Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

You know Captivity, the movie with the torture-porn ad campaign, including a huge four-panel billboard in LA, showing Elisha Cuthbert being Abducted, Confined, Tortured and Terminated. I’ve seen her being buried in sand on the side of a bus stop in New York, and seen her crying behind a chain-link fence that she held with her bloody fingers on the subway.

It’s a vile movie, from all accounts. As if the ad campaign weren’t enough. From the scathing New York Times review:

Though hyped as a torture movie, “Captivity” is really the extreme revenge fantasy of every (slightly damaged) guy who ever lusted after a woman far out of his league. We are first introduced to the victim, a supermodel named Jennifer (Elisha Cuthbert), via a long close-up of lips slathered in blood-red gloss. Soon those lips will be sipping a drugged apple martini at a SoHo charity event and then, a little later, screaming “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” to a hooded abductor (Pruitt Taylor Vince) while their owner is strapped to a dungeon table. As images of Jennifer’s magazine covers flash around her, it’s clear that the only thing she has to apologize for is being attractive — and unavailable to mommy-damaged sadists.

A punish-the-tease tale of exhausting repetitiveness, Larry Cohen’s script is trapped in a tedious loop of drugging and threatening as Jennifer is shown the fates of previous victims and meets a cute fellow captive (Daniel Gillies). Yet after four days of psychological battery — during which her skirts and her heels climb ever higher — our heroine is still glowing and eager to make out. Like the infamous 1978 Hustler cover depicting a woman disappearing into a meat grinder while her legs wave invitingly at the viewer, Jennifer is a pervert’s fantasy. She is also, as a character, more silly than sympathetic.

Here’s the thing.

My brother worked on it. He doesn’t have a credit, but he worked part-time on the crew during the shoot in Moscow, where he lived at the time, in 2005. Before it became torture-porn. When it was “just” a movie about a psycho who kidnapped a model whose only crime was not being available to him and held her captive in his basement. Before the eyeball milkshakes, designed to appeal to Elisha Cuthbert’s “fan base” and the people who dig the Saw movies. And bonus! The emotionally-stunted, pretty-people-hating psycho kidnapper is fat.
I’m honestly not sure how to feel about that. I mean, in 2005, when he picked up a little work on the side (he’s in the Director’s Guild, but always wanted to live in Russia; he got a job in the US Embassy there at least until there were some visa issues, but since there’s a lot of production work going on in Moscow…), this was something perhaps a little icky, but not torture porn. When he visited in May, he brought along a rough cut of the film, with the titles in Russian, and was excitedly pointing himself out to me on-screen (he has a walk-on as a cop).

By that time, I’d already seen the buried-in-sand ad, which wasn’t around long. And I’d seen the trailer where the bloodied and crying captive whispers, “I’m sorry” to her captor. Honestly? I wasn’t sure what he’d seen of the ad campaign in Moscow. I’m not sure I wanted to ask, since it was work, and he’d had trouble finding work in the DG for a while for arcane and Byzantine reasons relating to base-of-operations rules. He’d gotten work on a TV show being filmed in Charleston, SC a while back, while he was still trying to get into the Guild, and switched his base of operations to be anywhere but Southern California, which meant he had a hard time getting work in Southern California once the TV show didn’t work out. So getting work somewhere like Moscow (or Hawaii, when my sister lived there and he got some work on Windtalkers and the execrable Pearl Harbor) was good for him.

I watched the film as far as his appearance, and then decided I really, really wanted to go to dinner. Let’s go!

I’m guessing he worked on a very different movie than what we’re seeing today.