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Eagerly anticipating this week ... (15-24)
John Crowley's We Live in Time (2024)

6/12/2014

The Paperboy (2012) - Daniels' off-putting and interesting Florida-yarn huffs and puffs



+ Strangest Movie of the Year

The intense, curiosity-inspiring poster for Lee Daniels' The Paperboy


Jack is actually just a little brother and paperboy in a little Florida-paper, when a loony nymphomaniac shows up in town and wants to help the editorial staff to get a falsely accused man acquitted for murder.
Paperboy is a film that is thick with animosity, stupidity, sweat and vulgar scenes with sex, urine, blood etc. It is not exactly good understood as successful in the conventional sense, but it is a madly atypical and weird little thing, which all the characters seem to snuffle and grovel and mumble their way through, and which demands patience from its audience. - The characters aren't easy, smart or very sympathetic, but there is a zest behind the direction and in the performances, - as with John Cusack's (Being John Malkovich (1999)) heinous murderer, - which makes the film queerly fascinating nonetheless.
Zac Efron (Me and Orson Welles (2008)) again shows his depth and talent; e.g. in a moving scene with Macy Gray towards the ending in the God-forsaken swamp-environment.
Paperboy, a movie often called lurid, also features strange narration and sentimentality, (as well as, - yes, - that infamous scene of Nicole Kidman peeing all over Efron on a beach.)
This is American director Lee Daniels' (Precious (2009)) fourth film. It unfortunately flopped badly, showing that words like 'lurid' and 'strange' apparently hold people today away from a movie more so than they attract them, even from a film with major stars, (which I find weird.) 
Daniels returned to mainstream tribulation after this with the much straighter, if also much less interesting The Butler (2013).

Related posts:

2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED V]
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED IV]
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2012 in films - according to Film Excess 


Roughly edited trailer for The Paperboy

Budget: 12.5 mil. $
Box office: 2.4 mil. $
= Big flop 

What do you think of The Paperboy and Daniels' other films?

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