Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.

I was working in the Labs earlier tonight when the door was kicked open and a hulking figure moved into the room. Reeking of chicken grease and Busch beer, the imposing MR. MOLLY fixed me with a sort of groggy stare and held out one meaty fist, where there was a crumpled piece of paper that I can only assume started out as white. "I got another review for you, Slim," he growled at me. I suddenly remembered the vicious beating this guy handed me last month when I screwed up his name on the page. I tried not to show any fear as I smiled at him. "Great," I responded, and I reached out to take the review from him. I opened my mouth to ask, "What's the film?" but Mr. Molly seemed to take this as an opportunity to shove the paper into my mouth, grab my face, and push me to the floor. It wasn't until I heard the door slam behind him that I sat up and retrieved the single sheet. QUILLS, eh? I'm a massive Philip Kaufman fan, so I'm certainly intrigued. Let's see what our newest resident psychopath had to say about one of Fox's big Oscar contenders for the year...

QUILLS: Writing Porn with Blood and Feathers

I got to see Philip Kaufman’s newest, Quills, at the William Fox Theater.

Let me say first off I’m a sucker for those “writin’ with feathers” flicks some old-time Hollywood studio head said he hated (might have been Warner, but don’t quote me). Loved Dangerous Liaisons, Ridicule – if they’re writing with feathers and plowing each other under like eight skirts, I’m in.

So I figured Kaufman, with his love of visual texture (he’s like Tony Scott with substance and purpose) would serve up a veritable Sizzler buffet of powdered wig porking and poking.

Quills is exactly that, with rich performances and brilliant art design. Everyone acts like they’re tanked on ether, and can’t wait to get in front of the camera and try out that new accent they bought on eBay.

The plot concerns the twilight years of the Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush, doing a Casanova Frankenstein with good dialogue), when he was locked in a French asylum, whiling away his time staging plays with inmate talent, and writing his most famous works, smuggling them out with the help of a maid (Kate Winslet, who gets yummier and yummier despite what the skeleton-worshipping fruits over at Us magazine say).

Wait a minute, I’ve got my laptop set on “run-on sentence”.

There.

The Marquis has another ally in the asylum’s warden/priest (Joaquin Phoenix, doing as good a job with his accent as Keaneau Reeves did in Bram Stoker’s Dracula) who’s convinced the Marquis is exorcising his inner demons through his writing. Of course, the popularity of lash-and-bum tomes like Justine brings the attentions of a Puritan doctor (Michael Caine) who is determined to “break” the Marquis and strike a blow for fuddy-duddies everywhere.

I could go into the loopy plot, over-the-top performances (Rush, in particular, has been to the Harvey Keitel School of Art House Acting) and ironic ending, but none of that’s going to do the job of GETTING YOU TO SEE THIS MOVIE, which you should. Because it’s more fun than a box of bon-bons shaped like tits.

The Marquis, locked in his cell, is a priapic Hannibal Lecter, whose pen and tongue turns everyone around him into heaving fuck-beasts. There’s a Feast of Fools sequence in which the Marquis taunts Caine’s character, who’s recently taken a child bride. There’s a brilliant sequence in which the asylum’s maniacs must transport de Sade’s latest work, sentence by sentence, to a waiting Winslet, like an X-rated game of telephone (a scene which inspires the film’s best line of dialogue, spoken by Rush, and not revealed here). And, pen and paper denied him, de Sade goes to some... ahem... brutal lengths to get his writing read.

Have a dinner of squab, a bottle of Yquem, and instruct your coach driver to get you hence to the nearest picto-graph theater. Get a nice box over the orchestra, crack a package of Venus’ Nipples, and support perversion.

It’s the Christmas season, after all.

MR. MOLLY