Salon.com > The Killer Inside Me

“The Trip”: Steve Coogan’s sly, hilarious road movie

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:01:00 +0000

Steve Coogan is the one-man apotheosis of British comedy's translation problem. A household name in the United Kingdom, thanks largely to his TV persona as the intolerably dense and pompous chat-show host Alan Partridge, Coogan could most likely stroll through any American shopping mall in total anonymity (unless he encountered the Monty Python buffs gathered at the comics store). Sure, he played Octavius in the "Night at the Museum" comedies and Hades, god of the underworld, in "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" -- but therein lies the problem, or one of them anyway. His biggest role in an American film, I believe, has been as the muumuu-wearing drama teacher in "Hamlet 2," an expensive and unfunny flop that everyone involved is eager to forget.

“The Killer Inside Me”: Much ado about misogyny

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:01:00 +0000

As was already clear when I wrote about the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of "The Killer Inside Me" two months ago, Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's legendary 1950s crime novel is likely to provoke a strong, and strongly divided, response. "The Killer Inside Me" tells the story of Lou Ford (played by Casey Affleck), who presents as an all-American deputy sheriff in small-town Texas but gradually slides into psychotic, misogynistic violence.

Since Lou narrates the Thompson novel, and film is by its nature a more detached and objective medium than fiction, there are limits to how well Winterbottom and screenwriter John Curran can capture the book's eerie, haunting power, or Lou's willful lack of self-knowledge. But the novel's most notorious scene, in which Lou calmly pulls on a pair of black gloves and sets about beating his hooker girlfriend to death, all the while apologizing to her and telling her he loves her, is rendered in explosive and terrifying detail. It serves as a rupture in the film's narrative of reality, one almost as dramatic as the moment when the film appears to break in the projector during Bergman's "Persona."

Is “The Killer Inside Me” too misogynist?

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:06:00 +0000

Long before any civilians had actually seen it, Michael Winterbottom's film "The Killer Inside Me" -- adapted from Jim Thompson's legendary 1952 crime novel -- became a blogosphere target as a purported example of Hollywood's pornographic glorification of violence against women. After the movie's Sundance premiere in January, a female audience member assailed Winterbottom and the festival during the post-screening Q&A: "I don’t understand how Sundance could book this movie. How dare you? How dare Sundance?"

There were reports at the time that co-star Jessica Alba, who plays a prostitute who is literally beaten to a pulp by Casey Affleck's deputy-sheriff protagonist, had walked out of that Sundance screening in disgust. Alba later denied this, and on Tuesday night at the film's New York premiere in the Tribeca Film Festival, she and other cast members (including Kate Hudson, whose character suffers a similar fate) mounted an articulate defense of Winterbottom and his movie.