Manglehorn
Director: David Gordon Green
Year Released: 2014
Rating: 1.5
Crabby locksmith Manglehorn (Al Pacino) spends his days being miserable, making keys, unlocking car doors, tending to his sick cat (it ate one of his keys) and obsessively meditating over an old flame. Without Pacino's magnetism and sense of nuance this would have been a chore to endure, since the Manglehorn character is written as a deplorable crank with few redeeming aspects (the way he treats Holly Hunter, Chris Messina and Harmony Korine's characters is despicable), and the reason for his anger and foul temperament is due to his past relationship with a woman the audience knows nothing about ... and discovers even less as time goes on. What remains is a sour-puss trudging painfully through his own agonized existence, and even Green's penchant for "surreal touches" (a car accident involving watermelons, a man serenading a woman in a bank, etc.) add nothing to the narrative.
