terrific character detail, such a terrific signifier of douchiness, that it's probably one of my favorite things about the movie -- a movie I liked quite a lot.

Of course, at the time I saw the movie I had no idea that it was a comedy bit recorded from one of Kevin Smith's podcasts, where radio personality Ralph Garman (who appears as an actor in both Tusk and Smith's last film, Red State) was doing an impersonation of Al Pacino. Apparently, in this particular bit, Pacino is a fan of tequila, triple sec, lime juice and salt.

To me, it just sounded like what a real dickhead would say to a group of girls, when he was hoping to roofie one of them and have his way with her. "Come on, drink up!" (Considering the events of Tusk, there's a bitter irony to the notion of unquestioningly drinking something that is thrust in front of you.)

It's not that I believed this character would do something like that, but that this character would not comprehend the underlying grossness of a jerk trying to get some girls drunk. Most douchebags would not actually commit date rape, but they would think the type of activities that lead to date rape are awesome. I wouldn't be surprised if Wallace Bryton were a devotee of Tucker Max, for example.

What I love is how many times Smith uses this ringtone in the movie. It's got to be in there at least a half-dozen times, and each time the movie pauses to let its absurdity play out for 5 to 10 seconds before the phone is answered. The ringtone comes at funny moments, to accentuate the comedy, and in scary moments, to puncture the tension. It is used masterfully to get a laugh each time.

Since just having me spell it out in words above is probably not enough to create the necessary mental image -- can you have an image of a sound? -- here is that ringtone, with accompanying graphics:



It's one of a number of masterful touches in Tusk -- intermingled with some touches that aren't so masterful, and some parts that simply seem like flab that could have been cut out. Still, Tusk is a win overall for Smith -- both very funny and very disturbing at different junctures, with some other random tones thrown in to jangle you further.

After Red State, that's what I love about the new Kevin Smith -- you really never know what you're going to get.

Now, to locate the nearest Mexican restaurant with a liquor license open at lunchtime ...

Without going into spoiler territory

It must be really difficult to talk about movies these days, especially since more plot information than ever tends to fall into "spoiler territory."

Unfortunately, what seems to happen is that the people charged with the sacred duty of protecting spoilers -- particularly podcasters, who converse off the cuff and don't generally edit out slips of the tongue -- simply give lip service to avoiding spoilers ... and then fail to avoid them. 

Which makes it even more difficult to listen to people talk about movies, if you haven't seen the movie. 

"Without going into spoiler territory," they'll say, "let's just say that a certain someone in The Crying Game doesn't have a certain type of genitalia that you would expect that certain someone to have."

Really? Did you just avoid that spoiler? I don't think you did. 

That's an exaggeration, of course -- the people on the podcasts I listen to have more smarts than that. The real problem is that any individual statement they make does not constitute a spoiler, but taken in combination, you get a pretty complete image of the thing you're trying not to find out about.

So now is the time that I will give my SPOILER ALERT about Tusk ... a movie I am in a position to be able to spoil, even though I have not actually seen it. (And therein lies the problem.) 

I was listening to the second-most-recent episode of Filmspotting on Saturday, having known it was about Kevin Smith's Tusk, and having dragged my feet on listening to it long enough to realize I was not going to be able to watch Tusk within a reasonable amount of time. (I believe it comes out here on October 16th.) 

I had heard the most general logline of the movie, which was "It's about a man who turns into a walrus." I might have not liked to know even that, but with a title like Tusk, I might have assumed it had something to do either with walruses or elephants. The 1979 Fleetwood Mac album was also a possible focus of the film. 

Now, when Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen and guest host Michael Phillips launched into their review, it was clear from the start that they intended to avoid spoilers. But it was also clear that they wanted to have an in-depth discussion of the film, which required them to give us more context than a totally spoiler-free review would allow them to do.

So there came that phrase again -- "without going into spoiler territory" -- followed by three rather suggestive phrases sprinkled through the review: "unwanted surgery," "body horror" and "obsession with walruses."

Piece those together, and now I know that there is a crazy guy who surgically implants walrus anatomy into a human.

Of course, if there were any doubts about that conclusion, I need only listen to the parts they felt confident they could share -- which basically remove any of those doubts.

However, Josh and Michael were not content just to spoil the main parts of the story. They also spoiled what is supposed to be a surprise cameo by Johnny Depp. Not just that he's in the movie, but that he plays a Quebecois detective with a walrus mustache. It's like if someone told you that Tom Cruise was in Tropic Thunder before you saw it. (And who knows, maybe someone did.)

It's the second time in the space of a month I was worried about listening to Filmspotting because of potential spoilers. I was told I should know as little as possible about Charlie McDowell's The One I Love, so I delayed listening to that episode. I was actually at a near podcast standstill, in fact, as I was also avoiding the episode of the Slate Culture Gabfest in which The One I Love was on tap.  

Fortunately, in that case, The One I Love was already available for rental on iTunes, so I scooped it up for the princely sum of $6.99 and watched it on a Friday night with my wife. When I then turned to the podcasts, I found that Josh and regular co-host Adam Kempenaar had really talked around the spoilers in their review -- but that Culture Gabfest team blew them wide open. (At least they issued a spoiler warning before divulging.) 

I'm not really criticizing any particular podcasters or people here. What bothers me is the very nature of film-related discourse, and what bothers me most is that I don't know there is any way it can be avoided. I love listening to these podcasts from week to week, and I love them precisely because they are not satisfied with a cursory, surface-level review of a movie. Getting into the meat of the movie is what makes them great. I'm so into the podcasts, in fact, that I don't want to skip any or listen to them out of order, because there are certain other features on each episode that are enhanced by listening to the shows in the intended sequence.

But I'm never going to be able to keep up with their pace of watching new releases, especially when certain movies don't even come out in Australia until three months after they hit theaters in the U.S., and certain other movies may intrigue me but don't seem like an immediate priority.

So what do I do?

Listen with one ear closed, and beg those involved to exercise as much prudence as they can.

At least I figure to see Gone Girl before Filmspotting gets to it next Friday. The plan is to go tomorrow night.