Sunset Gun

Hungry Heart: Toback on Tyson

Mike Tyson has made me almost shockingly emotional. More than once. From discussing all the love he has to give, and how he can’t receive it, to his genuine nostalgia for his former trainers, to all the women he mistreated, to the pigeons he’s been raising since childhood and loves (a la Brando’s On the Waterfront Terry Malloy), the man’s troubles hit me to the core. And you can say I’m being conned or manipulated or white-washed by director James Toback (who clearly loves his friend) -- say what you want. I don’t care. Tyson moved me. Just like Gary Gilmore moved me in The Executioner’s Song or Perry Smith moved me in In Cold Blood, two other works in which the writers (Norman Mailer and Truman Capote -- who also were in love with their subjects) took on troubled, talented men turned criminals with a raw yet lyrical sensitivity and a deeper awareness of how, both the world and the man, can misdirect their power and passion to crush themselves -- no matter how much potential they’ve got.  With Mike Tyson, add the collective racism (by liberals and non-liberals alike) that view him as some sort of primal animal, and you’ve got multiple issues to contend with -- personally and politically. 

Heady, poignant, scary, humanist, controversial, heartbreaking, and maddening -- Tyson pushes potent buttons. The famed “outsider” director  who made, among other pictures, his masterpiece, Fingers, The Pick Up Artist and the terrifically underrated Black and White (which featured a stellar, scary turn by Mike Tyson in a brilliant scene with Robert Downey Jr. ) turned his camera on his friend of many years, former heavyweight champ, fallen icon Tyson and the result is hypnotic. Shot entirely from Tyson’s perspective, the style will unnerve those who have serious problems with the former boxer. But many (I hope) will see a person in pain, and a person who’s never resolved his pain. Which in our current culture of constant, empty apologies and quick fix therapy sessions, or the Barbara Walters tour of redemption, Tyson’s emotional honesty is deeply refreshing. Yes, he’s still fucked up.  And yes, he’s the first to admit it. For 90 minutes we watch Tyson's face, world weary and at times, teary-eyed, discuss his life, from the heavyweight championship he won at 20, to his the trainers, to his wives, to his loves, to his pigeons, to his rape charge, to his stint in prison and then some.

No matter how you feel about Mike Tyson, the man is a fascinating American figure. A tragic American figure. And clearly, Toback agrees.  As I talked with Toback, our discussion went to many places (our mutual love of Thomas Hardy and Dostoyevsky and our frequent siding with the supposed “bad guy”), so I’m parceling out some key moments, proving, once again, that James Toback is a man who is never at a loss for words, ideas, or demons  -- demons he embraces like a familiar friend. And God (or Satan) bless him for it.

Thomas Hardy as related to Mike Tyson...

Re-occurrences are not unlikely in fact, they are inevitable and you put them in movies and people say, “Oh get the fuck out of here” that’s too convient. And then you say, read some Hardy and live a little and you’ll not only see it’s not convenient, it’s inevitable, these things that you feel fit too neatly are constantly occurring. One of them happened to Tyson. When he got out of prison, I was thinking, I’m going to use him now in this next movie Black and White…and I was just visiting my mother and I’m walking down 72nd Street to Columbus Avenue…thinking whether Mike has his old cell phone number which I’m sure he hasn’t so I can call him about the movie and as I’m thinking this, there’s a knock on the window of the City Grill Restaurant  and there’s Mike sitting there with a friend and I come into the restaurant and I say, "You are not going to believe this. I was just thinking about getting your number and calling you to ask you to be in… Black and White" and he says, "You’re not gonna believe this(and he says to his friend) ‘Who was I just talking about?’" The guy says 'James Toback' and he says (points) "this is James Toback." So that was a truly Hardy-esque moment. I love Hardy.
 

Favorite Thomas Hardy?

Jude the Obscure by far…

Of course. The darkest one of all…

Yes, of course.

And, favorite Dostoyevsky?

