By Betsy Sharkey
FILM: The Salvation
CAST: Mads Mikkelsen, Mikael Persbrandt, Jeffrey Dean Morgan
DIRECTION: Kristian Levring
The simplicity of an old-school Western with one good loner facing down a relentless outlaw can fool you into thinking these films are easy to make. From classics such as High Noon and Shane to Sergio Leone’s bloody spaghetti Westerns, they tend to be short on dialogue and long on mood, with death coming at the end of the day.
It’s only when you watch something such as The Salvation, set on the American frontier circa 1871 and showcasing the formidable intensity of Mads Mikkelsen, that it becomes apparent how difficult it is to create that tension between good and evil on the high plains.
The fine Danish director Kristian Levring has the look and the love of the genre down. Long shots of a desolate, dry and unwelcoming land are there with all the grit and glory.
Written by Levring and Anders Thomas Jensen, the movie has a few bursts of energy and invention — a cleverly executed jailbreak is one. But the story drifts and the pacing drags, failing to gather much steam until the final moments.
The idea is an interesting one, focusing on the immigrant experience in settling the West. As the film opens, Jon (Mikkelsen) and his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) are waiting for the train in some broken-down frontier town. After seven long years apart, his Danish wife and young son are coming from the old country to join him at his homestead, a day’s ride out of town.
The family is barely reunited before it is torn asunder. A couple of rowdy bruisers sharing their stagecoach set their sights on Jon’s wife, and all too soon Jon’s only reason for living is to kill the ones who killed his loved ones.
It’s a score quickly settled. But unknowingly he’s just started a feud. The main lowlife was the brother of Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the outlaw whose reign of terror holds the town in his grip.
Hints about the coming oil rush and the greed of such big ventures are dropped here and there. Justice is scarce with money on the line, so the stage is set for brutality and blood. — Los Angeles Times/TNS
A feel-good plot
By Roger Moore
FILM: McFarland, USA
CAST: Kevin Costner, Carlos Pratts, Hector Duran
DIRECTION: Niki Caro
His name is Jim White. He’s a coach. But that last name is all the students — his prospective athletes — need to know at McFarland High School.
“White. That an acceptable name where you come from, Holmes?”
Why sign up for his cross country team? Why even try?
“Nobody wins around here, ‘White’.”
McFarland is in the heart of California farm country, a town of “pickers”, Hispanic descendants of migrant workers who have settled there, many of them still picking and barely getting by. The kids have a fatalism about their future that seems at odds with their stamina and stoicism. That’s what Coach White (Kevin Costner) picks up on. If only he can get them to stop calling him White, or Blanco or Jefe.
As in, “I’m not running, Jefe.” (Chief).
McFarland, USA is an earnest feel-good sports dramedy, a simple culture clash story that is well-intentioned to a fault. The fact that it works can be laid at the feet of Kevin Costner, who plays another unfussy, flawed and totally real white guy who makes a journey past stereotypes to understanding another people, another culture.
Flawed? We’ve already seen the stone-faced White throw cleats at an unruly football player in Idaho. There’s a temper there, one that’s gotten him fired before. As in Hoosiers and a handful of other coach stories, White needs redemption.
That’s not what he thinks he’s found at McFarland. The town is so Hispanic and poor that he worries about his daughters, frets about how soon he can get out. It’s 1987, but his principal knows his past. It doesn’t take much to get him demoted from the football team staff.
But White hears that cross country is a coming sport in California. And he can’t help but notice the endurance of his stoop-shouldered students. If they can survive the hard field work that they do with their parents, they sure as shooting can run over hill and dale with the prep school kids who will be their main rivals.
McFarland is old-fashioned without being dull, pandering without feeling cloying or racist. As with Black or White, in which he plays a narrow-minded man who has his eyes opened when he sees past racist stereotypes, Costner plays a person whose ignorance of other people and other cultures is his greatest sin. He does not make these guys caricatures. Caricatures cannot change. Real people, Costner’s performances suggest, can. - TNS
A brooding period piece
By Roger Moore
FILM: Inside Llewyn Davis
CAST: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake,
DIRECTION: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.
Homer’s The Odyssey was the inspiration behind the Coen brothers’ Oh Brother, Where Art Thou. And that ancient epic provides the loose structure and coded, contemplative essence of their latest, Inside Llewyn Davis, a brooding folk-music-on-the-brink-of Dylan period piece built around a heroic quest.
Not that “heroic” leaps to mind when watching Llewyn, beautifully underplayed by Oscar Isaac. He may sleep on a succession of friends’ and acquaintances’ sofas and not be able to afford even a winter coat. But at least this folk-music failure is doing more than merely “existing”, which is what the “squares” of 1961 did.
Llewyn is a soulful, melancholy member of that ever-so-brief folk “craze” that peaked with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter Paul and Mary making their marks in the late 50s and early 60s.
Llewyn has a new “High Fidelity” LP to his name and no one is buying it. He plays a Greenwich Village “basket joint”, where if he’s lucky, his rapt, turtle-necked audience will drop enough in the passed basket to allow him to eat, smoke and hang on another day.
And from the minute he leaves the stage and is subjected to a back-alley beat-down, we know Llewyn is his own worst enemy, a chilly embittered jerk who keeps making wrong-headed decisions and wondering why things don’t work out for him.
The Coens, perhaps inspired by the life story of their fellow Minnesotan, Dylan, impeccably re-create that era.
But Inside Llewyn Davis actually goes nowhere. The movie is so “interior”, it so zeroes in on Isaac and his baleful stare, that we’re relieved any time something overtly funny happens. -TNS
DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha
No joking matter
By Moira Macdonald
FILM: Clown
CAST: Eli Roth, Peter Stormare, Laura Allen
DIRECTION: Jon Watts
When realtor Kent (Powers) finds a clown costume in a house he is trying to sell, he thinks he’s found the answer to his problems when the clown booked to entertain his son’s birthday party calls it off.
Donning the suit, he saves the day. The only problem is that the clown costume isn’t a costume at all, it is an “evil” garment.
Kent finds that he cannot remove the costume, nose or wig, even with scissors. When his wife tries to prise the red nose off of his own, it takes a lot of skin with it. It’s about this time that he receives a tip that the costume is turning him into another person and the only way to stop it is to have his head chopped off. Kent is understandably hesitant to allow this to happen, and so begins a race against time and a battle with himself before the “character” takes him over completely.
It turns out that the “character” can only be sated by devouring five children! The “clown demon” is an impressively scary looking beast.
DVDs courtesy:
Kings Electronics, Doha
