Thursday (2 Stars)

This is the second film in three days which I've felt tempted to turn off after the first ten minutes. Once more I gritted my teeth and watched to the end. This time I don't totally regret my patience. There's an exciting sex scene that takes place at the end of the first hour, and those three minutes have upgraded my overall rating to two stars. Nothing else in the film is worth watching.

The film is called "Thursday" because the whole film takes place on one day, from seven in the morning till eight in the evening. Casey Wells used to be a drug dealer, but now he's gone straight. For the last four years he's been working as an architect, and he's happily married to a beautiful career woman. On Thursday morning Nick, Casey's old partner and former best friend, turns up at the door and asks if he can stay for a few days. Sure, why not? Then Nick leaves to do some errands, and the chaos begins. One after another people turn up at the house looking for two million dollars that Nick has hidden. The bodies start piling up.

The sex scene? The girl in the picture is Nick's ex-girlfriend. She ties Casey to a chair and says she wants to have sex with him before she kills him. That's pretty hot, but it doesn't end well. While they're in the act the next visitor arrives and shoots her in the head, splattering blood and brains over Casey's face.

I just read Roger Ebert's review of the film, and his thoughts are the same as mine, except that he didn't enjoy the sex scene. Poor Roger, that means that he didn't like it at all. To quote a few words from the review on his website:

"It's pretty hard to offend me, but a film named 'Thursday' crossed the line this week at the Toronto Film Festival. Watching it, I felt outrage. I saw a movie so reprehensible I couldn't rationalise it using the standard critical language about style, genre, or irony. The people associated with it should be ashamed of themselves. There is a 'plot', but essentially the film is a series of geek-show sequences in which characters are tortured, raped, murdered and dismembered in between passages of sexist and racist language".

My thoughts exactly, even though I can't express myself so eloquently. Roger Ebert, who passed away on April 4th, 2013, was the only film critic whose opinions I almost always agreed with. He was my inspiration for starting this blog. He's sadly missed.

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