Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I love David Gordon Green’s first two films, so I’m rabidly interested in anything about UNDERTOW. Let’s dig right in...
Hi Harry, Moriarty, etc...
Saw a couple movies at the Toronto film fest that seem to have eluded reviewers. Seeing a few more later in the week, but for now...
UNDERTOW by David Gordon Green
I love Green's first two films, George Washington and All the Real Girls, so it was exciting to be able to check out Undertow at the fest. Dermot Mulroney plays John Munn, the widowed father of two boys, Chris (Jamie Bell) and Tim (Devon Alan). They live in backwoods Georgia without much contact with the world. One day, John's sleazy brother Deel (Josh Lucas) shows up at the house after a stint in prison. Deel is clearly interested in a gift that John inherited from their father, a gift that was supposed to have been split between the two brothers. When Deel discovers the loot, he kills John, but the kids escape. Deel is forced to chase Chris and Tim through Georgia as they try to hide from their father's killer.
Undertow is both a thoughtful drama, in line with Green's other work, and a highly intense thriller. Lucas takes a break from his job as an up-and-coming Hollywood leading man to play Deel, a truly terrifying entity in the film. Bell was superbly cast after a meeting with Green in the U.K. where he expressed interest in trying out a southern accent. Like Green's other films, it's a bit slow at points, and some of the plot is a bit thin (Chris doesn't think anyone will believe he didn't kill his own father, while the obvious suspect would clearly be his convict uncle, thus enabling the chase).
Still, Green, who has a real talent for finding great performances in just about everyone he meets, adds to an already fine body of work.
HAVEN by Frank E. Flowers
This review has to be prefaced by its audience. One of the stars of Haven is the now-uber famous Orlando Bloom, and he was in attendance. I've been to a lot of films at the fest over the past five years or so, but I have never seen the kind of fanfare that surrounded Bloom. The film was held up for about 30 minutes while Bloom posed for photos and signed autographs for masses of screaming fans. A girl in front of me looked like she was going to have a heart attack when he walked by. The film was also a hotly anticipated ticket at the fest, with Kevin Bacon and Emily Mortimer also in attendance.
So what is Haven? Well, it's a complex drama about the lives of teens and a couple of investment bankers in the Cayman Islands. The film follows a group of Americans, Caymanians and British who are making their lives in the peculiar nation, which is a tax shelter and home to millions of dollars in money that belongs to no one in particular. The film centres primarily around Carl (Bill Paxton) and his daughter Pippa (Agnes Bruckner), two Americans who are forced to flee Miami when the feds arrive to take money launderer Carl away to tax court; Shy (Bloom) and Andrea (Zoe Saldana), a couple who Andrea's family heavily disapproves of; and the Brits, Mr. Allan (Stephen Dillane) and his dysfunctional family.
The twisted plot too complicated to explain, and in some cases too complex to even relate to the audience. There are scenes in the movie that make next to no sense at all. The ethnicity of Bloom's character isn't really clear, and is made less clear by the fact that he flip flops between a Caymanian and British accent over the course of the film.
That said, Haven is an interesting first film for Flowers. Somebody after the film asked if his writing was influenced by Tarantino to which Flowers replied "I am a fan of the cinema." Sure, a moderate Tarantino influence is evident in the film, but what flashy out-of-sequence film doesn't seem kind of like Pulp Fiction these days? I would say the more obvious comparison is to Amores Perros. In fact, I got the same sort of feeling as I did in that film's third part where it was sort of like, "Of course there is a third part. The movie just isn't long enough, right?"
I can't really do the film justice, so I'll say that Flowers has produced a solid first effort, if maybe one that could use a little editing.
Peppermint.
Thanks. Nice work. Keep ‘em coming as you see more at the fest, okay?
"Moriarty" out.
