Prison stuff. In prison movies.
The Koreans seem to specialise in tear-jerking prison films featuring children and executions. Well, this one and Harmony (2010); it’s not a big field, admittedly. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on August 13th, 2013 at 10:47 pm. Updated on August 13th, 2013 at 10:47 pm.
When Deputy District Attorney Douglas Goodwin (Paul Kelly) smugly celebrates the success of his latest prosecution – another conviction and another death sentence – you immediately know that somehow the boot is going to be on the other foot. And it soon is. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on August 6th, 2013 at 10:29 pm. Updated on August 6th, 2013 at 10:31 pm.
If you were a reporter who had gone undercover to expose brutality on in a chain gang, do you think that you’d be at all keen for your editor to publish stories and photos – that can only have come from you – while you’re still working in the prison? Not hugely keen, one suspects. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on August 3rd, 2013 at 11:01 pm. Updated on August 3rd, 2013 at 11:23 pm.
Back in 2006 this was released as a movie on DVD. It had been Hugh Jackman’s first major screen role a decade or more earlier, and the marketers were no doubt looking to cash in on his X-Men fame. Yet it’s not a movie at all, but rather the unedited (and conveniently feature-length) first episode of the Correlli TV series, masquerading as something else. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on July 29th, 2013 at 11:03 pm. Updated on August 3rd, 2013 at 8:47 pm.
I know I’ve said that I’m not interested in sci-fi prison movies… yet here is another one. My excuse? I was on holidays and it came up on my TV. I didn’t seek it out; it came to me. And when it did, it came as a kind of updated remake of Escape from New York (1981), which I hadn’t been expecting. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on July 21st, 2013 at 10:48 pm. Updated on July 21st, 2013 at 10:52 pm.
Also known by the unfortunately dumbed-down title of ‘Concrete Hell‘, this is a nicely-crafted movie that traces the inexorable corruption of a newcomer to prison. It suggests that for her, and for others, there is no escaping being dragged into the brutality of prison life. And that to the uninitiated, prison is a vastly different world, operating under its own rules. At the film’s close, as the newcomer, Allison Campbell (Nicky Guadagni), finally elects to go into 23-hour lockdown in protective custody – the only way she can avoid either becoming inextricably entrenched in the queen bee’s criminal network, or being bashed or stabbed – she wryly reflects on the life ‘in a bubble’ that will be hers for the remainder of her sentence. “Listen, what are you complaining about?” a guard reproves. “It was your choice.” “Was it?” says Allison. And that’s clearly the question that we are ultimately asked to answer ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on July 16th, 2013 at 9:38 pm. Updated on July 16th, 2013 at 9:38 pm.
You could be forgiven for thinking that this is just another exploitative Women-in-Prison movie. And it probably is. But it duped me, somehow, into thinking it might be something more. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on July 7th, 2013 at 8:18 pm. Updated on July 7th, 2013 at 8:18 pm.
The Korean title for this movie translates literally, and somewhat ironically, as ‘Our Happy Time’. While it is principally about two hurting people healing each other, it also serves – with South Korea in the midst of a moratorium on the execution of prisoners on death row – as a powerful argument against capital punishment: a common theme in South Korean movies at around this time. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on June 30th, 2013 at 10:38 pm. Updated on June 30th, 2013 at 10:38 pm.
Is this any less of a prison movie because it concerns a prison for children as imagined by a child? Possibly. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on June 26th, 2013 at 10:13 pm. Updated on June 26th, 2013 at 10:15 pm.
It’s one thing to make a film with a few of your mates on a budget of a couple of hundred dollars. It’s another thing entirely to inflict it upon the broader public. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on June 16th, 2013 at 2:36 pm. Updated on August 11th, 2013 at 12:07 pm.