Arriver = To Arrive, not To Happen, if I remember right.

Meh, it had been happening since at least Albert Brooks' Real Life, which is one of the most under-known movies I think I have ever seen.    It doesn't imply the audience is complicit, and puts the onus squarely on the producers…but the climax is sublime.

Are you talking the real life murder case from the '80s?

It actually LITERALLY translates to "It's coming close to your home."  Which is a take off of "Coming to a theater near you."

Dead baby boy.

@avclub-ba0a95f8ef733a213eb3bd8674a90453:disqus Actually, in my neck of the woods, it was a gamble which version you were getting.  One Blockbuster had the NC-17 version (I believe it was the one in Farmington, MI), while every other video store had Unrated edited versions, if they carried it at all.  This included…

The dentures are hilarious.  The pacifier I still don't get (and think it was a miscalculation still).

Remy did.  Only Ben ever went on to succeed in film.  The other two - Remy and Andre - never did anything really significant in cinema to even warrant additional credits on IMDB.  Apparently, Remy ended up involved in some weird 3 minute tv series with Ben in the late 90s.  But, that's it.

@avclub-d542a3419c3ad57206a96bcc86155ebc:disqus Yup.  It is a very very different movie with those two sequences removed.  It becomes a much lighter more direct comedy.  Still really brutal and uncompromising, but not disturbing enough to unnerve.

When I was a student of U-Mich, I was part of a film club that put on 35mm films in auditoriums.  My first year, I nominated this film and, through the voting process, it won.  At this point, however, I had only seen the Unrated edited version on VHS (long before the DVD from Criterion had come out), and it was a bit…

There are two versions on VHS.  There is an uncut NC-17 version and an edited Unrated version.  Yes, I did not flip those.

The original Fox-Lorber cover art was phenomenal.  The Criterion cover art was a severe miscalculation, as that scene never happens in the movie, and Ben actively hates killing kids.

Yup. He was innovating to save a bullet.

There there…it will get better.

But which one is which?  It's like there's two of them!

@avclub-d88a1fef9041a3c49408560ef2122eab:disqus I have to agree with his reasoning for the NC-17 rating though, in light of his R-rated "what about the children??" arguments.

@avclub-b6e5391be8277308d0801a0be95ac706:disqus I'm not saying a good critic has tastes I agree with all the time.  I find my tastes are more aligned with Terry Lawson and A.O. Scott, but neither of them have their own genre fetishes that I don't like.

@avclub-1e850f6bef0bc36ca1f64e95ff1cbd2e:disqus  Go read the reviews I mentioned.  They're terrible reviews.  I do mean terrible.

@avclub-32a2e71c97df5281f1324db72c73a59a:disqus But, it wasn't the play I remember from the '60s when I was doing all sorts of drugs!!!

I think that's why everybody has been recommending Doctorow to me.  I have a minor fetish for anarchic cyberpunk (is there really any other type of cyberpunk?).  The Doctorow friends are not the same as the Starship Troopers friends, mostly.