aristides-1

Director Refn's influences? "The Shining", "Occurence At Owl Creek Bridge" (the granddaddy of this genre) and "Jacob's Ladder", though in fairness to these two great films "Fear X"'s director ignorantly breaks the *rules. Ultimately there's another movie maker who should receive top award for Influence......will name the name later.

*Films that take the full-time ride telling their story only to reveal at the end that everything takes place in a few seconds or minutes of the main character's life have to, repeat, have to, let the audience know that this is what it's all about at the conclusion. "Fear X" fails the test by it's false ending and since the story's structure didn't cleverly lead us all to a Lady or the Tiger ending, one feels cheated.

Most influential director to Refn? Andy Warhol. (Oh, the tedious longness of much of the scenes. Edit you bastard, edit.....you're not Stanley Kubrick!)

(For Someone's Information: An earlier writer commented that Refn had "used Kubrick's photographer (cinematographer?), Larry Smith, from "The Shining" on this movie. "The Shining" was shot by the great John Alcott. Larry Smith is one of two gaffers on "The Shining".

I could not, for the life of me, follow, figure out or understand the story. As the plot advances it too stays incomprehensible. I'm going to guess and say that there was a preproduction story/plot problem that never got sorted out. The producers could never separate the many details that the novel, or any novel, has the time and space to create from the other idea, which was to make a movie about a serial killer and the killer's pursuit by the police. They ended up with too many things happening in a proscribed feature film time limit. Too bad really because they had a solid cast, a director who knows how to move things around and excellent cinematography. In fact, a well made movie that one could enjoy and relax with for a couple of hours.

It's a hard film to critique because of the extremely poor transfer, film to DVD. I picked this up at a local food market and presume that the distributor bottom- lined it.

Had to fight to concentrate on the story because of the visual "muddiness". Literally couldn't always tell what was visually happening.

Story of course has been done plenty of times before as any long-time sci-fi fan knows. I became irritated with the main character in his not figuring out the source of his and the other characters problems. Though I'm not usually unsympathetic to some well placed poetic license being used, the ending of this film, brain transfered to the robot, made me think that the writer/producers didn't have a sure hand on what all the proceeding nihilistic story was leading to. Should have ended with a clean up of the building and a whole new group of test subjects moving in.

This atrocious film shows that untalented hustlers can also get their films made in Australia. Some SPOILER comments intertwined: From the incomprehensible opening having to do with three cons being sprung (by prison officials?) to pull a heist, to the heist itself, shown as a precision job that probably couldn't have been pulled off EVEN with day-by-day, month-by-month practice......something the incarcerated guys couldn't have done.......to the mostly un-understandable language used; the director sub-titled prison argot, which was a good idea, should have sub-titled most of the rest of the movie. Where shall I go from here; too much to choose from. But the scene where on the first day of being back in the joint, one of the brother gang members invades the private space of a prison shrink......and then begins an (ultimate) successful seduction......to the "comic" third brother, who falls deeply in love with a woman casually chosen on the street for a carjacking, this movie virtually always makes the wrong, non-logical, non-real and non-believable way of telling a story. Oh yes, for those of you who pick up a movie's press kit and are told that a movie is an "action/ comedy", the using of the word "comedy" isn't supposed to do the job of making you smile or laugh. One needs humorous scenes or funny moments to meet that description. I'm limited to a thousand words and could take this film apart, almost scene by scene but let me add the following: there are more than several key scenes where results happen that are never explained (more SPOILER): How did the corrupt lawyer possibly figure out where the stolen $10 million was hidden but since he was apparently the one who stole it why would he then, six months later, track down the three brothers and threaten them with prison if they didn't go after a huge heist? Since he tried to have them murdered previously, what kind of schmuck would be so out of it to approach the would-be victims? Awful, awful movie.

However brief the image was, displayed during a get-a-way scene when an

animal was struck in the road by a vehicle, it was so clearly a stuffed deer that it made me laugh out loud.

Not quite as funny but still amusing was the uniform of the cop. Director's mother must have been a myopic seamstress. These two things, of the many,

many other things already covered by others leads me to nominate Mr. Roth for the *Ed Woods Award.

*Unlike Woods' movies this one did have more than a few bucks spent on it yet it looks more cheaply made than it should. This takes a certain kind of talent.

TO BE READ ONLY BY PEOPLE WHO HAVE SEEN THE MOVIE (This critique is all spoiler).

This movie could have ended with Ned behind bars waiting for his murder trial followed by the final beach scene with Matty. That it didn't do this has to do with the scenes in between. These scenes are: Ned snaps out of his jailhouse funk and says outloud, "she's alive!" He then [obviously] asks his friend the detective, J.A., who solved the case and arrested him, to come to jail for a visit and tries to convince the cop about his realization. J.A. appears to be unconvinced. Then, some time later, Ned gets a high school yearbook in the mail and finds out whose identity Matty stole and in so doing, he (and we) learn Matty's true identity. He now has a name, use of which, among other things, would be on a passport. So now the final scene of Matty, living her long-dreamed of wish of being wealthy and being in an exotic place, brusque to her gigolo, moodily dreaming of Ned perhaps, has a different meaning. Ned will pass on the valuable information to the bulldog detective J.A. and, spare us, the viewers, of a cumbersome too long story and movie. Finding her, extraditing her, trying her, etc. We get to think about the future; her great surprise when she's busted and, yes, Matty get hers!

