We pulled the plug on two movies in a row -- the droll indie wank "Bunnylovr" and the annoying quasi-horror momcore pulp "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You." Both were aimless, apparent attempts to explore the psychology of a woman grasping for direction.
In each movie, very little happens, plotwise. We get a series of events in the life of the protagonists, but they lead nowhere. Similar events repeat day in and day out, and the men in the films tend to be creepy or abrasive. Each film spun its wheels for at least 44 minutes, without a satisfying plot development in sight. I bailed on each movie, coincidentally, right at the point of animal abuse.
"Bunnylovr" is probably the least sexy or interesting movie you can make about a cam girl. Katarina Zhu writes, directs and stars as Rebecca (her online name is the slinkier Teddi), who has a boring day job that she's bad at, and she makes money on the side performing online for creeps, though in the first 50 minutes, she flashed no forbidden flesh the whole time.
Instead, she holds lucrative private audiences with a well-off creep who sends her a live rabbit in the mail. Rather than run in the opposite direction at that disturbing provocation, she forsakes her other clients for face-to-face sessions with this dullard, who has an unsettling demeanor, to say the least. By the time he convinces her to pose lasciviously with the cute little bunny, this whole thing is going nowhere fast.
Meantime, Rebecca is straining to keep up a relationship with her estranged father (a charming Perry Yung), who is a chain-smoking card sharp with a pretty obvious health problem that I'm sure devolves into pathos in the final reel. The major crime here is that the story is flat-out boring. I can accept that it's not titillating (though why make the character an exhibitionist in the first place?), but I can't forgive a turgid script and a placid performance. Someone needed to step in and either direct Zhu or replace her.
Also stuck on one note -- and a pretty screachy one at that -- is Mary Bronstein's horror slog "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" (no, there's no point to that title). Poor Rose Byrne is trapped in Movie World, stuck at 11, amped up for no reason other than her writer-director wants to drag her through extreme acting exercises. Byrne is a talented actress (and comic actor), but here she's at the opposite end, craft-wise, from, say, Gena Rowlands in "A Woman Under the Influence."
Byrne's blandly named Linda is on her last nerve -- her daughter has a profound eating disorder (which requires a feeding tube), her husband is away a lot, and her roof has caved in from a plumbing debacle (which doesn't make sense logistically). Linda is mentally fried from the very first scene -- hectored by her needy child, whose face we don't see, so the girl's whining is especially annoying. Mother and daughter slum it at a low-rent motel while repairs are made, and it's clear that Linda is out of control, leaving her child (unnamed) alone often and falling into bad habits with recreational drugs and alcohol. The humiliations repeat in cycles, and even when Linda gets a break from her own kid, she has a therapy patient who is going through her own post-partum struggles. (Glimmers of life can be found in underused denizens of the hotel -- the front desk clerk played by Ivy Wolk ("Outcome") and a hip resident played by A$AP Rocky.)
This is supposed to be some profound treatise about the rigors of motherhood -- but how sympathetic a character is Linda, when she has the means to hire a nurse to help tend to the child and a crew of workers to repair the house, both of which would take the load off of her ... and thus let the air out of the artifice underpinning this pretentious genre exercise. Throw in Conan O'Brien wearing glasses and acting all serious, and you have quite a mess on your hands.
Be grateful for small favors: At the 11-minute mark of "If I Had Legs," Rose Byrne's character is seen listening to classic Guided by Voices, the "Bee Thousand" track "Hot Freaks":
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