Slow West (2015)
Felony (2013)
A treatise on "What goes around, comes around". On doing what's right because, in the end, it's the only thing to do. And on the age-old unwritten mandate that "Cops take care of their own."
That's a lot to bite off and chew, mate. The good news is that Director Matthew Saville and the stable of fine Australian acting talent at his behest more than pass muster here. Everyone steps up impressively to deliver a rock solid dramatic thriller with a constant current of conscience serving as it's foundation.
Namely, Tom Wilkinson is outstanding as ever, Joel Edgerton (so good in last year's "The Gift") is as dependable as fans like me have come to expect and Jai Courtney comports himself just fine, thank you. Wilkinson is the reason to watch "Felony". As great as he is, the veteran inveterate character actor continues to operate largely under the radar.
The time has long since passed that the damned radar zero in.
The Revenant (2015)
Academy Award winner Alejandro González Iñárritu ("Birdman") directed, co-wrote and co-produced "The Revenant" with the indisputable intent of transporting his audience back to the primitive and animalistic conditions inherent to the brutal and untamed North American wilderness of the early 19th Century. Having experienced this masterpiece in modern filmmaking now myself, I feel qualified to deliver the following declaration in the most resounding manner possible...MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!
With each stunning scene of grim grandeur Iñárritu passed before my eyes, I was unwaveringly riveted, hurtled headlong, swept into every successive moment, captivated in a whirling dervish of surging vitality.
From ultra-violent Native (and non-indigenous) American ambushes, to excruciatingly crude cleansing of heinous bodily wounds, to a Grizzly Bear mauling that for all the world appears to be actually happening, I was rendered at once exhausted and exhilarated in the wake of a furiously unrelenting assault on my emotions.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of his career as real-life frontier legend Hugh Glass, "The Revenant" is a ferociously ambitious epic, presented essentially in three distinct acts: Escape, Survival and Revenge. Tom Hardy's perfect performance as reprehensible antagonist and the reviled target of Glass's relentless scorn, John Fitzgerald, serves to further solidify the richly gifted actor, together with DiCaprio, among the genuine elite of their craft.
There is a deeply effecting, albeit brief, Epilogue to "The Revenant", as the nearly two and a half hours of full-force frenzy that has preceded it comes to a movingly quiet climax.
An unspeakably tortured soul has found peace. At the end of a long and agonizing odyssey, and at long last, enduring peace.
Buried (2010)
I am not the world's biggest fan boy of Ryan Reynolds. It's not that I vehemently dislike the guy or anything. Just not drinkin' the Kool-Aid he's serving up in general.
This said...man, did RR dominate in "Buried". Which only makes sense, as he was the only dude (or chick for that matter) in the whole damn movie-and in exceedingly extreme close-up for the entire ride! His rendering of a civilian hostage buried alive in a wooden coffin beneath the war-ravaged Iraqi desert is viciously fearsome in it's raw brutality. Reynolds rages here, unleashing torrents of savage emotion in feral eruptions as threadbare as they are explosive.
It just didn't need to be milked for over an hour and a half . No knock on Reynolds, certainly, but that's even asking too much of such revered acting royalty as Laurence Olivier or Gregory Peck. And, hell, even Meryl Streep for crissakes. Evidently, Director Rodrigo Cortés thought otherwise. And in so doing, he wound up shoveling sand on a resoundingly superior performance.
Lamb (2015)
First things first. “Lamb” explores a liaison between a male and a female which is unequivocally inappropriate, unhealthy and unsettling. Not to mention illegal. One half of this couple is a 47-year-old man. The other, an 11-year-old girl. And while the bond forged between them never becomes a sexual one, it is a relationship that categorically made me feel consistently uncomfortable and squeamish.
