Starring:Thomas Dekker, Brad Rowe, Lena Headey, Gary Entin, Edmund Entin, Lauren Storm, Shiloh Fernandez and Megan Fox.
Directed by: Thomas Dekker
"Can I Get A Close-Up?"
an inquisitive Thomas Dekker asks as he focuses on the raw, bruised
flesh of a junkie's arm in the opening minutes of his directorial
debut, "Whore". What follows in the next one hundred and five minutes
is a crack brained, insane conglomeration of fiction and documentary
filmmaking. Dekker, a twenty-one-year-old actor most famous for his
television roles on "Heroes" and "Terminator: The Sarah Conner
Chronicles" has made an ambitious, arty, at times deliberately
appalling first feature. In what other film will you see the N-Word
blasted across the screen followed by other derogatory words for
homosexuals and other races? And in what other film will you see a
skin-head (one of the many roles played by Dekker) stumble around high,
blood fuming out of his mouth?
Thankfully once Dekker has
gotten his kicks on making sure your mouth is properly agape- there is
an astonishing and original film within the muck and jumble of it all.
With no real concrete narrative it's hard to describe Dekker's film but
I will surely try. Between delightfully absurd musical sequences and
drug addled dreamscapes, there are four stories following various
characters. A mother (Headey) dealing with a runaway child she had at
the of age fourteen, two brothers (the Entins) one of them dying of
AIDS, a male hooker (Fernandez) beaten, raped and on the run and
finally a young female hooker (Storm) who wants to be "Pretty Woman'd"
and taken off the streets.
Feel good movie of the year? Not
exactly. The last story is assuredly the best. Storm delivers a
breakthrough performance, that very well could have been cliched and
unwitty, but is instead a revelation. When she is asked to dress up in
a disturbing role playing sex game, she evokes such control and
emotional sensitivity you can't take your eyes off her. She is the real
discovery here.
I have to hand it to Dekker too, there are shots
in this film that look like something David Lynch would strive to
achieve. A shot early on flows down a dark street corner lit by the
glow of several blinking marquee's in the distance, as the pace picks
up we follow a boy and realize we the audience are the predator about
to catch its prey.
He crafts a gritty picture of adolescence
and a disturbing peer into the homeless lives of teens but with an
extremely overwhelming and bizarre outlook. His core base of fans (a
lot of them teenie-bopper girls) will promptly spontaneously combust if
they view this film. They will either be terrified and alarmed or
stupefied and aggravated. But that's exactly what Dekker wants. This
isn't John Conner defending the world in a mainstream TV show, this is
a young man taking a huge risk and finding out who he is as an actor
and a filmmaker.
Early on Most of Dekker's stories move with a
great flow and provide moving performances and substantial thrills (a
gunshot to the head of a character made me jump out of seat in its
realistic look) but others evoke unexpected and melodramatic giggles. A
character faints sloppily, while another cries 'it should have been
me!', while another dances around to "Rock Candy Mountain" and precedes
to puke everywhere. There are a few more stagy, unauthentic scenes- but
Dekker could cut these mistakes and have something vital and award
worthy.
Right now, Dekker has a movie that definitely leaves
you thinking after you're finished, but with a snip here and a cut
there it could be more, even savagely memorable.
- MOVIEPICTUREFILM.COM; DECEMBER 2008;
http://www.moviepicturefilm.com/film.php?itemid=1964
