You want to watch something weird? Sure you do. How about something wrong? Admit it. All you want is wrong. How to sate your desires?
For starters, you could watch Quentin Dupieux’s notably wrong movie from 2012, Wrong, a very particularly weird and wrong movie with meticulous attention paid to its every detail. I don’t know if I liked Wrong. But I’m glad I saw it.
Taking a breather from such carefully rendered oddness, Dupieux made a quick follow-up to Wrong in 2013. It is called Wrong Cops. It is entirely weird and gernerally rather wrong, yet neither as weird nor wrong as Wrong. Profoundly weird wrongness takes time and effort to craft. Wrong Cops is a thrown-together affair. Considering that Dupieux’s first movie, Rubber, is about a killer tire, Wrong Cops is Dupieux at his most normal.
Sharing music with Mr. Manson
Wrong Cops is mostly about some wrong cops. They do the kinds of things wrong cops usually do in movies, like beat people up and steal and sell drugs. But they do it weirder.
The lead wrong cop is played by Mark Burnham, who also played a cop, presumably the same cop, in Wrong. He is deeply into his role. No one is better. It’s too bad Dupieux’s movies are so little seen. Burnham is the kind of actor people should be casting in much bigger roles.
Burnham is the cop who sells weed. He does so by forcing a Chinese grocer to catch rats in his warehouse, then stuffing those rats with the marijuana, and sealing them back up with duct tape. So, yeah. He sells people dead rats full of pot. He gets a little upset when people question his methods.
Weed in a rat
Another fellow finds a bag of cash buried in his backyard, in which he’s digging because of the cop who wants him to bury the half-dead man in his (the cop’s) trunk who he failed to completely kill when he accidentally shot him while trying to shoot the punk kid who didn’t like his music. The punk kid is played by Marilyn Manson.
Another cop plots to steal the bag of money by threatening to reveal to the newly rich guy’s young daughter the gay porno magazine in which he’s featured.
The half-dead guy, meanwhile, has an ear for music and helps the one-eyed cop with the giant lump on his head compose a new techno song.
And so on.
Cop with lump makes bad music
Eric Roberts, Ray Wise, and Grace Zabriskie turn up briefly, to no particular effect.
The final scene involves a very high cop and a deer and it’s my favorite scene in the movie because it is, for reasons I could never explain to you, wonderful.
I’m not saying Wrong Cops is a good movie, but it is a movie, and it is weird, and it is wrong. Maybe you should watch it.
Don’t look at it!
I loved Rubber and super-loved Wrong and thought Wrong Cops was just sort of a mess. I can’t even recall the deer scene?
It is without question a mess. It is barely a movie. The deer scene is less of a scene than it is simply the end of the movie. So, yeah, you might not recall it.
Meanwhile, his new movie, Reality, seems to be out there in various VOD sorts of ways. I suppose I’ll watch it.
cool. let me know what you think. although I’ll likely watch it either way. i think i like his stuff more than you do.
Did somebody say they liked Rubber? What the fuck is wrong with you? You people have Stockholm syndrome from only having Netflix. That movie is an annoying little piece of shit that never should have been greenlit. Of course, I only watched a few minutes before I quite rightly did something else, like watch a real movie. But I’m fucking right.
I’ll have to let the Evil Genius defend himself on that count. I also only watched part of Rubber before giving up. But his follow-up, Wrong, is something else…I’m still not sure what, but it might be good.
And last night I watched his latest movie, Reality. I’ll write it up soon in the hopes of further enraging you.
Your loss. Rubber is a deep-level spoof of Hollywood, as is Wrong, just in a different way. Yes: the villain is a tire. But it has as much personality as many leading actors. Which is the joke. On you.