The Guilty
This Danish high concept thriller is fucking phenomenal. The entire thing takes place in an emergency call center where they get a ring from a lady who says she’s been kidnapped. You can hear she’s upset, frightened and barely holding it together on the phone. The operator trying to help her through the situation is a cop who’s on phone duty as punishment for some shady shit he did as a patrolman. He’s pretty good at detecting though because from previous calls he can tell pretty quickly when someone’s freaking out on drugs and when some dude obviously got ripped off by a prostitute but refuses to admit it. He has a strong intuition. Unfortunately he doesn’t always use it for good.So we got a nail biter if I ever saw one. All the action is left to your imagination leaving
a powerful impression. The only bits we
have to go on are voices on a phone and the protagonist’s facial and body
language. It’s so fucking intense because
you can’t see what’s happening on the other end of the goddamn line. You feel like you’re drowning in
helplessness.
And I couldn’t stop thinking about the people that do this
job for real every day. I don’t know how
many calls involve a circumstance this dire with an abduction and little
children in danger but even one in a rare while has gotta drive you insane.
With something like this that’s very play-like and
essentially a one man show it becomes extremely fragile. The script has to be perfect, the
performances have to land flawlessly, the shooting has to be dynamic enough to
keep the audience engaged, the audio has to be clear yet slightly distorted to
give agonizing distance between the victim and their lifeline and the editing
has to be spot on to achieve just the right flow. It seems like such a difficult film to make
and they knocked it out of the park. One
of the quickest and most suspenseful ninety mins I’ve ever experienced.
(An American remake is coming out sometime soon but I can’t
imagine it getting any better than this)
All Square
More of a character study than anything else John is an
interesting guy. He was moving through
the baseball farm system when a family tragedy forced him to give up his
dream. He’s been fiercely bitter ever
since and doesn’t take shit from nobody. Well, except when he gets sucker
punched. His morals are definitely
screwed up with the little league scam but he also befriends one of the kids
and teaches him how to pitch. Maybe he
doesn’t always give the best advice but deep down he’s got a heart and
sometimes he listens to it.
Hyams continues to be one of the most overlooked/underrated
directors out there and further shows he has range beyond action/thriller
material (he also made an excellent doc on MMA fighter Mark Kerr (The
Smashing Machine) and one on bull riding (Rank)). In fact I liked this better than his newest
serial killer thriller Alone. So put
this one on the bump for a few innings.
It’s got good stuff.
Inside Moves
It’s a beautiful picture with a positive message that I
absolutely dig. There’s a theme of
overcoming one’s disability and the bar where Jerry and Roary work are full of
folks with some sort of hindrance. A
blind man, a man in a wheelchair and a double hand amputee are their best
friends who they hang out and bullshit with all day long. They find strength in each other to keep
moving forward.
The performances are the definite standouts here with Savage
and Morse slaying it. It looks like
Savage had to distort his body in a pretty extreme manner due to the brace on
his leg and Morse must’ve had to practice his basketball moves because he makes
a lot of the shots for real. Beyond the
physical the emotional turmoil they go through with all the baggage they carry
around inside is heartbreaking and ultimately uplifting. Morse and Savage had to exude a warmth but be
standoffish at the same time which couldn’t have been easy.
The Boys from Brazil
Lawrence Olivier (Dracula (1979), The Bounty)
does a great job too as a Nazi hunter who’s trying to piece together what the
fuck Mengele is up to. I definitely
don’t want to leave him out of the discussion because he turns in a memorable
performance as well. He gives a lot of
character to someone who could’ve been very bland by playing him hard boiled
towards his allies and enemies but sympathetic towards the victims. He’s not some master sleuth but a guy doing
what he can to protect the world from war criminals that seek to destroy it.
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