With personal position firmly established and hardly exclusive, what “Lamb” is ultimately about is two helplessly lost people consumed in a desperate search for someone who cares. And someone to care for. I definitely can never condone the manner in which this compulsion is consummated here. However, I completely understand this fundamental need burning in us all. This is a film that tests in boldly serious and stark terms our limits of what defines such integral human connection.
Ross Partridge writes, directs and stars as David Lamb, a man so emotionally damaged that he sees a child as the savior of his severely scarred soul. Partridge’s role is a massively difficult one to deliver upon effectively, constantly balancing precariously as he must upon the most sensitive of fine lines. His personification of David maintains the essential equilibrium demanded throughout, ultimately delivering as he does so an astonishing performance that is at once loathsome as it is emotionally cataclysmic.
Oona Laurence (Southpaw) is positively transcendent. Appearing to be even younger than she is supposed to be here, Laurence infuses her understandably deeply conflicted character of Tommie with an impressively mature perspective intertwined with a naïve innocence. She owns the final moments of this movie. They are powerfully effecting. Expect that they will stay with you, as they surely have done with me.
Partridge vividly conveys the evolution of this peculiar pair’s partnership through his wholesale contrast in setting. Beginning with a series of scenes from a dispiriting urban underbelly, the director deftly shifts the environment markedly, transporting us to and among the spectacular wide open spaces of the American western prairie. It is a sense of Shangri-La realized-a blissful place of near perfection for the curious couple. And it is a state of being we all know can not realistically be sustained.
“Lamb” will no doubt meet with controversial reception by audiences and critics alike. Be this as it may, Partridge has succeeded mightily in crafting a motion picture that I believe ascends well above the territory of simple shock value and exploitation. And should you choose to experience his story, and can somehow permit yourself, while certainly to not ignore, but rather interpret beyond the inherently troubling subject matter it examines so unflinchingly, you may find, as did I, that you have been uniquely and richly rewarded.
Everything Will Be Okay (Alles wird gut) (2015)
The Oscar-shortlisted German Short "Everything Will Be Okay (Alles wird gut)" touched me in a particularly personal fashion. As a father, I found it wrenching to process this chronicle of a scheduled visit between a divorced dad and his young daughter as it rapidly disintegrates into a dark and ominous journey of utter desperation and debilitating sadness.
Though I am not divorced, I certainly identify with the overwhelming love that Michael (a searingly heartbreaking portrayal from Simon Schwarz) has for his baby girl, Lea (8-year-old Julia Pointner in a stunningly moving performance beyond her years). Without reservation I can not condone the extremes to which this deeply troubled man goes to secure his child for his very own. Still, I absolutely comprehend the all-consuming emotions invested in doing whatever a parent must to care for and protect those whom you love literally more than you love your own life.
At different moments in the film, little Lea is assured by first her father and later her mother that "Everything will be okay". Yet in the wake of the spirit-shattering final scene we have just witnessed, we are sure only of this: While it is a comfort well intentioned, for this conflicted child caught in the crossfire of scathingly contemptuous parental warfare, it is a promise that can never truly be honored.
The Best Offer (2013)
Geoffrey...Rush...is...an...actor. Are we clear on this? Damn, is this guy good at his job. The veteran Aussie is the reason to watch the exquisite mystery drama "The Best Offer".
Rush gives his all as he gives us Virgil Oldman, a lonely auction house owner and expert art appraiser/collector who operates both above and well below the line of legitimacy. His partner in chicanery, co-constituent of acting royalty Donald Sutherland, together trick and take at will from wealthy yet unwary bidders. And all the while Oldman continues adding to a personal treasure trove of "painted ladies" on private display in a secret room of his sprawling mansion.
The Italian filmmaking tandem of Director Giuseppe Tornatore and Music maestro Ennio Morricone uniquely unify to make each scene seem entirely essential. And with nearly every image, the raw and rousing sonic power of the extraordinary symphonic and choral soundtrack almost assumes the dimension of another character in this consistently captivating tale.
