Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The Greatest (Single-Issue) Comic Book of All Time?






Top Five Love & Rockets Characters Who
Aren't Actually Maggie, Hopey or Luba


5. Venus
4. Izzy
3. Errata Stigmata
2. Penny Century
1. The Motherfucking Sea Hog






I couldn't for the life of me remember why I had put Agnes and His Brothers in my queue, but I did enjoy when I watched it. The funny thing is, the movie is very, very similar to American Beauty, right down to a specific scenes. Like, seriously, there's a scene where someone thinks they're watching one character perform fellatio on another, except there's a plant in the way and the other characters are really doing something else totally innocent. There's a spooky kid obsessed with his camcorder, there's a divorce precipitated by a frigid wife...

The thing is, despite the obvious filching, Agnes is a much better film. While American Beauty sort of skirts around controversial subject matter in that smarmy way that middlebrow American films do so well, Agnes - despite the superficial similarities - owes a lot more to Pedro Almodovar in terms of tone (and not simply because the movie features a post-op transsexual in a prominent role). There's veiled incest, bestiality and semi-public shitting. The movie's most sympathetic character is a peeping Tom with passive aggressive issues toward his father who only finds happiness by becoming an adult film star, to give you an idea. I don't even mind that they lifted the closing sequence almost wholesale from Adaptation - it was still an interesting movie that stuck with me for far longer than I expected.




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