My favorite is The Possessed. Stavrogin's confession  -- one of the greatest chapters in the history of world literature. And I love The Brothers Karamazov and I love Notes from Underground, which I used with Jimmy Caan in The Gambler: “I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man, and I think my liver is diseased.” Once you’re a devotee of Dostoyevsky, you feel a kind of allegiance to his spirit. I literally feel that my life could not have been what it became without him, he was the only writer, I’m not so insane that I literally think it’s true, [but he’s the only writer] who ever addressed me directly and personally. I actually felt he wrote this to communicate it with me. He is speaking directly to me. And I will someday answer.  I regard my movies as a response to him. Not an argument. But an extension and a feeling that I am somehow carrying out his inspiration.

This was a very Dostoyevskian line: Mike Tyson saying “My insanity is my only sanity.”

That’s right. That is exactly what happened with me when I flipped out on LSD when I was 19 and a sophomore at Harvard. I lost my sanity for eight days. And that was my sanity. Those voices, that madness. And you can know it’s insane and at the same time say that’s all there is, everything else is just an illusion. And of course it’s tough to fit in the social universe with that attitude and that psychology. But what can you do, if that’s what you believe? Fortunately I gave up that belief…but I knew that I’d never get over it. I knew that if I ever became an artist that it would become the subject of my work so that even if I’m doing a movie about Mike Tyson, I’m really doing a movie about how madness lurks under the primary layer of consciousness and is ready to erupt at any time. And how the behavior of people who are living in some kind of close juxtaposition to madness  is always going to be potentially disruptive, subversive and radical because one is not subject to the normal restrictions and limitations that a quote un quote ‘sane person’ who has never been quote un quote ‘insane’ has had to deal with.

The rape charge and critics as lemmings...

First of all there’d be no reason on earth for him to spend 15 years lying to me about it… He’s always told me, not told me, it’s far too impassioned to use a verb like “told,” -- he has always insisted that it is a horrifying example of railroading and that he under no stretch of the word could possibly be thought of as having raped her…In fact, he said if 500 people were watching he said there isn’t one who could legitimately say that’s what happened. But when you put in the fact, as you’re just talking about, people don’t see anything but the outside information surrounding context and that’s what they believe.  Because it’s easier to do that. It’s easier to go through life always believing what the herd mentality leads you to believe because you’re always on safe ground. As long as I say what I am supposed to say, no one can nail me, because I’m just saying what everybody else is saying or everybody in my group is saying.  It’s like opinions of movies. There are film reviewers who are incapable of having an opinion till they have polled the group they are part of and make sure they are not going to be off base. It’s embarrassing to a point of being ugly and creepy.  The idea of that I would ever have an opinion because I thought I was supposed to have it is so nauseating to me that I would rather slit my throat.  You’ve packed it in as a human being… I cannot say what I think because I’m afraid of what people I want to be a part of might not like me and will be upset that I said it or think there’s something wrong with me? Fuck them and their ancestors.

The rape charge was always suspicious to me -- and what does convicted really mean anyway?

You start to look at it and say, this is fucking ridiculous. What do you mean, convicted as if it were a word we should be in awe of and the case is closed, discussion is over. Oh my god! It means he did it! No, it doesn’t. It means it was he was convicted. The reason I have this fresh in my mind is because many people ask me about it. Convicted rapist. Convicted, convicted. This is why Wittgenstein was my favorite philosopher because he was the first one when I read him when I was 15 who started making me think about language as a suspect. That language can be used to conceal, to deceive to mislead even uncousiously as much as it can be used to reveal. And that often, we use language as a tool of preventing meaning from coming through not as a way of creating meaning or truth.

Yes, writers say a lot and mean nothing, even when they’re being supposedly “out there” -- it’s often always just enough to please their group. 

Yes. I think this kind of group thinking, class thinking, is the bane of any kind of honest approach to life and I am always so antagonistic towards it wherever I see it, that I’d rather defend someone who is guilty then convict somebody who is whether he is innocent or not, the conviction is based on this kind of group thinking…where we all know this. Everybody knows that. Who’s everybody? Well, I and my friends.  It's always going back to the basics. This is why Dostoyevsky was the greatest novelist who ever lived, because he assumed nothing. He started with the notion, (well that’s not true he assumed the Russian Orthodox Church was perfect, but if you put aside that insanity) everything else he did started with a fresh perspective of human personality and the dynamic of human behavior and love and sex and madness and money. Nothing was assumed. Everything was original. 