They say "You can't con a con man." That may well be. However, as we come to discover in "The Best Offer", toss love into the mix and all bets are off.
No matter how smooth the swindler.
talhotblond (2012)
"talhotblond" is a passable made for television docudrama account of a tragic and bizarre 2005 case of fabricated internet identities and murderous jealousy.
Courteney Cox does an adequate job of directing the mostly uninspired(ing) cast (the former "Friends" star also co-produced and appears in her film, which Cox reportedly shot over just 16 days), with Garret Dillahunt (Fox TV's "Raising Hope") emerging as the most commendable of the bunch. Dillahunt is suitably creepy as a mild-mannered middle-aged Midwest husband and father who comes completely unhinged with obsession over an online persona he knows only as "talhotblond", whom he believes to be a teenage girl.
Really, can anything good possibly come of this?
Yeah, it could have been better. But if you've seen any measure of flicks fully fashioned for the tube, then you have almost undoubtedly seen way worse.
Wish You Were Here (2012)
Two young Australian couples-one married, one dating-see their dream Cambodian vacation become a nightmare in "Wish You Were Here". It's all fun and "ecstasy" until one of the quartet ominously goes missing, never to make the trip back Down Under.
This mystery/family drama hybrid consistently engages, and provides one of the most tenuous "and they all lived happily ever after" endings in recent memory.
All with one notable exception, that is.
I came away from "Slow West" with the feeling that I had just seen the economy version of the insta-classic epic "The Revenant". Both deal with a raw and rugged sojourn through the Western U.S. of the 1800s. This chronicle of a young foreigner in search of his lost and one true love simply does so in a more passive and less enduring manner.
Not that there aren't some good things to be cultivated from what is clearly a passion/vanity project for the film's star and co exec-producer, the recently ubiquitous Michael Fassbender. With "Slow West", Writer/Director John Maclean fashions a slow burning story, all the while deliberately building toward a violently tumultuous climax. Along the way I found Maclean's methods to be part pretentious, part conscientious, and his use of "something really big is coming, you just wait" foreshadowing heavy, pronounced and (perhaps overly) aplenty.
Shot on location with New Zealand serving as a more than serviceable Old West setting (some back-story scenes were also filmed in Scotland) and with a predominantly non-American cast, "Slow West" presents an intriguing international interpretation of the stark brutality inherent in the territory of the time.
As the movie concludes, it is the strangest of makeshift parents and children with whom we are left to consider. And we realize full well that this is a family forged not of blood, but rather fromblood.
A treatise on "What goes around, comes around". On doing what's right because, in the end, it's the only thing to do. And on the age-old unwritten mandate that "Cops take care of their own."
That's a lot to bite off and chew, mate. The good news is that Director Matthew Saville and the stable of fine Australian acting talent at his behest more than pass muster here. Everyone steps up impressively to deliver a rock solid dramatic thriller with a constant current of conscience serving as it's foundation.
Namely, Tom Wilkinson is outstanding as ever, Joel Edgerton (so good in last year's "The Gift") is as dependable as fans like me have come to expect and Jai Courtney comports himself just fine, thank you. Wilkinson is the reason to watch "Felony". As great as he is, the veteran inveterate character actor continues to operate largely under the radar.
The time has long since passed that the damned radar zero in.
The Revenant (2015)
Academy Award winner Alejandro González Iñárritu ("Birdman") directed, co-wrote and co-produced "The Revenant" with the indisputable intent of transporting his audience back to the primitive and animalistic conditions inherent to the brutal and untamed North American wilderness of the early 19th Century. Having experienced this masterpiece in modern filmmaking now myself, I feel qualified to deliver the following declaration in the most resounding manner possible...MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!
With each stunning scene of grim grandeur Iñárritu passed before my eyes, I was unwaveringly riveted, hurtled headlong, swept into every successive moment, captivated in a whirling dervish of surging vitality.
