Wrong Cops

2013 absurdist comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: One cop tries to hide a pornographic past. One cop has accidentally shot a man and wants to get rid of the victim. One cop is working his magic to try to see a woman's breasts. One cop, a cyclops, is working on starting a career in music. They're wrong cops!

According to the Wikipedia synopsis of this movie, this takes place "in the not very distant future, where crime has been completely eradicated" which I must confess is something that I missed completely. I mean, just having Marilyn Manson in a movie has to be considered a crime in some places, right? This is a Quentin Dupieux joint, and this guy makes movies for a very limited audience. Very limited. I just happen to be part of that audience, I guess. I don't think I'd ever call any of these movies--Wrong, Rubber, this one--great, but they make me laugh, and there's something different enough about them that makes them refreshing. Eric Wareheim plays one of the titular cops, and if you're into the Tim and Eric stuff, you might have a head start in liking something like this. It's arguably not that different in tone or scope than any of those seemingly infinite and infinitely abysmal parody movies. But I'm going to pretend it's a more intellectual exercise and that Quentin Dupieux is Dadaistically partying like it's 1919 or the reincarnation of Samuel Beckett digging up some exquisite corpses to see if he can make them giggle. It makes me feel less guilty about enjoying the movies. The credits roll, and you see that Marilyn Manson and Eric Roberts are both in this, and you start to squirm in your pants a little. And then David Lynch regulars Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie? Oh, man, you gotta hold on tight for this one. Eric Roberts--seriously, if you want a good laugh, check out Eric Roberts' imdb page and count how many movies he's making appearances in for 2014 and 2015--gets to say, "It's a numerical movie. There won't be any stars," a line that forced me to pause the movie just to have some quiet time to figure out if it made any sense. I decided that it either didn't or that I just didn't get it. He's wearing an awesome fringe jacket, and I'm pretty sure he's at least half as stoned in this as he was when recording the voice of the talking cat in A Talking Cat?!? Marilyn Manson, for some reason, looks like the corpse of a 15 year old in this movie. This guy hasn't aged much since he was in The Wonder Years, has he? See, I know some of you are hip enough to actually get that joke. Like Dupieux's other movies, this has a lot of electronic music. The opening credit music is really good. It's all Dupieux as his alter-ego Mr. Oizo, and it adds some charm to the whole thing. There's also a lot of references to music in the movie's plot. The sexy Mark Burnham listens to music during several scenes, and Eric Judor, a character with an eyepatch and an oddly-shaped head that makes him look like a guy who could have fit right in as a character on Jabba's barge, tries to make music ("That song is shit in a can."), so I guess you could say there's something about music going on here although I wouldn't want to think too much about it on the chance that I'd just end up disappointed. A first scene with a dead rat and an explanation that it is more discrete, random freeze frames, a suicide attempt involving a character fully clothed in a filled bathtub and holding a gun, a Wareheim freakout where he kicks a phone and screams, "Motherfucking bitch!" in the most wonderful of ways, my favorite montage of the year involving the cops digging and splurging and engaging in their obsessions and hitchhiking and hurling fish, the punchline of a character's obsessive digging, and the overly silly slab of black comedy during a funeral scene made this all a lot of fun. Well, if you're an oddball like me. Comedy for oddballs. That's what Dupieux makes. And I love him for it!