Tyson felt like a tragic Greek figure

That’s the first thing he said [when] the movie ended. He said:  “It’s like a Greek Tragedy the only problem is I’m the subject.” And then he saw it for the third time, he came up to me and said:  “You know people always said they were scared of me and I always thought ‘what are they talking about? Why are they scared of me?’ and he said tonight I was watching the movie and I thought,’ I’m scared of that guy.’” One of the reasons Mike Tyson is a great “fictional” character, a great leading man in the movie that is about Mike Tyson where he’s playing himself is precisely that he’s a character who really only tells the truth, he gets through to you as who he is. There is no evasive misleading stuff…

That Holyfield fight and the ear…

You end up saying he should have had a third ear to bite. Because Holyfield is clearly intentionally head-butting him to the eye…Holyfield is a dirty fighter…and Mike snaps. And he goes crazy. And, as he says, I don’t regret having bitten him, I regret that I lost my discipline because that’s the one thing a fighter needs is his discipline, and I lost it. So I lost my faith in boxing and I lost my faith in myself. That was a real turning point for him, not because he bit his ear, or ears, but because he lost his sense of control. He went insane in the ring…you’re watching a person whose gone insane and that’s one of the wildest and weirdest moments in film history to me. He went back home drank some wine smoked some pot and fell asleep. You have this image of a billion people arguing and talking about this crazy event that happened and he’s sitting there alone.

And...one of the most moving moments of the picture, the famous: "I'll fuck you till you love me..." Yes, I really do get chills. Here's a clip of Toback discussing that moment with me:

Drive, She Said: Awesome Auto Insanity

The newest issue of Garage Magazine is out with my column, Drive, She Said reveling in the wonders of mental breakdowns in, yes, automobiles (or as Two-Lane James Taylor would say, auto-MO-beels). Thanks to my photographer, the great Estevan Oriol for his especially bad-ass picture through the windshield of my Torino and of course, Brian Bounds, Dan Stoner and Jesse James. Make sure to buy a copy at your local newsstand or at any 7-11 or Borders.

Here's a sample...

Ever lost your mind in a car? Like really lost your head, a la The Bad and the Beautiful Lana Turner sobbing hysterically? Or a crazed, fashion-Diana Ross-death-obsessed Anthony Perkins in Mahogany? Or, love of my life, Warren Oates' bloody brilliant nervous breakdown in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (in addition to, as I have discussed innumerable times, Two-Lane Blacktop)?  

I have. Which turned me towards (of course) movies. Since driving can feel so cinematic in real life, it's no surprise that the invented world of movies often express, explicate and exalt motor-psycho moments so perfectly. Here's just one example, one of my favorite sports pictures, one of Burt Reynolds greatest and a perfect, gritty Robert Aldrich movie  -- The Longest Yard.

Robert Aldrich’s The Longest Yard contains one of cinema’s greatest opening sequences of supreme speed demon self destruction. Here’s how it goes: Washed up pro football player Paul "Wrecking" Crewe (Burt Reynolds) who was banished from the sport for point shaving, staggers out of bed with a woman who's clearly (and very loudly) keeping him. As Crewe reaches for a drink, she storms out of the bedroom hollering at him for being a loser, how she paid for his new teeth -- essentially emasculating ol’ Burt (lady, don't do that). In a move that would never, ever happen in a film today, Crewe shoves her, and he shoves her hard, with the rage and bitterness of a man who's ego has been bruised one too many times. And then...he jumps into her fancy Citroen/Maserati SM.

Oh, this is so great. Speeding down the street, with drink in hand and Lynyrd Skynyrd tune blaring (no less -- anyone with a soul knows you can't drive slowly to Skynrd) and cops are in pursuit, Burt peels it. But does he care? Nope. So much so, that when he finally stops the madness, he doesn’t turn himself in; he simply kicks the car into a watery grave. But that's just the half of it. Waltzing into a bar for more drinks -- he then casually insults the dispatched officers (to the delight of both the bartender and the cop escaping his barbs) and finally, slugs the fuzz. A wonderfully hilarious, transgressive scene with Reynolds at the top of his dangerous cinematic charms, all this happens before the opening credits come to an end. God, the '70s could be so fucking great.