From ultra-violent Native (and non-indigenous) American ambushes, to excruciatingly crude cleansing of heinous bodily wounds, to a Grizzly Bear mauling that for all the world appears to be actually happening, I was rendered at once exhausted and exhilarated in the wake of a furiously unrelenting assault on my emotions.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of his career as real-life frontier legend Hugh Glass, "The Revenant" is a ferociously ambitious epic, presented essentially in three distinct acts: Escape, Survival and Revenge. Tom Hardy's perfect performance as reprehensible antagonist and the reviled target of Glass's relentless scorn, John Fitzgerald, serves to further solidify the richly gifted actor, together with DiCaprio, among the genuine elite of their craft.
There is a deeply effecting, albeit brief, Epilogue to "The Revenant", as the nearly two and a half hours of full-force frenzy that has preceded it comes to a movingly quiet climax.
An unspeakably tortured soul has found peace. At the end of a long and agonizing odyssey, and at long last, enduring peace.
Buried (2010)
I am not the world's biggest fan boy of Ryan Reynolds. It's not that I vehemently dislike the guy or anything. Just not drinkin' the Kool-Aid he's serving up in general.
This said...man, did RR dominate in "Buried". Which only makes sense, as he was the only dude (or chick for that matter) in the whole damn movie-and in exceedingly extreme close-up for the entire ride! His rendering of a civilian hostage buried alive in a wooden coffin beneath the war-ravaged Iraqi desert is viciously fearsome in it's raw brutality. Reynolds rages here, unleashing torrents of savage emotion in feral eruptions as threadbare as they are explosive.
It just didn't need to be milked for over an hour and a half . No knock on Reynolds, certainly, but that's even asking too much of such revered acting royalty as Laurence Olivier or Gregory Peck. And, hell, even Meryl Streep for crissakes. Evidently, Director Rodrigo Cortés thought otherwise. And in so doing, he wound up shoveling sand on a resoundingly superior performance.
Lamb (2015)
First things first. “Lamb” explores a liaison between a male and a female which is unequivocally inappropriate, unhealthy and unsettling. Not to mention illegal. One half of this couple is a 47-year-old man. The other, an 11-year-old girl. And while the bond forged between them never becomes a sexual one, it is a relationship that categorically made me feel consistently uncomfortable and squeamish.
With personal position firmly established and hardly exclusive, what “Lamb” is ultimately about is two helplessly lost people consumed in a desperate search for someone who cares. And someone to care for. I definitely can never condone the manner in which this compulsion is consummated here. However, I completely understand this fundamental need burning in us all. This is a film that tests in boldly serious and stark terms our limits of what defines such integral human connection.
Ross Partridge writes, directs and stars as David Lamb, a man so emotionally damaged that he sees a child as the savior of his severely scarred soul. Partridge’s role is a massively difficult one to deliver upon effectively, constantly balancing precariously as he must upon the most sensitive of fine lines. His personification of David maintains the essential equilibrium demanded throughout, ultimately delivering as he does so an astonishing performance that is at once loathsome as it is emotionally cataclysmic.
Oona Laurence (Southpaw) is positively transcendent. Appearing to be even younger than she is supposed to be here, Laurence infuses her understandably deeply conflicted character of Tommie with an impressively mature perspective intertwined with a naïve innocence. She owns the final moments of this movie. They are powerfully effecting. Expect that they will stay with you, as they surely have done with me.
Partridge vividly conveys the evolution of this peculiar pair’s partnership through his wholesale contrast in setting. Beginning with a series of scenes from a dispiriting urban underbelly, the director deftly shifts the environment markedly, transporting us to and among the spectacular wide open spaces of the American western prairie. It is a sense of Shangri-La realized-a blissful place of near perfection for the curious couple. And it is a state of being we all know can not realistically be sustained.
