I was ready for this movie to be a bit dorky, a bit ’80s, a bit made-for-TV. What I wasn’t prepared for, having watched it and wondered why so many of the plot lines just seemed to evaporate, was to find that it wasn’t made as a film at all. It turns out to be bits of a 1984 TV series (of which there were only two or three episodes), cobbled together in 2002 into a single, slightly dorky, ’80s, made-for-DVD movie. (more…)
Posted on June 6th, 2010 at 4:57 pm. Updated on June 6th, 2010 at 4:57 pm.
This hints at being a straightforward revenge story: grieving father seeks to avenge the death of his son. It starts with a couple of biblical references about vengeance and man being called upon to shed the blood of those who shed blood. Curiously, it then introduces a little-known footnote to Exodus 21: 23-24 (”a life for a life, an eye for an eye..”) along the lines of ‘if your son is shot through the eye, shoot the shooter through the eye’; you are not merely called upon to avenge the death, apparently, but to avenge the death using exactly the same method. In jail, that can add considerably to the degree of difficulty. (more…)
Posted on May 2nd, 2010 at 5:53 pm. Updated on May 2nd, 2010 at 6:07 pm.
This is a smouldering love affair spanning prison and life after. It’s often been compared to Brokeback Mountain, with good reason; a man’s world, two seemingly heterosexual men falling in love, and nearly all of it understated or unspoken. (more…)
Posted on March 8th, 2010 at 10:54 am. Updated on March 8th, 2010 at 10:54 am.
Set entirely in a spartan four-man cell, this could be voted Least Uplifting Film of 2009. It’s apparently based on real events at a German juvenile detention centre in Siegburg, near Bonn, in 2006, where three inmates tortured, raped and then hanged a fourth. That doesn’t make it any easier to watch. (more…)
Posted on March 7th, 2010 at 4:19 pm. Updated on March 7th, 2010 at 4:19 pm.
This is supposed to be inspired by actual events, but it’s not clear which actual events provided that inspiration. Methinks there’s a liberal dose of artistic licence being splashed about. (more…)
Posted on February 28th, 2010 at 4:00 pm. Updated on February 28th, 2010 at 4:00 pm.
Based on a true story, this follows Peter Madagin, an angry teenager who gets 5 years in an adult prison after a railway engineer dies in the train that he and his mates derail while mucking around, acting tough. It’s hard work empathising with him - so hard, in fact, that the film doesn’t work. Well, that’s just one of the reasons the film doesn’t work. (more…)
Posted on December 26th, 2009 at 9:46 pm. Updated on December 26th, 2009 at 9:46 pm.
Eduart (Eshref Durmishi) is a young Albanian who travels to Greece, hoping to become a rock star. He has the looks, but not the talent, it seems. To keep alive, he thieves. He also hustles. At a gay bar, he is picked up and taken home by a rich bloke who is not really his type. He is caught rifling through this bloke’s desk, but that seems to not to dampen the older man’s ardour once an initial attempt to get him to leave is out of the way. Eduart, more appalled than panicked, strangles him and flees. (more…)
Posted on October 21st, 2009 at 9:37 pm. Updated on January 11th, 2010 at 10:39 pm.
A curious mix of British prison architecture (well, Dublin’s Kilmainham Jail), the look and feel of a US reality TV show (think ‘Britain’s Unruliest Prisons’ with prisoners dressed in thin beige boilersuits), and some very un-American and unexpected plot twists that unapologetically break faith with the genre. (more…)
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 at 10:38 pm. Updated on September 3rd, 2009 at 10:15 pm.
While one of the dramatic turning points occurs in a prison, most of this movie occurs outside. Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) becomes a white supremacist pin-up boy after his father is murdered by black youths, and when his car is broken into by some young blacks who he kicked off the local basketball court (in a winner-owns-the-court game), he kills two of them. (more…)
Posted on May 18th, 2009 at 8:39 pm. Updated on August 27th, 2009 at 10:10 pm.
I had a bit of trouble with this film. I don’t know whether it was that I’d read somewhere that it was the Indian Shawshank Redemption (not that I entirely understood what that meant), or that I kept thinking that the charismatic leading man was Leonard Cohen. Maybe it was the plot. (more…)
Posted on May 17th, 2009 at 1:29 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 6:43 pm.