19. DISCHARGE: Hey hey, ho ho, that nasty ooze has got to go! *You see, the only truly great jokes are the ones that have to be over-explained, right? Check it out… In addition to being a less than flattering name for bodily fluid secretions, Discharge is also the name of a 1970’s/80’s minimalistic UK punk band with intense drone-like rhythms who sing short sharp protest songs, mostly about the fears and horrors of nuclear war and the fallout from it. Some have described their sound as a “grave-black aural acid assault.” How is that for information leakage? Haha. We suppose you could opt for a film about nuclear fallout, war, punk stuff, or just plain ol’ seepage of some sort.
I start a lot of Letterboxd lists. I’ve held back on making my “Movies where Nicole Kidman gets raw dogged” list because it feels silly, but really, no A-list actor is out there getting it on screen. Like after Eyes Wide Shut and her divorce from Tom Cruise, she’s been the least shy actress about intimacy on the big and small screen. Good for her. I think it should be celebrated. And man, in this movie, not only does she get hammered against a dryer by Lloyd Dobler, she ends up peeing all over Troy Bolton when he gets stung by a jellyfish.
Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.
The high-minded festival snobs at Cannes sat through Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy and practically lost their monocles. They booed, hissed and squawked like panicked hens, and the high-society film columnists rushed to declare it the single worst piece of celluloid ever slapped onto a reel.
There was no fifteen-minute standing ovation.
The Paperboy isn’t trying to be high art. It feels closer to the kind of movie that would play at drive-ins, except it has a budget of like 90 of those movies put together. It’s a sweat-drenched, grease-stained, utterly unhinged pulp-grotesque. It is trash and filth and man, I wish it had actors like Claudia Jennings, Rene Bond, Joe Don Baker, Shelley Winters, Royal Dano and James Mitchum in it, but here we are with people who — I’m going to use the same joke twice — got paid more for this one movie than John Saxon made in his entire career.
Summer of 1969. Lately, Florida. Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey) is a righteous reporter back home, trying to prove that Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack)—a gross, alligator-gutting lunatic on death row—didn’t actually murder a corrupt local sheriff. He’s joined by another reporter, Yardley (David Oyelowo), his little brother Jack (Zac Efron) and Charlotte Bless (Kidman), an over-painted, bleach-blonde Alabama sexpot who trades lust-crazed letters with death-row inmates and falls head-over-stiletto-heels for Cusack’s swamp-goblin character without ever having touched him. Macy Gray narrates the whole disaster as Anita, the family maid, delivering her lines like she’s trying to explain an acid trip to a traffic cop.
Let’s talk about Kidman some more. People like to talk about brave acting when an A-lister puts on a fake nose or loses twenty pounds for an Oscar-winning part. This is actual bravery. Kidman struts into prison visitor rooms in a neon-pink dress, legs crossed, giving off enough raw sexual static to blow out the soundboard. The prison scene between Kidman and Cusack—a telepathic, non-contact orgasmic encounter performed right in front of Efron and McConaughey—is so deeply, wildly uncomfortable that it would not feel out of place in a 70s Mandingo ripoff.
Kidman reportedly told her director, “I’m just a working girl, Lee. You’ve got to direct me.”
That’s all before Efron gets swarmed by jellyfish and Nicole Kidman kicks out a bunch of teenage girls by threatening them with violence, then strides over like a blonde sun goddess to urinate on his face to save his life. Daniels got cold feet in the editing room, but Kidman told him, “Lee, you made me pee on Zac Efron. If you don’t put it in the movie, you need to man up.” At least someone other than me made a watersports Letterboxd list.
In an era where every second movie released by a studio feels like it was sanitized by a corporate focus group and scrubbed clean for maximum global consumption, The Paperboy feels like a mess. A mess that Mariah Carey wrote and recorded a song titled “Mesmerized” for the film’s soundtrack. I wonder what she thought of this movie.
You can watch this on Tubi.
