Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade

I saw this movie when I rented a DVD that came with a lot of brief "movies" such as this. I wonder if it was done to show the head of a studio what a great feature length movie this would make. I enjoyed the short story format and was impressed with Molly Ringwold's acting.

Billy Bob Thornton's screenplay manages admirably to catch the inevitability of violence in impossible family situations. The question one might ask is: who has been wronged most? You simply can not lock up a child in a shed for years and expect it to act rationally. George Hickenlooper does well to restrict his staging to a cool minimum. The actors get more space that way. Molly Ringwald, J.T.Walsh and Billy Bob Thornton are equally good in this gripping short. Although I'm not certain whether I agree with Hickenlooper's choice of two-shot for the interview scene -B.B.Thornton shot the same scene almost completely in close up for his SLING BLADE; and to good effect- his decision to use black and white photography was a wise one. This kind of film is not a dime a dozen, it should be treasured.

Some Folks Call it a Sling Blade: 5 out of 10

A curiosity piece for Sling Blade fans this short is the opening act of the original film done in black and white with Molly Ringwald as the reporter and a nebbishy mental health director.

Everything else is the same right down to J. T. Walsh's rape stories. The only real surprise is how quickly it is over. (25 brisk minutes) Unlike other viewers I really didn't notice a menacing nuance in this version. It really seemed almost note for note. One might rightly wonder why this short simply didn't appear as an extra on the Sling Blade proper disc. The included behind the scenes docs explain that pretty clearly.

The first doc is of little interest except to see J.T. Walsh chain smoke and hear director George Hickenlooper expound on how he likes short films and how European it is to make one. The second doc proves all that art for art sake stuff a lie.

Hickenlooper shows very lengthy clips from three of his features. The first Heart of Darkness a Filmmakers Apocalypse looked interesting. Even more interesting is how Hickenlooper got a directing credit even though Coppola's wife shot all the footage. The other two features the Killing Box and the Low Life look awful. The Killing box is a vampire civil war hybrid from which Hickenlooper removed the vampires and the Low Life seems like one of those self conscious auto-biographical films that comes out of Project Greenlight.

The real treat is hearing Hickenlooper completely trash his former friend Billy Bob Thorton basically describing him as an unstable maniac. Since Thorton went of to fame and fortune and Oscar gold. (Hickenlooper even attacks Billy Bob's eligibility to win an Oscar for best adapted screenplay) and Hickenlooper was not asked to direct one can only assume a little payback was in order during this "record straightening".

Even funnier Hickenlooper accuses Thorton of trying to turn the short into an audition reel (Why else would you do a short?) while in the next breath explaining he was going to use it to shop a feature film. (And all of this in one of the most self centered promotional docs I have ever seen. It's like a childhood film retrospective at a sweet sixteen party.) The whole mess is imminently skippable except for the morbidly curious.

Pretty much everything has been said by previous reviewers here. It is probably pertinent to add that but for the success of this little independent number, the full length SLING BLADE most probably would never have gotten made three years later.

Obviously a labor of love for creator Billy Bob Thornton. He presents a markedly different Karl Childers here. As retardedly backward but infinitely more menacing. It was probably on reflection that the character was made more "marketable" and sympathetic the second time around. Both films are such an absorbing focus on what is essentially a simple man turned (by dint of social expectation) feral by circumstances totally outside his control. The villain of the piece of course was Karl's father, played in a marvellous one-off cameo by Robert Duvall in the feature-length film.

In SOME FOLKS CALL IT A SLING BLADE, the reporter is played by Molly Ringwald. Many seem not to have approved of her interpretation of the part, preferring the cutesy high-school reporter in the 1996 release. I thought she handled it well, after all she was dealing with a quite different "Karl Childers.'

Either way, this makes for a fascinating back-up to SLING BLADE. If anything, it adds to one's understanding of the man himself.

I'm going to have to go out on a limb here and say that I enjoyed "Sling Blade" far more than this short, which preceded the feature film by three years. Maybe it was the snotty, hands-on-hips, childish performance by Molly Ringwald that bothered me here. Or maybe it was the horribly stereotyped view of the residents of what, in the full-length, Karl calls the "nervous hospital." Yes, the short strongly resembles the opening of the full-length film, but I think it's weaker in many ways. The cinematography is better in the feature film (and I have no problem with black and white); Molly Ringwald's performance really sours the whole 25 minutes; and left on its own, this opening really implies things I don't like. Rather than actually speculating on how Karl will deal with living unsupervised, it seems to portray all the residents of the hospital as soulless victims. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to feel at the end of the film. At the end of "Sling Blade," I felt I had gotten to know a man. At the end of "Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade," I just thanked my lucky stars that Billy Bob Thornton decided to direct a version of it himself.