Tusk (2014)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2014
	Director: Kevin Smith (Clerks 1-2, Red State)
	Actors: Justin Long (Jeepers Creepers), Michael Parks (Kill Bill), Haley Joel Osment (The 6th Sense, A.I.), Johnny Depp (The Ninth Gate), Genesis Rodriguez (Man on a Ledge)
	Country: USA, CDN
	Genre: Horror, Black Comedy
	Conditions of visioning: 29.03.2015, CINEMA theater, MFFFN15
Synopsis: In search for unusual people, a podcaster (Long) travels to Canada and ends up meeting a man telling fantastic stories about his life, and in particular of his encounter with a walrus.
Review: After his two last bad experience in cinema for different reasons (Cop Out because of the Hollywood system and Red State because of the self-distribution and poor results), the genius "king of Geeks" Kevin Smith (Clerks, Clerks 2, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma) preferred to spend his time with his main passion: podcasting. But during one of those sessions he found out about a very strange add for lodging on a British website: a man offering a room for free on the condition that the lodger wears two hours per day a walrus costume, and behaves like one! And during the course of the 1.5-hour show one can hear Smith setting the basis for what he thinks would make a good movie, that he then managed to direct. You can listen to the whole podcast here (jump straight to 11:45). It turned out that the add was just a hoax (as I learned in that article), but it did give Smith the motivation to go back to cinema. Smith added a bit of himself to the story: the man answering the add is indeed a podcaster looking for a story, and infinitely more than Smith the guy is impolite, vulgar, irrespectively and making fun of the misery of others. This difficult character is payed brilliantly by Justin Long that I loved in the other original Horror flick Jeepers Creepers. Smith's habitué Michael Parks completes the cast together with the very natural Haley Joel Osment (yes the kid from The 6th Sense and A.I.) and the new bomba latina Genesis Rodriguez. And one should not forget Johnny Depp barely recognizable in a role that pushes his talent for acting weird characters beyond what he did with Captain Jake Sparrow in The Pirates of the Carribean franchise. After this long preamble, is the movie any good? I would say yes, if you like to discover something bizarre and out of the ordinary. Oh the story is easy to follow, the actors play very well and the movie looks good, but the structure and changes of rhythms often take you by surprise, like they already did in Red State. During the projection people often laughed at the ridicule of the situations almost against themselves. And as always with Kevin Smith the dialogs are great. Even if Tusk is not a big success yet (at the time of writing it earned 1.8 M$ for 3 of investment), it launched Smith into two more movies to complete a "True North Trilogy" starting with Yoga Hosers for which he even postponed the making of the long-awaited Clerks 3.
Rating: 8 /10