Please pick up the magazine to read my entire ode to auto-insanity. For now, here's Burt blazing.

Bloody Beautiful Ballard: Crash

With the passing of the great J.G. Ballard, I'm returning to my favorite adaptation of his work, David Cronenberg's auto-erotic Crash.

"Crash is an autobiographical novel in the sense that it is about my inner life, my imaginative life. It is true to that interior life, not the life I have actually lived."

--J.G. Ballard

A survived car accident can be one of the most exciting, disturbing and hallucinatory events in a person's life, and not simply because of life endangerment and pain. Time is sped up, then suspended; physical and mental sensations are heightened, blurring reality. Life feels strangely, in the moment but dazzlingly surreal. And yet, a car accident is such a common occurrence that when we drive by one we frequently do so with a titillated, detached interest.

Inside cars, those speeding microcosmic shelters, we see distinct personalities -- aggressive, meek, and distracted -- the potential of which Godard envisioned in his maddeningly extraordinary car wreck loop Week End. To enter these personal realms, we act in mildly subversive ways -- honking at a trucker, making an enraged cutoff, flirting on the freeway. Arranging this entry erotically so as to combine man with machine with sex is less familiar. But perversions often rear up in mundane environments, especially ones surrounded by seat belts, door locks and steel.

David Cronenberg, the auteur known for turning "safe" environments (apartment complexes, hospitals, the gynecologist) into terrifying, erotic and reality shaking locales, penetrated the world of the automobile and stretches its "normalcy" tenfold. Adapted from J.G. Ballard's brilliant novel, Crash is a rare picture with unconventional plotting. Cronenberg constructs the exposition, action and conclusion (as well as its subtext) through sex scenes, scenes that open and flower -- or, depending on your viewpoint; grow increasingly perverse -- throughout the film's rather short running time.

James Spader plays TV-commercial producer James Ballard, who is introduced to the auto-erotic world of the peculiar scientist Vaughan (Elias Koteas) by Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) a woman he meets via a near-fatal car accident, and with whom he first experiences the automobile's turn on potential. James, his wife Catherine (the strikingly icy Deborah Kara Unger) and Remington join Vaughan and his subculture of dazed crash survivors, including Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), a walking Helmut Newton-esque fetish doll of scars, leg braces and support suits (she is, in her own way, a glorious vision). They swap partners not only to satisfy their craving for dangerous, pulse-quickening sex, but also for an exploration of what J.G. Ballard calls "psyhic fulfillment."

From its opening shot -- Catherine laying her breast on the cold wing of an airplane -- Crash immediately expresses its alignment of technology and the human body, a physical relationship that occurs daily, though we don't often notice it. Vaughan leads James and Catherine to a sexual awakening with their mechanical connections, infusing their human relationship with the charge its lost through deadened senses and alienation. There are negative ramifications to these people's sometimes repulsive acts, but there is also a broadened knowledge of the world around them and the creation of a strange beauty through their meticulously visual orchestrations.

Like the conventional contact between two cars, the movie's sex is rarely face-to-face, revealing the couple's disconnections, but also the idea that they're stretching toward something. As the picture unfolds, James' desire builds into perversion yet somehow also becomes more personal: After Catherine's rough coupling with Vaughan in a car wash (the scene's commingling of cleaning fluids, sperm, car seats and human skin is the movie's best visualization of J.G. Ballard's language), James kisses her bruises with a tenderness previously unexpressed. At this moment, when we see that the couple is truly in love, we grapple with both the benefit of their experience and its implications; questions that we cannot immediately answer bubble to the surface.

