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Directed by: John Hillcoat Starring: Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone This movie is a fascinating western in an unusual setting (the stark Australian outback) made in 2005. Written by the musician Nick Cave, it shares many characteristics with Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, most notably with its haunting rock score. Its realism smacks of Deadwood, but with more flies; its lyrical and almost transcendental portions are interwoven masterfully with the frequent and brutal bouts of violence; its bleached, barren setting simultaneously evokes overpowering natural beauty. This movie is more literal than Dead Man, but it concerns itself with the same basic issues: the indigenous population, morality, violence, and beauty. The basic story revolves around a wonderfully played cavalry captain (Ray Winstone) who captures two brothers, Charlie and Mike Burns. Until recently they were part of an outlaw gang lead by their older brother Arthur which carries out brutal killings in the area and lives in a cave up in the rocky hills. The Captain threatens to hang Mikey, basically still a boy, unless Charlie finds his elusive brother and kills him within nine days, in which case both he and Mikey are promised pardons. This relatively simple plot becomes a complicated moral web filled with death and reflection. I highly recommend this film. RATING: 5 PROS: Hyper-realistic, lyrical, beautifully shot CONS: Possibly too brutal ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421238/
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# ? Dec 7, 2006 05:00 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 09:11 |
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Saw it a while ago because I'd heard really good things, and was incredibly disappointed. This movie felt like twenty pages of script stretched into a full-length film. I understand what the director was going for with all the long, lingering shots of the barren landscape, but he went way overboard with it. Everything just seemed to move so slowly. There were one or two cool scenes, in particular when Guy Pearce gets a spear thrown through his chest but they were not enough to make me enjoy this movie. The premise was intriguing, though, and I wouldn't mind seeing another movie that did it justice. Rating: 1.5/5
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# ? Dec 10, 2006 03:02 |
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ShakeZula posted:Saw it a while ago because I'd heard really good things, and was incredibly disappointed. I agree completely. The film had a lot of promise with its brutal portrayal of frontier life, but is hampered by a lack of actual content. I never was able to really connect with Guy Pearce's character at all, because throughout the movie he says probably less than 10 lines total. In fact, throughout the entire movie there is a suprising lack of dialogue. I think this movie could have benefited greatly from a running narrative from Guy Pearce's character, explaining the situation, and his thoughts, ect. Anything to fill in the long stretches of nothing-ness. 2/5
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# ? Dec 12, 2006 23:09 |
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This movie is quietly tense in a way that will eventually make you want to pause it and go and get some fresh air. The sheer since of total isolation you feel as the characters are stuck out in the middle of nowhere is enough to make your skin crawl, and you begin to understand how people with no connection to a "civilized" world can quickly degenerate into frothing madmen. Which happens. Graphically. It's not an action movie. It's more of a character movie as the characters begin to unravel and you understand why they did what they did, from Guy Pearce's stark, desperate Charlie Burns to Winstone's gruff and fevered Captain Stanley, both of them men who are trying to save something in an uncaring world of chaos. Even though this is definitely a character movie, it's still violent as all hell. I've never actually seen a head explode on screen, and it has a torture scene that makes The Passion of The Christ look like something out of the Teletubbies. It's not for the faint of heart, as you have close-up seats to rape, murder, and torture in ways I had never thought possible before. But it needs this. It needs to show you wanton cruelty so that when the characters finally do take a moral stance, you understand why. The word for this movie is, "intense." 4/5
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# ? Dec 24, 2006 18:13 |