Sunday, August 29, 2010

Postal

Postal is a film by German auteur/tax loophole exploiter Uwe Boll, who takes a lot of shit because he's an arrogant, deluded, loud-mouthed asshole who makes really terrible movies out of video games that nobody's ever heard of. This one's different, though, because it's supposed to be funny.

It's about this dude (Zack Ward, a.k.a. Scott Fargis from A Christmas Story) who lives in a trailer park and has a 400-pound wife who fucks everybody but him. He can't find a job, so him and his Uncle Dave (former Kid in the Hall Dave Foley and his naked penis) steal a truckload of Krotchy dolls (anthropomorphic cartoon cock-and-ballses) so they can sell them on eBay. Problem is, Osama was gonna do the same thing, only he was gonna load the dolls up with Bird Flu. The whole point of Postal is to try and be as offensive as possible to as many people as possible, but it's just so childish that it fails and ends up being kind of…I don't know if cute is the right word for a movie in which the hero headbutts a retarded kid for no reason, but there it is.

Case in point: The first scene shows the 9/11 terrorists haggling with Osama over the phone about how many virgins they're going to get in heaven. That's about the level of satire we're dealing with here. Boll (whose first name is pronounced "uva," not "yoowie," as I had hoped) even appears as a child-molesting, video game-hating Nazi version of himself who owns a theme park called Little Germany and pays for everything with gold teeth while bikini babes in Hitler mustaches dance around him.

The only point he seems to be making with any of these adolescent shock tactics is that politics and religion and stuff are, like, stupid. Still, the movie is a lot of fun because it's so colorful and eager to please. It's got the feel of one of those USA Up All Night flicks from the late eighties, the ones you catch halfway through and never find out the name of. I'd compare it to Sonny Boy or Parents or Nice Girls Don't Explode, real classics like that.

Also, it's got some great cameos, like Seymour Cassel and the dude who played the Big Lebowski as dirty old men (Best line: "When I get through with her, she'll look like she got hit by the mayonnaise truck!"), J.K. Simmons as a street preacher who says fuck the 9/11 victims, Verne Troyer as a version of himself who gets raped by a roomful of monkeys, and that yuppie alpha-male asshole from Hostel, here playing the yuppie alpha-male asshole from Postal.

This will very likely be Boll's best movie ever, and I suspect it will develop a small cult following. Certainly Boll himself believes that he's made a timeless masterpiece. As he says on the outrageously paranoid and self-important commentary track, "I have the courage. This movie is full of courage. This movie is not pussying out for nobody. This movie is insulting the people that have now the power, who can now destroy my career. They can now sue me. They can now kill me, like the fundamentalists. I give a shit about the fucking Mufti shit, and about the Muslims or whatever, or Muhammad, because I give a shit about the whole religious stuff." Seriously, fuck firemen. Uwe Boll is the real hero.

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