There were obvious questions that came to me: Is Crash a cautionary tale about people so numbed by the modern world that they must seek excitement in dangerous measures? Is it commenting on our dissatisfied consumer society? Is it simply a turn-on? I think the answers are yes and no. Though the novel's relentless descriptions of bodily fluids and organs coalescing with twisted steel ("his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered forever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine") are rendered less graphic by Cronenberg, J.G. Ballard's vision of the "liberation of human and machine libido" remains potently intact. In both novel and film form, Crash takes a non-moral and non-celebratory approach to its subject matter, creating an alternative perception of the physical world that is as beautiful as its is horrific. And that amalgamation is, unlike many movies and true to Cronenberg, disturbingly, unnervingly sexy -- enough to make you check yourself. Or at least check yourself in the rear-view mirror.

Staunch Characters: Grey Gardens

One of my favorite documentaries of all time is now a feature film: Grey Gardens, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore (airing April 18 on HBO). I've been worried, but intrigued by this concept, but if it fails, there's of course, always the original.  Nothing compares to the real deal Beales. With that, remember to watch the documentary that started it all.

Originally released in 1975, Grey Gardens is an extraordinary, still-relevant and influential work of cinéma vérité by documentary auteurs Albert and David Maysles. The brothers worked together in the documentary genre--or "direct cinema," as they preferred to call it--from 1957 until David's death in 1987; their previous films include Salesman (1969), the heartbreaking precursor to Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, and Gimme Shelter (1970), the Rolling Stones' dark antidote (if antidote is the correct word) to Woodstock. Though controversial for their earlier work (a man is stabbed to death by a Hells Angel in Gimme Shelter), they received their most damning criticism for Grey Gardens. Accused of both voyeurism and tabloid-style exploitation of aging women, the brothers pushed the limits of vérité to a bizarre yet recognizably human level. By revealing the intimate power struggle between an artistic mother and her flamboyant daughter, the filmmakers created an unflinching portrait of disturbing power, heightened by the viewer's flinching recognition: Almost everyone has a family, and almost no one's is functional.

But there is an odd, old world beauty in this dysfunction, something that attracts viewers like myself time and time again. I've lost count as to how many times I've watched this film since acquiring a screener years back and every-time I turn it on, I'm riveted by women who have now become like documentary friends. In spite of and honestly, because of their problems, I love them. And If you're a fan, it's nearly impossible to not love these very non-grey subjects, Edith and Edie Beale, daughters of American aristocracy, aunt and cousin to Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, and exotic birds of a paradise lost--two real-life Daisy Buchanan's gone Baby Jane Hudson.

The movie loosely tells the tale of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter "Little Edie" (who died in 2002), a pair of misfits who lived for decades at Grey Gardens in East Hampton, Long Island. Beginning with newspaper headlines screaming about the estate's unsanitary condition and its condemnation by the Suffolk County Health Department (The New York Post stated that the two were "living in a garbage-ridden, filthy 28-room house with 8 cats, fleas, cobwebs and no running water"), the movie indulges the viewer with the offbeat and spellbinding lives of mother and daughter Beale.

At the helm is Little Edie, who, in her independent, alluring, chatty and creative way, leads the filmmakers through the disordered, spoiled and tangled corridors of their house and minds. Dressed in an assortment of daring ensembles ranging from a bathing suit worn with fishnet stockings and white high heels to towels, curtains and tablecloths (usually topped by an heirloom brooch), Edie is never without a turban and a dramatic gesture, look or utterance. Once a ravishing beauty--truly she was, like a blue-blood Marilyn Monroe--with a sharp wit, Edie mysteriously left a promising career as a dancer, model and actress to live with her aging mother. Despite her insistence that she is "losing her figure," she is still attractive, regardless of the camera's unflattering angles.

The same holds true for Big Edie, who in her youth looked much like Uma Thurman. The sister of "Black Jack" Bouvier (Jackie's father) and former wife of Wall Street lawyer Phelan Beale, Big Edie was the black sheep. Once at Grey Gardens, she was free to pursue the pastimes that brought her great joy and a bohemian reputation: singing, playing the piano and hanging out with her artistic, mostly male friends. Less eager to be filmed than her dramatic daughter, she is all at once a shrew, a formidable intellect and an artist who appears enraptured when she sings in a trembly 79-year-old voice.

