tohu777
Joined Jan 2008
Welcome to the new profile
We're still working on updating some profile features. To see the badges, ratings breakdowns, and polls for this profile, please go to the previous version.
Reviews3
tohu777's rating
The first reel of this film is very deceiving: you might well think that it's a kind of dramedy, a clichéd story of a do-gooder yuppie activist expanding his horizons and finding his humanity through an acquaintance with a very quirky homeless man. But it's absolutely nothing of the sort. To judge by interviews with BBC producers, the director, and writer Alexander Masters, the final film matches the intentions they had from the start, to make something that wasn't easy and which captured this man Stuart Shorter in all his complexity.
Master's script is really compelling & tight. But it's the actors who drive the film: Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy together, more often than not in fairly tight sets merely talking. They were already both masters, back when this was filmed.
Tom Hardy's role here bears a vague resemblance to his work in Nicolas Refn's film Bronson; though I'd say that this film is even bleaker and more harrowing than Refn's. The eruption of Stuart's pain and self- hate is shocking, and Hardy doesn't ever hold back. The performance compares well to that of Robin Williams' in The Fisher King. In both cases, the actor enters a state that shocks you into concern for them rather than sitting in admiration of a modulated performance.
This is an incredibly bleak and brutal film, without the comfort of its having been a fiction.
Master's script is really compelling & tight. But it's the actors who drive the film: Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy together, more often than not in fairly tight sets merely talking. They were already both masters, back when this was filmed.
Tom Hardy's role here bears a vague resemblance to his work in Nicolas Refn's film Bronson; though I'd say that this film is even bleaker and more harrowing than Refn's. The eruption of Stuart's pain and self- hate is shocking, and Hardy doesn't ever hold back. The performance compares well to that of Robin Williams' in The Fisher King. In both cases, the actor enters a state that shocks you into concern for them rather than sitting in admiration of a modulated performance.
This is an incredibly bleak and brutal film, without the comfort of its having been a fiction.
This is one of those movies that forms a catalog out of the movies (and TV shows) that it's patched together from. First of all, Rod Serling wrote this premise out several times for The Twilight Zone, especially in the "Monsters Are Due On Main Street" episode of 1960. Peckinpah made Straw Dogs more than 40 years ago (!) *and* it was just remade in 2011. Haneke made Funny Games in '97 and then again in 2007 (not to mention his Time of the Wolf, released in-between). The Strangers in 2008 was *much* better than this film. And I guess a retreat to a panic room would've been too obvious a steal from Fincher's film...
Why does a hollow, worthless, by-the-book film like this exist, anyway? Because an "artist" has a burning need to shoot something, but no idea that isn't pre-digested and encased in his DVD collection? Don't bother with this junk--chances are you've seen it before.
Why does a hollow, worthless, by-the-book film like this exist, anyway? Because an "artist" has a burning need to shoot something, but no idea that isn't pre-digested and encased in his DVD collection? Don't bother with this junk--chances are you've seen it before.
