Director: Clark Gregg
Year Released: 2008
Rating: 1.5
Sex addict Sam Rockwell has two jobs: as a con man whose 'act' is pretending to choke on food in restaurants (and raking in sympathy money thereafter) and as a Colonial America re-enactor, both to help pay for his mother's (Anjelica Huston) stay in a pricey Alzheimer's hospital. The tame 'transgressive' aspects - quick flashes of nude old ladies, a brief fake-rape encounter (the movie's sole funny moment), the callous protagonist's nonstop libido - are really just a thin mask for the overbearing Mommy Issues that plague this whole story, with the unbearable flashbacks of abusive Mom Anjelica manipulating her poor child and using him as a tool for her cash-laundering schemes. It's neither as dark as novelist Chuck Palahniuk probably intended nor as darkly humorous as Gregg probably intended - and it doesn't so much conclude as simply stop - but Rockwell's gifted enough to make almost anything watchable (no one could have saved Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) and the sole reason to see this.
