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Proxy

If Fight Club and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle had a really boring, emotionally stunted baby, it would be Proxy.

Hands down one of the most boring, slowest paced movies I've had to sit through in a long time, this pointless piece of independent crap needs to be shelved and forgotten.

I will note here, with some interest, that "birth horror" has really seen a boom in the past 5 years or so. Although I typically have a pulse on the social issues that create an increase in a particular horror topic, I'm not sure - aside from the renewed interest in grindhouse cinema - what's making everyone so hot for pregnancies these days.

I'm also seeing an increased number of lesbian relationships in horror but, unfortunately, they are all truly, deeply, unhealthy relationships. Here you won't need to be a genius to track the roots of this trend. How fucking sad.

So, I'm not sure I can explain Proxy in my typical one liner - try to follow along while I lay this one out for you:

A pregnant woman is attacked and the baby killed. We later find out that her lover is the attacker and the victim planned the crime. The victim begins attending a support group where she meets a woman who is pretending to have lost a child. Victim then victimizes the faker by murdering her son. Faker's husband kills the victim, fantasizes about torturing her, and is eventually killed by his wife. Who then kills the victim's lover.

What a bucket of convoluted plot puke adding up to 120 wasted minutes of my life.

And seriously, if I stumble onto one more movie starring Joe Swanberg, I might delete my Netflix account and give up watching movies for good. People keeping lauding his "improvisational performances" and it completely blows my mind. His overly inflated self-importance ranks beside that of Tarantino. You "brilliantly" improvise your work? No dude. Read your fucking script and stop being too lazy to memorize your lines. You're too cool for rehearsal? Really? Get back to me when you have an iota of the talent Robin Williams had or Bill Murray has. Then you can blow off rehearsals and improvise your lines.

There is ABSOLUTELY no chemistry between Swanberg and his on screen wife (Alexa Havins). They are like two mannequins posed beside one another. The only moment they even come close to having any kind of emotional interaction is in this glorious moment (after their son has been murdered) where she says to him, "we can always have another."

First of all, I actually laughed out loud at this because it's the kind of callous, heartless, tactless joke I would make about other people who have lost a child.

Secondly, it's about THE LEAST realistic thing a human may say at this point.

Anyway - it's the only instance in the whole movie that they both almost seem to be acting.

You can watch the trailer here, if you hate your life and having literally NOTHING left to live for:
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