Donnie Brasco, swaddled humbly, is low-qual’ excoriating, almost damning. I knee-jerk interpret Johnny Depp’s betrayal—its dismal thoughtlessness like a notional cultural precedent—to be an infantile abreaction, intended to goad Pacino’s small-home bosom and provoke dance around the immaculate pillars of Pacino’s perfected, low-fidelity Oedipal transparency (whose humour is so vast and derogative it is spousal), and in this infinitely recursive sense to be absolutely grotesque, un-egoically personal (in an immanent way), too much trembling and pernicious, too-damn-phenomenologically-immoral, to be anything but an odious lying semblance to upturned federal nostrils, whose holier snobbery normally lives a little.
Falling Down (1993)
Falling Down is severely unhealthy and macabre in a fizzy, plangent, vaporous way, but neither prissy nor linear, showing just how far the average job has managed to scry. Michael Douglas may as well have spent two hours visiting the barber and the costume cutter and party outfitters next door, the way his impassive time hugged the exit like mouldering curbside walnut. It is torqued, hypertonal, distempered, downright mystical, deteriorative and intrusive, like a divorce during a vacation. It is full of bad hocks and riddled psychosocial offshoots. It left me feeling like my very means were irate—like I had unknotted laces.