Rarely, almost never, does a botched costume tell you everything you have to know about a movie but in this self-described "low budget" film, one of the lead's costumes in fact is a warning signal. The so-called "professional ", "best there is" hit man (played by Scott Glen) is saddled, pun intended, with an ill-fitting suit that he wears throughout most of the movie. I've worked on low budget films in my career but when a director or producer saves money, not by serving pizza for meals instead of catering the

film, but stints on the leading man's suit, then you know you are in trouble. The suit looks like it came out of the bargain floor, discounted, one-size-fits-all, section of some low price emporium. It fits him like a glove; an oversized glove on a small person, let's say. Once a thing like this starts a movie then something as simple as the Scott Glen character acting "hired gun cool" becomes an item that causes smiles, if not laughter. (I must also mention the need for the

screenwriter to try and imitate the atrocious dialogue Tarantino has inflicted on movies and have the hit man, about to practice his trade, "talk" about it to the victim. Isn't it possible that these folks, in real life, just ........do it......and move on to their home life?

Watanabe should have been Hopalong Cassidy and Cruise the Gaby Hayes character: we're supposed to believe that Watanabe's Last Samurai would find Cruise's "Nelson" interesting? Interesting to keep around....to keep alive...to introduce, or rather force, into the household of his sister, the man who Nelson just recently killed? (Cruise also doesn't seem to age, to mature, as the years go on; the Gary Coleman of his age.) The LS defers to Cruise in climactic battle scenes, even though Cruise is not trained in the ways of sword/bow & arrow, etc. warfare? What possibly can the LS learn from this shallow twerp?

Loved the epic last battle scene though: a final charge, on horseback, shrapnel-laden Howitzer shells notwithstanding, into the breech with well trained soldiers firing the latest in rifles....missing the two hero's. Then the non- Saturday-nite-specials; 200 round a minute Gatling guns enter the picture and the director actually shows contact as the bullets explode into our two heros (sort of like the bad-fantasy ending of DiPalma's "Scarface" with Pacino taking in more lead than produced at Shiloh.......and still not dying!) who will not be stopped! They cannot be stopped! Honor, Zwick-style, insists that a ritual suicide be performed, on the battlefield, by the second banana, cradled by Nelson. All the soldiers, who presumably had friends and/or buddies killed, show "respect" and let the Great Man die, as well as letting the loathsome white foreigner live.

If one needs additional proof to stay away from "epic" Hollywood movies and virtually any Tom Cruise movie of the past ten years, then visit a friend"s house who has just paid the rental for "The Last Samurai" and experience this movie.

The young poet Audrey is shown writing an epic love ode to her boyfriend. Montage of her on her bare-roomed floor with voice over ("I want to be your wristwatch band so that every pulse throb will subtly remind you of my eternal love", etc.), images of this young Romeo, a spoiled-looking kid with all the depth of a ham sandwich. More poetic verbal images and then the [unintentional] comic moment, seen in a silent image: Romeo and Juliet on the balcony of the Chelsea Hotel where in a Romantic Moment that justifies all her deathless love and poetry....he spits, intentionally, on a sidewalk passerby many feet below. Yes, what Musedom he provides for the piss-elegant poetry of her young being. Priceless! (And, oh yes, a few lines must be dedicated to the usual Kris Kristoferson tired, substance abused, world weary artiste performance: would you want to spend 15 minutes with this drunken dope at a party?)

[SOME SPOILER COMMENTS) The director Dahl, borrows from earlier made good, bad and ugly terror/ supernatural films and comes up with ........The Truck Driver From Hell. Too many film critics, probably fearful of being called snobs, seize on some of the derivative moments from earlier styles of this genre and cry "Special Movie". Early parts of the movie are somewhat believable-within-the-genre. After all, this isn't a documentary or realistic thriller. But as the filmmaker, desperate to continue the one-simple-idea story, adds (or piles on) supernatural reasons for things happening as they do he violates some basic rules; supernatural powers on the part of the truck driver allows him to have an omnicience about where

victims-to-be are located but are extended to character behavior that is not

believable: a group of policeman,guns drawn, having found a murdered motel

clerk, burst into a room where a young woman is bound, unable to speak, to a

chair. One of the main characters, who they have never seen or know about, is caught standing behind her chair. He is told not to move but does so and runs to jump out of a window. The police don't shoot him. The movie also creates a character, played by Steve Zahn, who is so morally objectionable that hoping

against hope, I was wishing that he would be killed. Much more but there are space limitations.