Both women's distinct personalities fill the picture with a sublime mixture of looniness, camp and genuine intelligence. These women may hermit themselves in their estate, resting on dirty twin beds while listening to Norman Vincent Peale's radio exaltations of  "positive thinking," but they are in their own Miss Havisham way -- independent--even if relying on one another so much. Though the Maysles refrain from using standard techniques of documentary narration, the mother-and-daughter interaction itself illustrates the Beales' simultaneously tumultuous and stagnant life. The two women live in aristocratic squalor, eating liver pâté, ice cream and crackers; singing, dancing and bickering in their bedroom; and feeding Wonder Bread and Cat Chow to the raccoons living in their attic. And they are frequently witty--enough so that much of their banter would do Tennessee Williams proud.

Big Edie, having lived alone for 30 years, considers herself an independent spirit: "I had my cake, loved it, masticated it, chewed it and had everything I wanted." When Little Edie accuses her mother of being anti-Catholic, Big Edie exclaims: "What the hell, I worship the Catholic church!" And when a cat is spied crouching next to a beautiful old painting of Big Edie, she says amused: "Oh look, the cat's going to the bathroom on my portrait...I'm glad someone's doing something he wanted to do."As hilarious as much of the women's rapport is, it is also tinged by a bitter, sometimes wistful pain. "I missed out on everything," moans Little Edie. "I was stuck here." Laughing, her mother says, "You're never gonna get out of here."

Though their connection is certainly entertaining, it also a potent, poignant example of  a love-hate relationship built on fear, ferociousness and a shared desire to really, remove themselves from the harsh world. And who can blame them? The Maysles brothers capture their bond expertly, and the viewer cannot turn away. Like many great dramas, it's a magnification of of our own strained bonds, it speaks to those of us who have chosen a less traditional path in life and it's strangely comforting--these gals may be old but they're certainly not over. And they're anything but boring.

Is the film cruel or simply truthful? Both the Maysles and the Beales thought the latter, and both "staunch characters" staunchly defended the film. Those who leave this film thinking of the Beales as mere freaks are missing Grey Gardens' major questions: What is healthy? What is wealth and breeding? What is normal? What kind of life should you lead? And is there a type of beauty in veering off course? At the end of Grey Gardens one may echo Little Edie misquoting Robert Frost: "Two roads converged in yellow wood. Pondering one, I took the other... Isn't that beautiful?"

I love Edie so...

God's Lonely (Funny) Man: Observe and Report

In 1980, Robert Kolker published his influential work of film criticism, A Cinema of Loneliness, a longstanding bible for film students who were fascinated by the grittiness and artistry of '70s cinema and by the subsequent changes that happened to the pictures some of us really grew up with: the blockbusters and comedies of the '80s.

I remember staring at the front cover of my red paperback edition. It featured Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle, head downcast, his confused, rage-filled, ticking time-bomb character tightly wound with hands stuffed in pockets, his precise, military fit frame braving the dirty, sleazy, mean streets of New York. He was frightening, but oddly appealing. This was alienation. This was isolation. This was "God's lonely man." But for younger viewers, this was a distant memory. Not only in the movies, but also in the real world. Though this may sound like a strange question (and not a query one should summon): Where had all the Travis Bickles gone?

Quick answer? The shopping mall.

And if you get behind director writer Jody Hill's subversive, hilarious, weirdly poignant and almost horrifyingly timely Observe and Report, you'll see Travis, not only as a power-hungry security guard in the form of a schlubbier Seth Rogen, but also as a regular Joe consumer. He might be traversing the food court or staring at the ice skaters in the center rink or wondering if he can afford a flat-screen TV while making his mortgage payment, but he's there, facing down all of that cheaply made fast food, recycled air and overpriced merchandise. He's killing time and, to become even more of a downer here, he's killing his soul. Yes, he's killing his soul at...Cinnabon. It's funny and yet it's not. It's also, so far, the best movie of the year.

