INSOMNIA (2002)

"Don't lose your way."

Crooked Los Angeles homicide detective Al Pacino and his partner are called to the remote fishing village of Nightmute, Alaska to investigate the murder of a local teenager.  Right from the very beginning, Pacino’s character seems unstable, but then when stress and the town’s perpetual summer daylight cause him to not be able to sleep (I guess, they haven’t heard of blackout curtains yet in Nightmute), Pacino starts stumbling around like the Drunk Stork in the Looney Tunes cartoons.  “Congratu…congr…congratulations. You’re a mother.”  Soon, Pacino’s sleepwalking existence turns into a nightmare when he shoots and kills his partner. D’oh!

INSOMNIA is a good film and definitely watchable.  Unfortunately, the emotional pace of the film is flat for pretty much the entire film.  Yeah, yeah there are a few moments of heightened interest (the fog scene, the dog corpse), but for the vast majority of the film we’re merely watching two despicable characters going around being turds.  Then again EBOLA SYNDROME is one of the most entertaining things ever filmed and it’s just a single dude running around like a total asshole for the entire movie, so what do I know?  I’m so goddamn heartbroken and confused and depressed that I cannot construct full thoughts.  I should lay off the serious movies for a few more months.  I thought I was ready.  I guess not.  It was sad, it was sad, it was sad.

Eh, whatever.  I enjoyed the film and always love watching Al Pacino chewing up scenery.  Steady pace, gorgeous locations, above average acting, one guy with an annoying mustache, a Pantera poster, a video store sign over a florist shop, ol’ girl from GINGER SNAPS, good lighting, nowhere even close to being as violent as I had expected, Twin Peaks vibes, SEVEN vibes, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS vibes.  Good movie, but it could have been much better.

Original - Insomnia (1997)

KISSED (1996)

“I’ve always been fascinated by death.”

Kiss me until my lips fall off.  Kiss me until I start to rot. Sandra (Molly Parker) likes dead things.  As a youth she enjoyed stripping down in the woods and dancing around with whatever she could get her creepy mitts on.  A dead bird, a dead chipmunk, an illegally aborted wookalar fetus, whatever.  But as The Good Book instructs us in 1 Corinthians 13:11-12: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”, so did Sandra when she became an adult…she stopped messing around with dead critters and started facefucking dead men.  “It’s a man, baby!” (Yes, I typed that out in an Austin Powers' voice.)

KISSED is a fun look back to the innocence of 1990’s Arthouse Cinema.  I remember watching the film back in ye olde 1996 and kinda being blown away by it.  (Remember: this was in the dark days before HBO’s Six Feet Under.)  Revisiting it now for this review, KISSED is still a good film, but it is way more simplistic than I remembered it being.  Still, simplistic or not, there isn’t a ton of tastefully filmed movies about the romance of necrophilia so you know you’re gonna watch it!

Quick pace, small cast of interesting characters that I wish had been fleshed out more (especially the dude who runs the funeral home), a surprisingly small amount of nudity, a predictable and unsatisfactory ending that left more questions than it answered (example: did the police read Matt’s notebook?), above average acting, interesting musical choices, ethereal lighting at times, cool vintage clothes, unique story that would have benefited from a longer runtime, only like two or three cars shown in the entire film...including a hearse during an extremely long car wash, not as much corpse sex as you would expect.

KISSED is an interesting film that is well worth watching. I just wish the budget had been higher and the script tighter.  Kiss me until kingdom come.  Forever, forever.