The Road (MA15+)
Director: John Hillcoat
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall
Rating: 5/5
112-minutes, now screening
Lovers of literature are bound to be familiar with US author, Cormac McCarthy for works like All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men, but the wider community really came to know of the writer when the Coen brothers adapted the latter title into an award-winning film.
Since their success – and in some instances, long before – filmmakers from independents to the big studios have scrambled to option other titles. In the case of McCarthy’s slight novel The Road, Australian director, John Hillcoat stepped in early to express interest in an adaptation. Hillcoat had form with bleak, disturbing films like Ghosts... of the Civil Dead and the Australian western, The Proposition, and evidently impressed McCarthy with his vision of what The Road could look like on screen.
The resultant film – faithfully scripted by Joe Penhall – is stark, upsetting, and ultimately beautiful. Briefly, the film tells of the relationship between a man and his son in the first decade after the world has been devastated by an unknown catastrophe. Food is scarce, the environment in ruins, and the population of the United States now miniscule, with tribes of cannibals and slave traders roaming the land.
The Man (Viggo Mortensen) has sustained the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) for several years since the fall of civilisation and the loss of the Woman (Charlize Theron). The pair travels through a gloomy grey landscape sustaining each other with the thin hope that relief lies somewhere to the east, and in a stubborn desire to “keep the flame alive” and force the triumph of good.
Theirs is a harrowing, astonishing journey with a surprisingly hopeful ending – be sure to stay through the credits and listen to the accompanying soundscape. Next, we have to wait until 2011 to see what director Todd Field will do with McCarthy’s even more gruesome Blood Meridian.
A precious life that’s rather special
Precious (MA15+)
Director: Lee Daniels
Stars: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey
Rating: 3.5/5
110-minutes, screening from tomorrow (Thur, February 4)
Perhaps this is a cumbersome title, but Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire is executive produced by one Oprah Winfrey, so it would be terrible to miss out on potential audience members by just using one word, especially when the original title, Push could have been confused with last year’s psychic , Hong Kong-based action thriller of the same name.
Sapphire’s novel garnered a huge readership – and Oprah’s patronage – so the film was always going to be an interesting (and precarious) project. The eponymous Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) is a morbidly obese teenage mother struggling to complete her secondary education.
Challenges present themselves on all sides: the conventional schooling system is reluctant to cater to a sixteen-year-old with one child and another on the way; Precious’s psychotic mother, Mary (Mo’Nique) sees her daughter and granddaughter as nothing more than carriages in a gold-plated gravy train; and her absent father only returns when he is horny and sober enough to rape his daughter.
Add to this bullying at school, in the streets near home, and at the hands of her vicious mother, and Precious lives an extraordinarily difficult life.
When her principal recommends relocating to a more specialised schooling environment, Precious initially is reticent; but her new teacher, Blu Rain (Paula Patton), along with a sassy and eclectic group of students, offer new hope.
Like The Road, Precious is a harrowing experience, but in the hands of director, Lee Daniels and screenwriter, Geoffrey Fletcher, the story is a really an old style fairy-tale wrought beautifully in a contemporary context.
THE BINGE - on DVD
Something for everyone
Lake Mungo (M) now available through Madman Entertainment
Departures (M) available February 17 through Madman Entertainment
Bronson (MA15+) available February 10 through Madman Entertainment
Haeundae (M) available February 10 through Madman Entertainment
Mystery, drama, psychosis, and devastation this issue, drawn from such diverse locales as Australia, Japan, England and Korea. Lake Mungo, from Australian director, Joel Anderson is a compelling faux-documentary about a missing teenager who gradually becomes the focus of a much larger mystery, and shows great promise on the part of the director, who very skilfully ratchets up the tension in his story. Thousands of kilometres away in Japan, a young cellist responds to the dissolution of his orchestra by packing up his house and wife to return to the village of his childhood. There, as they struggle to reconstruct their lives, Daigo (Masahiro Motoki) discovers a strange new career path paving the way for recently departed souls. Departures is a beautifully rendered love story-cum-transformative journey, and well deserved its multiple awards.
In Bronson, Danish director, Nicholas Winding Refn – who made the stunning Pusher trilogy – adapts the true story of a lunatic prisoner who terrorised the British justice system. Michael Peterson – aka Charles Bronson – reinvents himself as a version of his hero and spends much of the next four decades in gaol gradually scaling up his outrageous behaviour.
And if disaster flicks are your thing, you can’t go past the latest blockbuster from Korea. Haeundae – directed by Jegyun Yun – sets a number of precarious relationships flailing amid the impending doom of a massive tsunami that threatens to devastate the eponymous city, and features some pretty impressive special effects (below).
