Product: Prime
Rating: 4.0
American Pie
I enjoyed this film and sat through the whole thing waiting to see how it turns out, so that puts it a step beyond most pictures, the kind I walk out on. That's not to say that PRIME isn't mindnumbingly predictable, because it's filled with chunky bits from other, older, better movies. And yet, the original part is so different that it stands out in a field of romantic competition. I see the movie as the story of Morris, a 23 year old prodigy who suffers from a sexual tragedy involving not being able to get a second date from any woman he goes out with. A bizarre, Kraft-Ebing compulsion then demands that he seeks vengeance by throwing a pie in their faces. I suppose it's the spectacle of their beautiful faces just peering in anguish through a cloud of fluffy meringue that must turn Morris on, perhaps a sublimated form of the so-called "money shot" X rated movies depend on. In any case, PRIME follows Morris around on expeditions related to his pie fetish, shopping with a friend (Bryan Greenberg as "David," the painter of modern life) at a light-filled bakery and inquiring of the shopgirl if the pie was baked fresh today.I wonder if that was to assuage the feelings of the audience, to make sure we knew that no females were hurt during the making of the film, and perhaps to indicare that Morris actually doesn't want to injury these girls permanently (writer director Ben Younger, who also made the superior BOILER ROOM years back, indicates that Morris uses only cream pies in these attacks). For a pecan pie or something like that would do quite a bit of damage. Yet the film remains a cold, clinical picture of a man out of control, with sociopathic dimensions, and as such it would make a good double bill with HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, or perhaps Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM.The accoutrements of his crime slide by the other characters in the movie, although Uma Thurman (as fashion photographer Rafi) is justifiably upset when she finds Morrie in her closet, rendering her pet cat unconscious with a bottle of beer). Most of the time, they're just thinking, "Pie throwing, a staple of American comedies since Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops," so something in our movie going experience has hot-wired the human body to associate a pie in the face with laughter, and Younger wants to peel back those associations and reveal pie throwing as the hate crime it is.SPOILER WARNING: At the end of the film, Morris gets his comeuppance, and the sight of his handsome, well, goofy face ringed with cream gleams with neo-expressionist horror, like the skinned face in Michele Soavi's Italian horror film LA SETTA.