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Shelf Beauties |
Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer Going to the
movies all of the time is a great deal of fun, but can become
monotonous when
you see a string of average movies.
Then, the Movie Critic Gods throw you a bone like Perfume:
The Story of
a Murderer, which is so bad it’s not just one of
the worst movies of the
year. It’s
one of the worst movies EVER,
like Gigli
or Basic Instinct 2
or any movie featuring the Olsen Twins.
Sadly, what makes it worse is the movie’s
own
pretentiousness, smugness and the feeling that it should be much better
than it
is because everyone involved in the film should be more competent than
this. Perfume
stars
Ben Wishaw as Jean-Baptiste – a young man unwanted from birth
(and let me tell
you about that birth, which is the worst, silliest, most ridiculous
scene I
have witnessed with my own two eyes, until later in the movie, when
something
just as moronic tops it. See,
Jean-Baptiste’s
mother is pregnant with him and working down at the docks gutting fish
for
sale. In the middle
of the work day, she
graphically goes into labor, sits down in the foot tall pile of fish
guts,
squirts out baby Jean-Baptiste amid screams and cries that can only be
heard
when a baby seal is captured by a killer whale, then KICKS THE BABY
ASIDE WITH
HER FOOT, so she can go back to work as the new born lies among the fish
heads!!!!! DAMN!). Jean-Baptiste, who
doesn’t speak very much,
soon finds himself living at an orphanage, and is fascinated by smells. He has superhuman
olfactory ability, and
obsessively, psychotically, wants to take in every odor, beautiful and
gut
wrenching alike. After a short
stint studying the art of making perfume, Jean-Baptiste heads off for
more
formal training and finds inspiration to make the greatest perfume
ever.
However, to do so, he must take the scent of beautiful young ladies to
serve as
the base, and they aren’t too keen on having a creepy mute
guy slather them in
some sort of animal fat, then have it scraped off of their naked bodies
with a
sickle (buddy, that costs extra!).
So,
how does Jean-Baptiste plan on getting their scent?
Yep, he kills them, so they cannot resist the
slathering and sickle. Will the
misguided serial murderer be able to get all the girls’
scents he needs before
he is caught? How
good is this perfume?
Normally, this
is the part of the movie where I tell you to avoid this stinker at all
costs,
but I almost feel like that would be depriving you of the most
unintentionally
funny time you will ever have at a movie theater.
Perfume
is one of those movies you want to
see, then tell your friends how horrific it was, while laughing so hard
you
might need to go to the emergency room for a sprained funny bone. It’s like a
right of passage. You have
to understand, Perfume
starts off on the wrong foot with the wrong tone, and
stories that don’t seem to go together, then keeps stumbling
and bumbling its
way to a climax half the people who buy tickets will never see because
they
will walk out in frustration or disbelief (and, believe me, you DO NOT
want to
miss this idiotic climax). Walking
out
halfway through means you will miss all of Perfume’s
tremendous
heinousness. Director/co-writer
Tom Tykwer tries to start off with a light hearted tone, but
it’s a strange way
to tell the story of an orphan abandoned by his mother, forced to live
worse
than Oliver Twist in the orphanage, trapped into working like a slave
in the
tannery and, finally, turned into a serial killer, while learning how
to make
sweet smells. When
Tykwer, along with
his co-writers Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger (based on the novel by
Patrick
Suskind), change the tone to match the sinister events unfolding on the
screen,
you might think the movie would get better.
However, the twists are so unbelievable they are
only topped by the incredulity
the audience feels as it happens.
The
resolution and the climax are two of those rare moments in a movie when
the
audience is forced throw up their hands and say, “what the
@%^&*$,” as the
movie suddenly becomes a porno. Along the way,
the movie wastes performances by Alan Rickman, Dustin Hoffman, and the
stunningly beautiful Rachel Hurd-Wood, to serve a story that is
nonsensical. Perfume:The
Story of a
Murderer is one of those movies where everyone
involved with it, and those
who love it, are too enamored with the material and themselves. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is rated R for aberrant behavior involving nudity, violence, sexuality, and disturbing images.
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