If this had been Jane Malkovich, it would be demented

Rating: 1/10 (23 June 2015)

I saw the movie recently because it's a cult classic that I'd tried to see when I was young and couldn't stand it.
Age, I thought would have brought more tolerance. It did. I sat through the whole movie gnashing my teeth and wanting to rub all my paws together so I don't launch into the screen.
It's wrong at so many different levels that I'm not sure where to begin.
First the art house message we're supposed to get -- how at different times of our lives we're inhabited by or inhabit myriad different personas that the true "you" might only rarely, or never, emerge.
Yeah. It's true. Star Wars watchers have brains too. We get it. And still don't like it.
Because BJM insists on taking what many have hailed as the "creative" route to the message, but is in fact only a demented below the waist inability to draw lines.
***spoiler alert***
1. It has both Craig and Lotte Shwartz (Cusack and Diaz) in love with touch-me-not Catherine Keener (Maxine Lund). Which would be fine if it were not for the fact that both Schwartzes then repeatedly enter Malkovich's body solely to mate with now touch-me-please Keener.
Imagine Malkovich was Halle Berry. And try and find it funny. If people inside her were making her commit sexual acts that she wasn't in control of, you would essentially consider it rape. If there are ways to make that look funny, BJM didn't crack it.
2. At a more fundamental level, if the movie wanted to be different with Cusack's puppeteer being different from the one usually portrayed - - it failed. And he isn't.
Schwartz ends up being the same demented sad story of Criminal Minds and CSI who's taken his own metaphors (of man who pulls the strings and living in another man's skins) too seriously. The man who's locked his wife in a cage.
3. Finally, there isn't even a character to connect with though Mrs Schwartz could have been. However in the end you have her chasing and shooting at a very pregnant Keener for reasons one can't really fathom.
All in all, I think I'd seen my share of over-rated movies. But this has to be the worst of them all.