Outside Counsel

Every night, after dinner, we have the same conversation: "Wanna watch a movie?" "Okay, what do you feel like watching?" "Something good." "Something from the '40's or ''50's?" "No." So then A. picks, and it can be a somewhat haphazard process. The other night she found a listing about two brothers in a small Southern town who solved a mystery. The name was familiar to me, but I couldn't recall anything about it, so we took a flyer. The name of the movie was The Paperboy, and the reason I couldn't recall anything about it was that last year, when it was released, the big noise was about Nichole Kidman's performance. I have a rule about movies with Nichole Kidman: I don't watch them. (I used to have a rule about Matthew McConaughey, but I'm coming around with him.) The buzz was about the scene when Kidman urinates on Zak Efron, but there are other highlights. Suffice to say that although A.'s description made it sound like it might be a sort of Scooby-Doo or Hardy Boys romp, it turned out to be something quite different. Some of it was kind of good. McConaughey was mostly very good, and John Cusack, who I pretty much always like, showed considerable range. Kidman-- well, the plot called for her to rebuff the Efron character's advances because of their age disparity, but there really didn't look like there was one. She looked slutty, sure-- that was kind of the point-- but she didn't look to be all that much older than Zack Efron, and could have easily been playing someone who was, maybe, a senior when he was a freshman, and now they are both out of school, so who cares? She is 46 years old, Nichole Kidman, which makes her twenty years older than Efron - pretty much the exact age disparity as in the movie. What I'm saying, I guess, is that Nichole Kidman doesn't play her actual age. That's nice for her, but it created suspension of disbelief issues for me.

The Village Voice has fired everyone I ever cared about there, and is dead to me now, but Michael Musto's review captures it nicely:

"The Paperboy--the Lee Daniels-directed tale of Southern trash investigating yet more trash--certainly seems to have all the elements:
Nicole Kidman as an overripe sexual Barbie doll
The infamous urination scene. (Kindly let me hold it in and not describe that one more time. It's leaked out everywhere else, so just go there, OK?)
Zac Efron writhing around in his extremely tighty tighties. A lot.
Macy Gray as the maid who jokes with Zac about masturbation issues.
And a big star as a gay who gets hog-tied.
On paper, it sounds like the ultimate good trash film--even beyond the Beyond--and totally up my dark alley.
Then why did I find it so damned dull?"

I don't know if dull  is exactly the right word: I think I'd go with incoherent. At the end of it I couldn't really tell what the point was supposed to be. Maybe it is one of those Quentin Compson things: You have to be from there.