“Lamb” will no doubt meet with controversial reception by audiences and critics alike. Be this as it may, Partridge has succeeded mightily in crafting a motion picture that I believe ascends well above the territory of simple shock value and exploitation. And should you choose to experience his story, and can somehow permit yourself, while certainly to not ignore, but rather interpret beyond the inherently troubling subject matter it examines so unflinchingly, you may find, as did I, that you have been uniquely and richly rewarded.
Everything Will Be Okay (Alles wird gut) (2015)
The Oscar-shortlisted German Short "Everything Will Be Okay (Alles wird gut)" touched me in a particularly personal fashion. As a father, I found it wrenching to process this chronicle of a scheduled visit between a divorced dad and his young daughter as it rapidly disintegrates into a dark and ominous journey of utter desperation and debilitating sadness.
Though I am not divorced, I certainly identify with the overwhelming love that Michael (a searingly heartbreaking portrayal from Simon Schwarz) has for his baby girl, Lea (8-year-old Julia Pointner in a stunningly moving performance beyond her years). Without reservation I can not condone the extremes to which this deeply troubled man goes to secure his child for his very own. Still, I absolutely comprehend the all-consuming emotions invested in doing whatever a parent must to care for and protect those whom you love literally more than you love your own life.
At different moments in the film, little Lea is assured by first her father and later her mother that "Everything will be okay". Yet in the wake of the spirit-shattering final scene we have just witnessed, we are sure only of this: While it is a comfort well intentioned, for this conflicted child caught in the crossfire of scathingly contemptuous parental warfare, it is a promise that can never truly be honored.
The Best Offer (2013)
Geoffrey...Rush...is...an...actor. Are we clear on this? Damn, is this guy good at his job. The veteran Aussie is the reason to watch the exquisite mystery drama "The Best Offer".
Rush gives his all as he gives us Virgil Oldman, a lonely auction house owner and expert art appraiser/collector who operates both above and well below the line of legitimacy. His partner in chicanery, co-constituent of acting royalty Donald Sutherland, together trick and take at will from wealthy yet unwary bidders. And all the while Oldman continues adding to a personal treasure trove of "painted ladies" on private display in a secret room of his sprawling mansion.
The Italian filmmaking tandem of Director Giuseppe Tornatore and Music maestro Ennio Morricone uniquely unify to make each scene seem entirely essential. And with nearly every image, the raw and rousing sonic power of the extraordinary symphonic and choral soundtrack almost assumes the dimension of another character in this consistently captivating tale.
They say "You can't con a con man." That may well be. However, as we come to discover in "The Best Offer", toss love into the mix and all bets are off.
No matter how smooth the swindler.
talhotblond (2012)
"talhotblond" is a passable made for television docudrama account of a tragic and bizarre 2005 case of fabricated internet identities and murderous jealousy.
Courteney Cox does an adequate job of directing the mostly uninspired(ing) cast (the former "Friends" star also co-produced and appears in her film, which Cox reportedly shot over just 16 days), with Garret Dillahunt (Fox TV's "Raising Hope") emerging as the most commendable of the bunch. Dillahunt is suitably creepy as a mild-mannered middle-aged Midwest husband and father who comes completely unhinged with obsession over an online persona he knows only as "talhotblond", whom he believes to be a teenage girl.
Really, can anything good possibly come of this?
Yeah, it could have been better. But if you've seen any measure of flicks fully fashioned for the tube, then you have almost undoubtedly seen way worse.
Wish You Were Here (2012)
Two young Australian couples-one married, one dating-see their dream Cambodian vacation become a nightmare in "Wish You Were Here". It's all fun and "ecstasy" until one of the quartet ominously goes missing, never to make the trip back Down Under.
This mystery/family drama hybrid consistently engages, and provides one of the most tenuous "and they all lived happily ever after" endings in recent memory.
All with one notable exception, that is.
This post first appeared on The Quick Flick Critic (***LATEST NEW CONTENT Added To "Documentaries" On 6/6/16***), please read the originial post: here
