January Spawned a Monster

Hostel

Directed by Eli Roth

The Ringer

Directed by Barry Blaustein

Watch your back around anyone who likes Woody Allen's Match Point. By praising Allen's latest repetition of his pathological self-indulgence, they don't even realize they're promoting his usual middle-class covetousness. Fascination with Allen's routine murder scenariodisguised as Wasp-envyproves they'd willingly kill for the same class advantages. (Back in '89 when Allen first rehearsed the Match Point plot in Crimes and Misdemeanors, the L.A. Weekly critic Michael Ventura rationally mused, When an artist kills a woman, I want to know his relationship with his mother.) We've gone so far past such reasonable concerns that Match Point's posh misogyny is no longer a tragedy of manners. It's essentially in the same charnel house genre as the macabre thriller Hostel.

The title Hostel is wittier than any recent Woody wank-off, since it subtly implies hostile. Director Eli Roth has made a highly self-conscious homage to the extreme horror films of Takashi Miike, the childish fantasies of Peter Jackson and the fanboy mindlessness of Harry Knowles (all thanked during the end credits). He stockpiles the low-grade luridness that is those guys' specialty. That it dovetails Allen's hostile upscale hegemony is a sign of our decadent times. 

Roth follows two American students, Paxton and Josh (Jay Rodriguez and Derek Richardson) touring Europe, looking to get high and get laid, while Allen relocates his social-climbing malaise to London (the screening room audience gasped ecstatically when the killer-hero moved into a Thames-view penthouse). Paxton and Josh travel to a Slovakian youth hostel where lascivious girls deliver them to Elite Hunting, a vicious underground scam for wealthy patrons who pay to kill-and-torture unlucky tourists. This morbid anti-Americanism has something in common with the sexy venality that Scarlett Johansson personifies for Allen. (She touchingly embodies a striving actress' desperation until Allen kills off her pathoslong before Jonathan Rhys-Myers blows her away.) Both films pander to simple-minded malevolence, but only Hostel is upfront about it. Roth's Americans-abroad premise is an undisguised expression of political self-loathing. And yet the excessive violence and blood flow are meant to be funnyan Abu Grahib comedy. 

Fans of Match Point should confess that they are indifferent to brutality, having sunk to the same level as extreme-horror punks. Surely those scandalous Abu Grahib photos can be viewed with the same delectation as stills from Hostel and Johansson's various fuck-me postures. This connection is more significant than Paxton rescuing a tortured Japanese girl, then realizing he has to snip-off her eyeball. It references Bunuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou, but its evocation of youthful transgression shouts Abu Grahib. Teen moviegoers (future draftees) are being trained to salivate over violence. Roth even includes a roving gang of children who kill for bubbleguma winking acknowledgement of his target audience. Bet they'd love to live in Thames-side penthouses when they grow up. 

Life doesn't mean anything in most recent moviesno wonder critics were bored by Munich. Even Allen's sophisticated audience is inured to such basics as emotion, soul, empathy. Hostel features vomit as ejaculate, pus as blood and butchery as fun. As with Allen, it's just means to an end, a disavowal of humanism for the pleasure of killing. These movies can't be blamed on Donald Rumsfeld.

Jimmy, a track star of the Special Olympics, smiles a TV-commercial grin. Handsome brown skin, bright teeth and Wheaties-box confidence, he arrives at a heat in his limousine, followed by a retinue of agents and handlers, sporting bling and a trophy white girl on his arm. He's like a stereotypical rap starwith a difference. An admirer enthuses, That guy's the Deion Sanders of retards! But Jimmy himself (played by Leonard Flowers) flashes a cannier message to the camera: I'm just like you.

That's the beauty of The Ringer, the comedy produced by the Farrelly Brothers and directed by Barry Blaustein that Fox snuck into theaters just before Christmas, without critics' screenings. Fear that the film's subject might cause media backlash underestimates the brilliance that the Farrellys have already demonstrated in movies from There's Something About Mary to Stuck on You, where handicapped people were treated comically yet always humanely.

With the Farrellys' satirical warmth, they don't need condescension to pass for respect. Their great advance is to view handicapped people with such clarity that when a normal or pretty person comes on screen, one suddenly sees oddityredefining nature as mere luck. Beauty then becomes much more significant as something you do, not something you are. This idea isn't new; it was powerfully presented when Peter Bogdanovich juxtaposed teenage Rocky Dennis' disfigured face next to a pretty-boy blond classmate in Mask. But the Farrellys' radical humanist philosophy is so cheerful that, despite what Entertainment Weekly says about Brokeback Mountain, The Ringer is the revolutionary film of the moment. 

Johnny Knoxville's pose as Jeffy Dahmor, a developmentally disabled track-and-field competitor, makes a funny, artistic response to Jackass, the TV show where Knoxville and his buddies relentlessly proved that fraternity-hazing slapstick was itself a form of retardation. Jeffy's attempt to fix the Special Olympics is a more dumb than cruel hoax. The Ringer follows the usual formula of cross-dressing comediesincluding Knoxville's attraction to a sweet female official (Katherine Heigl)but without sanctimoniously preaching tolerance. It's about able-bodied Knoxville getting past his intimacy issues and learning right from wrong. The moral lessons hidden in the homo-erotic antics of Jackass are exemplified by the cast of handicapped performers who show themselves smart, expressive and temperamental, even encouraging Knoxville to teach the arrogant Jimmy a lesson. They parade the Olympic site in brotherly unison to Elmer Bernstein's theme from The Magnificent Seven, although Morrissey's rousing/affectionate November Spawned a Monster would be equally appropriate.

But imagine the stars of Tod Browning's Freaks seen as not vengeful or malevolent. Jed Ress as Glen and Bill Chote as Thomas are no less human than the guys in Wayne's World or Napoleon Dynamite. Their guilelessness and innocence elicits the purest laughter; seeing their puzzlement about the world and society is almost like watching the birth of vaudeville shtick (Did you know Christ was a Jew?) and the dawning of reason. When Jeffy has second thoughts about his scam, Thomas shrewdly advises: There's just good people and bad people. There are no gray areas. 

The Ringer has been ignored by tasteful snobs, but its blunt humor and resounding wisdom subvert the pieties of recent prestige movies. (Jeffy even prepares for his hoax by studying Rain Man, Forrest Gump, I Am Sam and the films of Chevy Chase.) Knoxville's lanky clown, a good-hearted punching bag, makes The Ringer a richer drag-act than Tootsie. As a story of fully functioning people by fully functioning people, Tootsie was easy. This is complex. Knoxville, the Farrellys, Blaustein and screenwriter Ricky Blitt deserve credit for daring to clarify that good movies teach about all people's handicaps. Remember: We watch movie stars as ideals, not idols.