They Call Him Mister Lonely
Writer/director Harmony Korine (Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy) is not for everyone. But enough people in Seattle are for him that last night's 9:15 p.m. showing of latest film Mister Lonely had the little theater at the Northwest Film Forum completely packed, and now the film's run has been extended another week (through May 29th).
The plot: Diego Luna is a Dangerous-era Michael Jackson impersonator, the radiant-as-always Samantha Morton is a voluptuous Marilyn Monroe impersonator. They meet cute at a Parisian nursing home, and she invites him back to her castle in the Scottish highlands, where she lives in a community of other celebrity impersonators. Her husband's Charlie Chaplin (though occasionally he verges into Hitler territory), her daughter is Shirley Temple, and other members of the tribe include a foul-mouthed Abraham Lincoln, a drunk Pope John Paul II, Three (not-so-passable) Stooges, Madonna, Sammy Davis Jr., et al. Meanwhile, there's skydiving nuns in Panama with Father Werner Herzog. Of course. We couldn't see any common threads between the two storylines, but our astute companion noted that in both, the aspiration for characters to lose themselves (and/or seek salvation) in celebrity ultimately has untoward consequences. That analysis is tenuous at best, but it works.
The same could be said about the film as a whole. While Mister Lonely intentionally doesn't make much sense, and while there's at least one major miscue near the end (it involves eggs), the movie has its comic moments, as well as a few richly poetic images--care of cinematographer great Marcel Zyskind--that we got completely lost in. It's definitely original, and refreshingly unpredictable, but is there any there there? Or as our companion complained, "Any movie with Buckwheat on a pony talking about his sexual fetish for chicken breasts and nuns jumping out of planes on bicycles doing free-falling stunts shouldn't ever be boring." Well said, Silvie, well said.
Through Thursday, May 29th // 7 p.m., 9:15 p.m. // NWFF // 1515 12th Ave // $8.50 general, $5 members, half-price tix on Monday
