1/10
Last Rites of director's film career hopefully.
10 October 2010
Warning: Spoilers
It cost me a dollar to rent this and I have to say it's the worst use I've ever put a dollar to. To think I could have put that as a down payment on a pack of gum or just turned Washington's head into a mushroom. But no, I had to rent the interminable Last Rites of Ransom Pride.

It begins with a voice-over telling us of Juliette's(Lizzy Kaplan)sad childhood and how she had to kill an evil general in his sleep. It's not a terribly long opening narration, and then we're hit with the oddly fonted subtitles telling us it's 11 years later, 11 years after she told us the voice-over or the actual events, we can only guess. By the way, the subtitles are very hard to read, which is unfortunate because they're used quite often.

Other than the little bit of back story we get, the characters aren't particularly deep. Lizzy Kaplan pretty much keeps one expression on her face for the entire flick and Dwight Yokam calls her whore a lot, but that might not have been in the script. Peter Dinklage does as well as he can with the material, but despite this contribution, his character is simply named "Dwarf" in the credits. Don't seem right.

A lot of what follows is intermittently plastered with instant replays of previous scenes and "artsy" shaky cam shots of animal skulls and birds that jerk like they're in a Tool video. These don't really add anything to the film and only serve to prolong the misery of watching it. It's not a terribly complicated story either, but Tiller sure takes the scenic route getting us there. It's like he's slowly winding a broken jack in the box. You want the weasel to pop, but you know it never will.

If you like westerns I wouldn't suggest seeing this, and if you don't like westerns, I still wouldn't.
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