Film Illiterate, wherein the proprietor records movies seen, and sporadic progress through assorted lists of the "best". Originally started after regretfully renting something forgettable for the third time. I've forgotten what, but never again! A tedious endeavour since 2005. Hello. 🙂
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I read a review describing The Salton Sea as "serpentine", which I think is true: partly because of the plot twists, which reading I imagine the reviewer intended, but moreso because it's langorous, cold-blooded, and just generally unpleasant.
Danny Parker (Val Kilmer) is a trumpet-playing tweaker -- a methamphetamine addict -- and it's at a tweaker party that the story starts. They're out of gack][1], and someone needs to get more. The introduction is redolent of [Trainspotting, albeit without the charm, but it's remarkably positive: the focus is on the sense of community among addicts, not the ravages of abuse; and when driven to crime, they serve as comic relief. Particularly notable in this regard is Kujo's heist, one of the funniest parts of the film.
But the addicts are only a sideline; The Salton Sea is more interested in the supply side of the drug trade. The quest for more meth leads Danny and his pal Jimmy (Peter Sarsgaard) to the psychotic Bobby Ocean (Glenn Plummer), perhaps the only criminal in Hollywood history ever to favour a harpoon gun. He's colourful, even surreal, and sets the tone for the rest of the film. (Later, for example, we meet Pooh-Bear (Vincent D'Onofrio), a dangerously crazy dealer with no nose and a rabid pet badger.)
Well, he sets the tone for half of the movie. The tone for the other half was already set, way back during the credits, with Danny's trumpet solo -- for me, at least, eerily reminiscent of Mulholland Drive. It's cold, melancholic, deadly serious. (And, I must admit, with an unfortunate predilection for pompous voiceovers.)
This contrast is a problem. There are flashes of humour, Lock Stock-style, but they're few and far between; they only serve to make the serious interludes seem self-important and pretentious. But worst of all, they're just too strange. Bobby is bizarre, Pooh-Bear worse; suspending disbelief far enough to accept their existence requires such a dislocation from normality that nothing less shocking could possibly come as a surprise.
It wasn't until reading that particular review that I even recognized the plot twists for what they were, actually. It was only on reflection that I even realized many of the plot developments had been quite unexpected: unexpected, but certainly not shocking, nor even surprising. I was expecting strangeness and misdirection, but found it only in small quantities, evenly spaced. Such mild dosages didn't even register.
It's got everything you could want from a great movie: larger-than-life personalities, convoluted plotting, carefully constructed misdirection, interesting Tarantino-inpsired shots, "deep" questions about identity. Kilmer's performance was solid and understated; D'Onofrio was as convincing as it's possible to be with such a character.
It's really quite remarkable that so many different elements could be mixed together and add up to absolutely nothing.