Red

I have Comcast Digital Cable. I’ve been a customer for a long time, so I no longer qualify for any of those nice introductory offers that make cable affordable. I’m beyond that. I pay twice as much as the newcomers for the same service. This is the world in which we live—a confused place where companies treat new customers like kings while shitting on their established base. The established base is established, so no need to reward those loyal bastards. Marketing in America. Capitalism. I guess I could play the switching game, where you go from DISH to Direct TV to cable and back again, making the rounds every six months or so, but I’m too goddamned lazy. Or I could call Comcast, tell them their service is too expensive for me right now, threaten to switch, and see if they offer me some kind of deal. But that would entail talking to one of their customer service representatives; I’d rather watch soccer. Comcast isn’t entirely bad. I enjoy the OnDemand service to some extent, even though every free movie they offer is Cliffhanger. If you have HBO or one of the other premium channels you can catch up on old episodes of The Wire or Dexter on OnDemand. That’s pretty cool. If you don’t have any premium channels, you can watch Cliffhanger. Or you can pay outrageous prices to watch movies that have been recently released on DVD. If you prefer your movies in HD, you can pay an extra dollar for them. So, the other night, I was searching the OnDemand menu for something to watch. I was in the HD section of the New Releases when I came across a movie that I’ve been excited about seeing: Cliffhanger (just kidding, the movie was Red). Red is the third film based on a Jack Ketchum novel. If you’ve read my reviews, you know that I’m a big Jack Ketchum fan and that I enjoyed both previous adaptations of his work, The Girl Next Door and The Lost. I was surprised to see Red offered on Pay-Per-View because it’s not out on DVD yet. It played at Sundance last January and is supposed to have a small theatrical run in August. But there it was, with a price tag of $8.99. That’s about the same amount I’d pay if I waited to see it in the theatre, but who knows if it will even come to Denver? And if it does come to Denver, it’ll probably play in some low-rent “indie” theatre with broken chairs and broken audio in a part of town where I’d have to pay to park. I have a nice widescreen TV and a pretty good surround sound system in my apartment. The decision was easy. I ordered the fucking movie. In HD.

Red is a story about an old man and his old, mangy dog named Red who is his best friend and a loving companion but in a totally platonic way, like they go fishing together and play catch and then some asshole teenagers kill the old guy’s dog and they don’t show any remorse or apologize about it, it’s just a senseless act of violence and immaturity and they lie to their parents about it and all that the old man wants is an apology, is for the kids to man-up and take responsibility for their actions, but they don’t, so Tom Sizemore gets involved and it turns out that he’s a big asshole too (which we already know because of his crazy eyes and the role he played in Scorcese’s Bringing Out The Dead) with big guns and a big truck, one of those Ford F-350 type trucks with huge tires and patriotic bumper stickers that tiny little penis dudes drive at 85 miles an hour in the fast lane when it’s snowing and icy and shit, spraying your car with road grime and slush, while listening to Toby Keith sing about some hottie with a smoking little body (even though he’s 47 and she’s 16) and things get a little crazy, in the movie I mean, not in real life, things get crazy in the movie adaptation of Jack Ketchum’s Red and the dog’s name becomes a metaphor for rage and anger and violence and then literally becomes the color of the blood that gets spilled when pointless actions and stubborn sensibilities mix and fester and boil in a cauldron of human shit. Read the book. Watch the movie.

Brian Cox, who has been in every movie released during this millennium, plays Avery Ludlow, the protagonist of the story. He carries the film, playing Ludlow as a totally sympathetic character who is pushed to the brink of insanity by actions beyond his control. Watch Red to see why the original Hannibal Lecter is one of the greatest actors working today. Kim Dickens (Joanie Stubbs from Deadwood) plays a reporter that becomes interested in Ludlow’s story and tries to help him get some justice. Other notable actors include Robert Englund, Amanda Plummer, and Richard Riehle (that guy from Office Space who invented the “Jump to Conclusions” mat). Red was directed by two people. When I first heard that this adaptation was going to be made, it always had Lucky McKee’s name attached to it. McKee previously directed the cult hit May and The Woods. I like both those movies, so I was excited about his involvement in this one. Then, for some reason that I’m too lazy to research at the moment, he was replaced by a Norwegian director named Trygve Allister Diesen. Whatever happened didn’t seem to affect the movie too much, as I was happy with how it turned out and how it remained true to the book. Thanks to Comcast for making this movie available to me at this time. I appreciate it. Back to Cliffhanger.