Godless

A taboo subject, which could've made for an interesting movie. Unfortunately, the pacing, dialogue, acting and editing are God-awful.

This movie has one speed...plodding. There's no variation in scenes & actions (fast vs. slow), everything just plods along with virtually every line delivered in the same wooden manner.

As bad as the pacing and script are, they still don't mask a lot of wooden, terrible acting. Most of these actors sound like they're reading from the script. Delivery is flat & one-dimensional.

Would love to see what could've happened with better talent, script and direction.

I have two big problems with this movie.

First, the only relationship I believed in was the one between Nate and Trent. There was real, palpable sexual and emotional attraction between those two, but there was none anywhere else in the movie. I didn't believe in Steven's relationship with Ray; every time he called him "Babe" I gave an involuntary shudder that he would say something like that to a stranger. Even worse, I didn't believe in anything at all between him and Nate, even conventional sibling affection, and the whole movie hangs on that supposedly overwhelming passion.

Second, the movie is based on a strange assumption that there's something so profoundly bad about sex between brothers that they have to sacrifice everything that matters to hide it and do everything they can to kill it. I never have understood that taboo. It's not like they'd have deformed babies. It's an absurd prohibition. But I suppose even now they wouldn't be able to get married, and since vicious lunatics have taken over the US government, that's not likely to get better anytime soon.

So I guess what I'm saying is that the actor who played Steven was badly miscast (he wasn't able to create any believable relationships on screen) and that the premise of the movie is absurd.

However, unlike many other reviewers, I loved the ending, for reasons that may be obvious from what I said earlier.

A film of actors more film of story story. Not because the story remains a sketch, useful for atmosphere, but because, except the first and the last scenes, it is only the frame of acting. Only a frame for a gentle , precise and profound inspired portrait of brotherhood, emotions, love in intense form, loneliness, jealousy, the others, family, relations, affection, a room and a house and people around table at dinner,m talking, and the past, and the fracture almost like a womb. The details of house and definitions of small, ordinary things are the basic virtues of this film beautiful, in some measure, for different motives, against itself. A beautiful film about loneliness, the closed other and the way to define as yourself.

The only movie that I have recently enjoyed as much as "Godless" (2015) is "Akron" (2015), which I recently reviewed on IMDb. Being addicted to happy endings, naturally I would like both movies - even though both are very different in look and pacing and place, but absolutely not different in their positive emotional impact.

Godless is movie number 2,734 in my personal movie library; Akron is 2,731. And while I seldom ride consciously on the coattails of another writer or reviewer, I must agree almost completely with my fellow reviewer of "Godless" who stated in part, "Craig Jordan as Nate is the most redeeming feature of the movie," although all of the performances in "Godless" are on the money. Period. Full stop. So I salute absolutely Craig Jordan and Michael E. Pitts, but also notably Garrett Young, from whom I hope to see much, much more.

My sole abjection to the previous review is related to pacing, described elsewhere as "DEADLY SLOW!". In my opinion, given the characters, plot, setting, cinematographic circumstances, and obvious directorial intent, the pacing of "Godless" is indeed slow, but the pacing of "Godless" is pure directorial genius, in my opinion.

With the mandatory caveat that I do not do this very often, I give "Godless" the IMDd rating of 10.

As a postscript, my long-time neighbor in what he calls "our sleepy Beverly Hills" has had an especially rewarding and lucrative career in the movie-making business hereabouts. So when I supplied him with a DVD of "Godless" and asked for his informed opinion about the totality of the production, the next evening he came over and said "first rate" and "top drawer" and agreed with my opinion of Joshua Lim's directorial genius. He also said that "Godless" is a jewel of a movie. And then he asked if I understood how hard it is for an actor to perform the understated character of Trent in the production, and how completely Garrett Young had precisely nailed all of the nuances of Trent. Of course I had to agree that Garrett Young was outstanding in his performance, and that I too hoped to see much more of him

Subject matter is great. Dialogue is horrible. It's too formal sounding.