Such is the power of Observe and Report, a movie that tips its hat to movies like Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, but remains an animal all its own. Hill's study of a delusional, deranged head of mall security could only exist now. And, as funny as it is, it's going to get to people who are feeling faceless, disenfranchised and empty. With all of cinema's syrupy bromances, mean, shock humor comedies, and Judd Apatow life lessons to either catch an easy, gross-out laugh or lift one's spirit, emboldening one to finally grow up, Observe and Report reveals how complicated this really is.

But again, I repeat, Observe and Report is a comedy. I think...

Seth Rogen, in his greatest, most daring performance to date, plays Ronnie Barnhardt, an overbearing and delusional head of security at Forest Ridge Mall. He's all bluster, a true toughie and occasional racist (occasional?), but also a bully who's not-so-secretly lonely and most definitely fucked up. Like many a misfit, he still lives at home, in this case with his sweet but severely alcoholic mother (Celia Weston), a woman who hilariously passes out on the floor only to be, in a moment of almost shocking tenderness, blanketed by her loving, burly son. Harboring an obvious crush on the mall hottie, a blond, bosomy makeup-counter sales clerk (Anna Faris), he patrols the grounds like a mini-fascist, with all of the other guards under his well-respected command. But they seem to be the only people who respect him.

Enter the perfect perpetrator, a flasher who shows his goods to screaming ladies in the parking lot and, in a braver, more disgustingly hilarious move, directly inside the mall. Ronnie is obsessed with catching this guy, and understandably so (in real life, flashers aren't as funny and innocent as they seem and are usually one step away from serious sexual predator), but to the point of ridiculous outrage. After the mall is robbed, a real police officer comes on the scene: the craggily handsome, hard-boiled Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta), who would like to be anywhere but that mall, especially with Ronnie hovering. He's dragged into the flasher situation, and, thereby, in Ronnie's eyes, oversteps his jurisdiction. This is his case, and no way is Harrison going to take the glory, no matter how little Harrison actually cares.

Through the presence of Harrison we learn what Ronnie really aspires to be: a cop. And his attempts to become one are both amusing and pathetic. With shades of serial killer intensity (how many serial killers want to be security guards or cops?), Ronnie goes through training with an almost admirable determination and handles a particularly dangerous situation involving violent drug offenders (which features a terrific cameo by Hill muse Danny McBride) with hysterically violent efficiency. The scene is weirdly inspiring -- and you realize how much you’re rooting for this demented man. And, he really could be a cop. Only he's nuts. This is his greatest tragedy, which, in Hill's transgressive, intelligent hands, is surprisingly crushing. How we grow to like this character is the picture's clever trick, and thanks to Rogen's potent performance and Hill's powerful dose of pitch black humor dusted with glimmers of humanity, we really do care. No matter how his date with Faris ends up (I won't reveal that here).

However, there are those who will hate this movie. Hate it. But, good. People are really talking/arguing/dissecting Hill’s picture – it’s clearly affecting people.

While driving past the movie’s posters and spying Rogen's now ubiquitous mug hogging the frame, I can't help but think of what the more unsuspecting viewer (not movie critic) who stumbles into this studio comedy will think. Without reading a review or even watching a preview (which reveals some of the picture's darkness, though not much), if such a viewer believes he or she is getting another generic Paul Blart: Mall Cop or an Apatow-infused Rogen charmer, they're in for quite a shock. There's no family friendly moment, there's no obvious redemption leading to a healing psychological breakthrough, there's no supportive friend like...Paul Rudd (some of us wish we had a Paul Rudd in our life). Instead there's Michael Pena offering brotherly love by aiming at innocent bystanders and shooting up smack in the bathroom. I can't remember the last time I saw heroin in a mainstream comedy (if ever), and I never realized I needed to see it until now. It's freakishly funny while strangely realistic and familiar. Amidst laughing, I felt an odd relief from this sick moment. I mean, if there's ever a place where one needs to self-medicate, it's at the soul-sucking mall. (I wonder what Robert Kolker would have to say about that).

Which makes this movie all the more shocking than, say, (and I admire the following examples) that junkie epic Trainspotting, and a lot more subversive than anything Michael Haneke hatches up. Because Observe and Report isn't playing at your local art house. No, it's playing right in the belly of the beast: at the mall.

Read my interview with Jody Hill here.