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Brandi Boski and Thomas Bardo are about as different as two people can be. Brandi is an elder care nurse on the verge of getting a sweet promotion, if she can just be sycophantic enough to her ice queen of a boss, while Bardo is a more than a little down on his luck project manager, recently downsized. But the one similarity they both possess is the same one that binds all of us together as human beings: they both have an alternate side to their personality. For Bardo, even though he is a smart and productive man, he is just too milquetoast to assert himself and take what he wants, but at the same time too proud to ask his son for help when he gets kicked out of his tenement apartment and becomes homeless. Brandi is a hood rat who makes bad decisions, such as driving home from a club after drinking and tonguing what was hopefully only a tab of E from her thug boyfriend. Stuck is about when these two disparate people meet in a head on collision.
Literally.
| After meeting up with a kindly homeless man, who gives him one of his push carts, Bardo (a really out of place Stephen Rea) is summarily kicked out of the park by a cop, where he was trying to cop some zees, and told to try the mission. Except on his way there he is struck by the car that Brandi is failing to pay attention to the course of, and becomes literally stuck headfirst in her windshield. Freaking out, naturally, Brandi chickens out of bringing him to the hospital, and simply drives him home and parks him in the garage. In the heat of the moment, in Brandi’s drug- and alcohol-addled shoes, we can almost understand why she does what she does. And in that is the genius of Stuart Gordon’s filmmaking. Unfortunately, what could have been a grim character study on the poor decision-making and misfiring good intentions of people in the rough part of a city that doesn’t care about them, Stuck devolves into forced black comedy and stereotypical horror film tropes. I wanted better from Gordon, a man whose work I admire above almost all others. |  |
Now don’t get me wrong: the filmmaking is excellent. The opening montage of senior citizens going about their daily routine, against a background of violent hip hop, is bizarre to the point of being awe-inspiring. The wide-angle lens, high contrast image, and slow motion action gives the elderly people a monolithic look, and the juxtaposition of their benign every day actions (taking pills, playing board games, being miserable), shot with sweeping camera moves, against the smacking bitches and capping niggas lyrics, is more discomfiting than the creepiest Aphex Twins video. And then we find Brandi (the always gorgeous Mena Suvari, here sporting cornrows) having to attend to old Mr. Binckly (Wane Robson, who recently blew up in Wrong Turn 2), after he has shat his bed. We are treated to a close up of the aftermath, which quickly cuts to Brandi washing the shit off of a naked Mr. Binckly. It is an in your face image, and seems to set us up for a brutal, no holds barred gritty street drama.
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