I missed my local press screening of The Paperboy, which is a shame, because any film where Zac Efron gets dramatically peed on sounds like a must-see. It opens today, and luckily, Deadspin‘s Will Leitch did get to see it, and quickly discovered what many of us already suspected: that Lee Daniels might be a lunatic. Daniels managed to con the world into believing that Precious was about a Very Important Subject, and thus above criticism of its hilariously over-the-top schlock (misspelled credits!), but without a sheen of Bringing Important Issues to Light, his nuttiness is that much more visible. Leitch, meanwhile, does a smart job giving us the only thing we really wanted out of a Paperboy review – a catalog of the crazy. Excerpted below.
Zac Efron. Efron spends this entire film lying around in his underwear. All right, there are maybe three or four scenes in which he is wearing a shirt, but otherwise, it’s just him in tighty whities, throughout the whole movie. There is no reason for this to be happening; it’s hot out, but everyone else seems to find a way to put on some pants from time to time. He also mimes masturbating to Macy Gray. We’ve all been there, brother. The High School Musical heartthrob also calls a black character the N-word in as nasty a way as you can imagine. Oh, and at one point he has to lie still while Nicole Kidman pees on him.
John Cusack. […] There’s one scene, however, when Cusack is forced to masturbate over his prison pants while staring at Nicole Kidman’s crotch. Daniels, of course, makes sure to cut to a closeup of Cusack’s semen staining said pants.
Nicole Kidman. Hoo boy. All right, so whatever your thoughts about Nicole Kidman—I think she’s a terrific actress; some find her too chilly; some just think it’s terrifying that she was once married to Tom Cruise—she certainly goes, to paraphrase Tropic Thunder, Full Whore. Daniels basically asks her to be the trashiest, looniest, most pathetic, most oversexed blowsy noir blonde you can imagine, and boy, does she deliver. The best way to describe Nicole Kidman’s crazy-ass performance is that the time you get a closeup of her crotch while she’s peeing on Zac Efron is the second wildest thing involving Kidman. I’d say the first is when you get an extreme closeup of her crotch—like, nearly Sharon Stone-level extreme—as she has an orgasm while sitting 10 feet away from Cusack. These are not isolated moments; Kidman goes all-out as a loony dimwit sex bomb. She never once shies away from the extremes Daniels asks her to go to. Lemme tell you: She should have. They all should have.
Obviously, there’s more in the full review, but I don’t have much to add to this. I look forward to triumphantly climbing up the Google rankings for “Cusack semen.”