_Thursday_ no stars (out of ****)
In a recent article for the _Chicago_Sun-Times_, Roger Ebert commented, "It's pretty hard to offend me, but a film named _Thursday_ crossed the line at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this month. Watching it, I felt outrage. I saw a movie so reprehensible I couldn't rationalize it using the standard critical language about style, genre or irony. The people associated with it should be ashamed of themselves."
I echo Ebert's sentiments, but from a different angle. There is a lot of violence, sex, and various other forms of bad behavior on display in first time writer-director Skip Woods's low-budget thriller. But the graphic nature of _Thursday_ is not what upset me; it was the content behind the mayhem--or, rather, the lack thereof. There's absolutely no substance to Woods's script beyond the setup: a "reformed" ex-drug dealer (Thomas Jane) who has his quiet Houston household violently thrown upside down after his still-in-the-biz ex-partner (Aaron Eckhart, who should have known better) arrives for a stay. What follows are random, plotless acts of violence and nastiness, such as various bloody shooting deaths; grisly body disposals; and, most notoriously, an Amazonian femme fatale (Paulina Porizkova) wearing a jacket reading "CUNT" who openly masturbates and later rapes the main character. This criticism may sound hypocritical from someone who completely bought into the sick sensibility of _Very_Bad_Things_, but there writer-director Peter Berg had an actual story to work with, and the borderline offensive shocks naturally emerged from that narrative. Woods, on the other hand, hails from the school of film that believes that shock value in and of itself equals hipness. In actuality, it only equates to pathetic desperation.
Michael Dequina
mrbrown@iname.com | michael_jordan@geocities.com
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