Bug.

"Bug, directed by William Friedkin from Tracy Letts's play, has the feverish compression of live theater and the moody expansiveness of film," writes David Edelstein in New York. "The mix is insanely powerful.... I wish I'd been able to giggle at Bug for being so over-the-top. But line by line, beat by beat, it's gripping stuff, and Friedkin puts you right in the middle of the mêlée. How did the coldly detached director of The French Connection, The Exorcist and To Live and Die in LA manage to get inside this play—preserving its theatricality yet making it such a live-wire experience?"

"Bug, made on the cheap for the horror-loving kids at Lionsgate, is genuinely freaky-deaky, not to mention more inventively unsettling than anything Friedkin has mustered in the quarter-century since twisting little Linda Blair into a satanic spewer of pea soup and F-bombs," adds Rob Nelson in the Voice.

Updated through 5/25.

"This horror story is largely metaphoric, a weirdo reflection on post-traumatic stress that invites comparison to our nation's current state of affairs - namely the way crisis is sold to an unsuspecting, gullible public (WMD might have been a more pointed title for the film)," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "Call it reaching, but it's not like Friedkin (or his characters) don't ask us to.... Whatever has gotten into Friedkin, let's hope it stays in there."

"Bug is a great film until it becomes a terrible one." Jason Bogdaneris explains his position in the L Magazine.

Mark Olsen talks with Ashley Judd for the Los Angeles Times.

Kevin Nance profiles Letts for the Chicago Sun-Times. Via Movie City News.

Earlier: Filmbrain; and "Cannes. Bug." Yes, it's been a full year.

Update: Alonso Duralde interviews Friedkin for Film Independent.

Updates, 5/24: "Even during the heyday of the American paranoia thriller, there was never a performance quite like the one given by Michael Shannon," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "As Peter Evans, the blandly named, seemingly innocuous drifter who appears one evening at the doorstep of Agnes White (Ashley Judd), a battered wife terrified of her ex-con husband's return, Shannon has either officially arrived onscreen or carved out a memorable cult niche."

"Billed as a psychological horror movie, Bug..., plays more like lousy dinner theater doing its darnedest to give American paranoia a bad name," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly, where Scott Foundas interviews Friedkin.

"Visiting Blue State hysteria upon a Red Stater shows a weird sympathy and Friedkin, as usual, is all about the freak-out," write Armond White in the New York Press.

"Bug, as a movie, is really just a great stage play," writes Annie Frisbee at Zoom In Online.

"Directing opera of late seems to have reinvigorated Friedkin's interest in storytelling through sound," notes Ray Pride. And further: "Some will reject as familiar the down-at-the-mouth characters and others will find the increasing violence intolerable. Still, I was awestruck by huge chunks of the movie's infuriating descent beyond madness and the inexorable style. For example, there's a jumpcut from a striking sex scene to an exterior shot of the motel by day, which immediately jumpcuts to night. That's a Billy Friedkin editing shock."

Updates, 5/25: "What a load of wank," growls Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "In the old days, Roger Corman would have made Bug in eight days for about 25 cents, and it would have been 100 times livelier. But this Bug isn't supposed to be fun. It's art that crawls."

"[C]reepy and unsettling, to say nothing of gory, but overall it's a little claustrophobic and uneven," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times, where Rachel Abramovitz talks with Friedkin.

So does Bilge Ebiri for Nerve.

At times, "Bug suggests Safe as remade by David Cronenberg, both in its biological, venereal horror, and in its paranoia about a contemporary world hopelessly corrupted by viruses, germs, and infections, literal and metaphorical," offers the AV Club's Nathan Rabin.

"The escalating hysteria and grisly set pieces of Bug may strain credulity, but Ms Judd has never been more believable as a woman condemned to attract the wrong kind of man," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times.

"A difficult film to fully embrace, it nevertheless marks a real comeback for Friedkin," argues Steve Erickson in Gay City News.

"The film is lean, direct, unrelenting," writes Roger Ebert. "For Friedkin, the film is a return to form after some disappointments like Jade it feels like a young man's picture, filled with edge and energy. Some reviews have criticized Bug for revealing its origins as a play, since most of it takes place on one set. But of course it does. There is nothing here to 'open up' and every reason to create a claustrophobic feel. Paranoia shuts down into a desperate focus. It doesn't spread its wings and fly."

"If this were the 1940s, we'd be talking about Judd in the same breath with people like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Susan Hayward," suggests Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. "Likewise, if she were working in France, where they still love women's pictures, she'd be making three films a year tailored to her particular intensity. But here she has had to wait. It has been 12 long years since Judd took everybody's head off with her cameo as a crack addict in Smoke. Now, finally, she has exactly the right material... and the perfect director for her, William Friedkin, who shares Judd's artistic universe: big, raw and desperate, right at the edge, and then past it."

"[E]ssentially, this is a movie about the dangers of letting love rob you of your reason and cut you off from the world, and, bugs in the bloodstream or not, who hasn't been there?" asks Dana Stevens in Slate.

Posted by dwhudson at May 23, 2007 2:04 AM