Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Here’s A-Bone with some more Sundance stuff. I wish someone... ANYONE... had gone to see HUSTLE & FLOW, but I’m not complaining too loudly, because our spies did a tremendous job of trying to see as much as they could. Check this out:
Hey Harry,
A-Bone here with a few more Sundance reviews for you. First up is…
Brothers (spoilers)
I was going to refrain from talking about genitals at all in this review, but it is Sundance, and what’s more Sundance than starting off right away with some gratuitous full frontal male nudity. That’s what this film did.
Anyway, all genitals aside… The story revolves around two brothers (hence the ingenious title), one of which is a nice guy (Michael) and the other (Jannik) a total bastard fuck up. Michael is an upstanding Major in the Danish military with a hot wife (Sarah, played by Connie Nielsen) and two young daughters. At the beginning Michael informs his troops that they are going to Afghanistan real soon, and he tells them while they are all showering (that’s where the male nudity comes from). After that duty he goes to pick up Jannik who has just been released from jail after serving time for assaulting a woman. To keep this review from being a hundred pages I’m going to zoom through the rest. Michael is promptly shipped off the Afghanistan and his helicopter is shot down and explodes into a massive fireball. Back in Denmark, after Michael’s funeral, Jannik becomes more responsible and starts helping out Sarah and the girls. But what’s this? Michael’s not dead and he gets taken prisoner by some Afghan fighters who force him to kill another Danish troop if he wants to live. Meanwhile, Jannik and Sarah get quite comfortable and share a big ol’ snog. Then lucky Michael gets rescued, and goes back to Denmark, where he gets the feeling that his family now prefers Jannik to him. There are hints that Sarah and Jannik slept together but it never says outright. So Michael goes a bit crazy after seeing the family of the man he killed, and trashes his house and beats up Jannik and his wife and assaults a cop and goes to jail.
If I had one word to sum up the entire movie it would be “forced”. It feels like the writer is taking you through a laundry list of actions that need to happen to get to the drama they want. Everything is a tool. Now, I know that as a screenwriter you need to use tools to get certain things done, but for heaven’s sake you don’t want it to feel like that’s what is going on. And you need to use the right tool for the right job. For instance, Afghanistan is used to get rid of Michael for a while, and that is all it is used for. I’m not saying they needed to make a broad political comment on what is happening in the world right now, but give us a little context to what’s going on and make it fucking matter! He could have been shipwrecked on a desert island for what they wanted to do.
Also, remember how I said Michael’s helicopter exploded in a massive fireball? That’s what happened. It was a long shot of the helicopter crashing into the ground and REALLY exploding. Guess how he was found by the Afghan fighters. He was lying on the ground with a little cut on his head and he could immediately walk. Jesus.
Another problem was more directorial. There was no sense of time frame. When Jannik and Sarah get a bit cozy I had no idea if Michael had been gone for 2 days, a week, or a fucking year. And then the icing on the cake was a God awful sappy song in English during the credits.
I know I’m being really mean, but there were some good things as well. There was actually some good humor in it, mostly from Jannik who is pretty funny. But some of the other humor felt extremely forced. There were also some really intense scenes, mainly when Michael flips out. But there were some other “intense” scenes that elicited some giggles from the audience. That’s never a good thing.
After all that I was mostly angry that I didn’t get to see Connie Nielsen naked, but had to look at bunch of Danish guy’s wieners.
Three Extremes (no spoilers)
I was lucky enough to get to see midnight screening of this last Saturday in Downtown Salt Lake. I don’t want to give anything away so this’ll be quick.
Dumplings (China) – Very good, but very disturbing. You could actually hear people squirming in their seats in certain parts. All I know is the foley artist should get some kind of award.
Cut (Korea) – This one was by far the most entertaining of the three. It was funny, it was awful, but it was mostly just plain old fun.
Box – (Japan) – This was quite good as well. A lot slower moving than the other two, but quite interesting right up until the last jolt.
Mysterious Skin (minor spoilers)
Well, it just wouldn’t be Sundance without the gay porn. A few of us have a secondary name for the festival. We call it Man-dance. However that name springs from the amount of movies that seem like they throw in the gayness because it’s “so indie” to shoot some gay porn. Mysterious Skin doesn’t fall into that group. This is treatment of a serious subject matter, and each and every one of the gay sex scenes are completely justified and give us new information to mull over.
I don’t want to give much away because it’s a film that needs to be seen and I couldn’t really do the story justice, so I’ll be brief. It follows the parallel lives of two boys, both of which were molested by their little league coach at a young age. They don’t say it right away, but Araki doesn’t exactly hide it. One of them, Brian Lackey, blocks the whole thing out and replaces it with fantasies of alien abduction and the other, Neil McCormick, turns into a male prostitute.
I’ve seen some of Gregg Araki’s other stuff so I knew what to expect (sort of) but a lot of other people in the theater didn’t, and many walked out. I was totally engrossed in it though. I felt for both these guys so bad, what this monster of a person had done to them and it made me angry and sad at the same time.
For such intense subject matter there was this strange smattering of humor through much of it, especially at the beginning with a ton of cool 80’s references. Then there was Brady’s mom who was so Leave It To Beaver at the most inopportune times.
The cinematography and directing were both really great as well, at least for my particular tastes. It had a very earthy feel to it, very real, very down and dirty. Araki didn’t shy away from showing too much either. He takes the sex scenes and beats you over the head with them until you want to scream for it to stop, which is probably the way Neil was feeling at the same time.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a pretty damn good job as the severely disturbed Neil, but for me Brady Corbet stole the show as the alien obsessed Brian. All in all, it was a good final Sundance movie for me. I would have been angry had my last one been Brothers. I’d still be steaming over all that Danish cock. That came out wrong.
Brothers – 2 out of 5
3 Extremes – 4 out of 5
Mysterious Skin – 4 out of 5
Till next year I suppose,
A-Bone
I keep hearing that the feature length version of DUMPLINGS kicks the crap out of the short version, which is evidently the high point of 3 EXTREMES. I think I’m going to try to see that first, then check out the anthology.
Thanks for the reviews, A-Bone. See you next year.
"Moriarty" out.
