Sewer viewers have heard the buzz about Cutting Moments for years, but only with the advent of the DVD money-raking machine have most of them had the chance to grok it with their own peepers. And with big-budget Hollywood remakes like The Fog and Miami Vice clogging up their synapses, many still haven’t taken that trip.
Well, Sewer has seen it - sort of. Yep, it’s that old baby getting in the way again. When does your faithful truth-sprayin’ sooth-sayer have the chance to watch the old ultra-violence with a dang kid around? Not too often, which is why the special edition release of Family Portraits: A Trilogy Of America (collecting Douglas Buck’s three transgressive shorts, including Cutting Moments) has been languising around courtesy of Netflix (but definitely on my dime) for almost three weeks!
And once again: why is it OK now for nearly any old hard-to-find sleaze-fest to be one lazy mouse-click away? How long, O Lord, how long? (We really miss you, Hunter.)
So the first family portrait, Cutting Moments, elegantly and on-the-cheap pulls back the curtains on some of the quiet desperation and true horror that happens in American suburbs every day, and it ain’t pretty.
Cross Richard Kern’s You Killed Me First with Robert Redford’s Ordinary People and mix in bit of H.G. Lewis’s The Gore Gore Girls and you’ve got Cutting Moments.
Damn,that’s good, I don’t think I need to write anything else. Except to say that Cutting Moments is undeniably special, sublte and brutal, and if that sounds like your kind of thing (it ain’t for everybody) then it’s definitely worth a look.
The special edition Family Portraits: A Trilogy Of America DVD includes dual commentary tracks for Cutting Moments, Home and Prologue, a track by the director and a track by different critics and professors of note. The flip-side of the DVD presents the three shorts in consecutive order as a full-length feature, though I don’t see this as any particular benefit to the work. Also on the flip-side are a number of extra goodies including a student film by Buck.
 |
| How we see ourselves means a lot. |
 |
| Or, are we just staring at the TV to avoid something deeper? |
 |
| Is there a way to cut through the haze? |