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tohu777
Reviews
Stuart: A Life Backwards (2007)
Brutally human...and offers no easy answers
The first reel of this film is very deceiving: you might well think that it's a kind of dramedy, a clichéd story of a do-gooder yuppie activist expanding his horizons and finding his humanity through an acquaintance with a very quirky homeless man. But it's absolutely nothing of the sort. To judge by interviews with BBC producers, the director, and writer Alexander Masters, the final film matches the intentions they had from the start, to make something that wasn't easy and which captured this man Stuart Shorter in all his complexity.
Master's script is really compelling & tight. But it's the actors who drive the film: Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy together, more often than not in fairly tight sets merely talking. They were already both masters, back when this was filmed.
Tom Hardy's role here bears a vague resemblance to his work in Nicolas Refn's film Bronson; though I'd say that this film is even bleaker and more harrowing than Refn's. The eruption of Stuart's pain and self- hate is shocking, and Hardy doesn't ever hold back. The performance compares well to that of Robin Williams' in The Fisher King. In both cases, the actor enters a state that shocks you into concern for them rather than sitting in admiration of a modulated performance.
This is an incredibly bleak and brutal film, without the comfort of its having been a fiction.
The Purge (2013)
Derivative trash
This is one of those movies that forms a catalog out of the movies (and TV shows) that it's patched together from. First of all, Rod Serling wrote this premise out several times for The Twilight Zone, especially in the "Monsters Are Due On Main Street" episode of 1960. Peckinpah made Straw Dogs more than 40 years ago (!) *and* it was just remade in 2011. Haneke made Funny Games in '97 and then again in 2007 (not to mention his Time of the Wolf, released in-between). The Strangers in 2008 was *much* better than this film. And I guess a retreat to a panic room would've been too obvious a steal from Fincher's film...
Why does a hollow, worthless, by-the-book film like this exist, anyway? Because an "artist" has a burning need to shoot something, but no idea that isn't pre-digested and encased in his DVD collection? Don't bother with this junk--chances are you've seen it before.
The Conjuring (2013)
I love Wan's style, BUT...
the last reel of this movie is a mess: jammed with action and effects, and most of these are heedless of what's come before. It's as if, when the screenwriters become hasty to draw everything to a close, their previously careful characters become similarly reckless and even dumb. The happy/huggy ending skips a bunch of nagging details--because, *really*, this family is left in a world of pain...
There is also the annoying "Based on a true story" conceit, which drags this nonsense (nothing wrong with honest nonsense in movies, per se) into real-world considerations, like: Can kidnap, assault, & attempted murder really be remedied by a DIY "exorcism"? Aren't these "demonologists" breaking the law themselves? (Real talk: "demonologists" are as "real" as Abraham Lincoln the Vampire Slayer.) A "true story" brings up these ethical/moral questions - that's how it goes...
What's with the trend of new movies stealing from/returning to "Poltergeist"? First "Mama"; and now "The Conjuring"...
Every great bit of Wan's economic style in "Insidious" is denied, in this movie. And the presence of Lili Taylor reminds me of that miserable time 14 years ago watching the lousy "The Haunting"...