David Cronenberg
2012
109 minutes
This is a later David Cronenberg film, which means it's going to have fewer ugly Canadians and more actual well-known pretty Hollywood people doing somewhat gross and disturbing things. This one has the sparkly Twilight vampire guy who is now in a bunch of great artsy films together with the John Adams Sideways guy, the one who isn't Paul Bartell.
The vampire guy is a rich busy man who needs a haircut and his daily prostate exam, which is complicated by street protests which block the path of his limo. He manages the prostate exam inside the limo, but the haircut proves to be a little more elusive. You can sympathize. Getting to a barber can be difficult and stressful, which is part of the reason that you eventually got clippers and started just going daily full-on zero guard yourself instead of trying to carefully maintain much more than an eighth of an inch of hair.
In Milwaukee, you had a crazy Russian/Israeli barber who always wore track suits and drank straight from a bottle of vodka in his shop and occasionally would offer you shots from it. His shop was a cozy place to get your hair trimmed.
In Baltimore, you always liked to go to Sherman when he was available, who had a shop near the revival theater that was in a continuing state of chaos. Sherman usually had a moped parked in his shop and when he wasn't cutting hair he would often be producing his own music tracks on a cheap notebook laptop. He had a large terrarium with turtles in it, and there would frequently be empty pizza boxes stacked in the corner of the shop. He had a samurai sword and a baseball bat leaning against the wall, which seemed like a reasonable self defense precaution for someone with a mostly-cash business like his own.
The overall feel of Sherman's barber shop was like someone started filming a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie set in the hood but gave up halfway through and left all the detritus in a barber shop. You liked Sherman because he always remembered the details when you'd come in every two or three weeks for a trim, for which he always charged you ten bucks. His hours were very irregular, but he was often open late to catch people who needed a trim before heading out to the clubs.
Sherman got ejected from his shop around the time work began on the Parkway, the other artsy theater in that neighborhood. The last you heard he had moved to a shop in Old Town Mall, the almost entirely abandoned outdoor pedestrian mall neighborhood a few blocks southeast of your apartment.
Time to choose something different: