Henry Fool (1997)

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Big ander
Spectacular. I want to watch this several hundred more times. Every performance is rich and the script is mind-blowing. Captures a dazzling disgustingness that feels so very American. 11 years 8 months ago
Siskoid
There's a conversation in Hal Hartley's Henry Fool that presages the ways the internet would one day be used, so it's absolutely proper for it to present personality types we might recognize from social media, but there was such a thing. Henry is a big-talking conspiracy theorist with a sex offender's past. Simon Grimm is anti-social and becomes a pornographic, and grammar-lacking poet under Henry's QAnon tutelage. His bullies are neo-fascists who follow a dumbed-down moral minority candidate and commit/excuse domestic abuse. Fay is comparatively normal, even though she (Parker Posey) is just there to shout at the world. I spoiled myself with this one by seeing the two later parts of the trilogy, so I knew where the characters were going to end up. Which is surprising if you don't have foreknowledge. But how they get there is still an intriguing journey. It does make me appreciate more how Fay Grimm recontextualized this film to spin out into a spy story. I can't quite decide what I would have said had I seen Henry Fool first as nature intended. 2 months ago