shakercoola

A British drama; A story about how people might live if they were presented with the opportunity to live in a utopia, an "ideal" city, exploring their hopes and reasons for doing so. This is an eloquent, stagy allegory based on a play of the same title by J. B. Priestley. The direction, acting, and photography are all good, apart from occasional fits of overcooked melodrama within its bounds. It is an intelligent screenplay, but the tale within it lacks cinematic dimension with long, static sequences of dialogue; the audience is robbed of the pictorial element of what is hinted at about the mysterious settlement. Tied to this is a quite heavy political slant in the script, which is left for the viewer to accept as a task rather than for them to explore by diversion; the audience is locked out. Though the theme of universal friendship is explored well.

An American thriller mystery; A story about a college freshman who joins her university's rowing team and undertakes an obsessive physical and psychological journey to make the top boat team. This character study holds some good tension about someone with self-destructive drive who internalizes a fixed set of rules incompatible with the world. It is not an original story but it covers a lot of ground about anxiety in college achievement and the dark side of sport. Initially magnetizing, the director loses control of this coming-of-age tale midway when the main character becomes a cypher, a martyr to her own drive; it becomes less meaningful for the viewer as the narrative flushes out in repetitive scenes with dialogue that is often delivered rapidly and in a mannered way and difficult to hear too. It is graphically visceral, daring the audience to recoil, with the effect that is laboured in that second act. The film picks up in the final third when it presses home the theme - it is sharper with dialogue, not repetitive, better paced, and the lead performance is stirring. All in all, the film captures the truth about the enormous effort required to reach a modicum of success. The film's tense score adds to the intrigue too, with some good vintage song choices.

An American romantic crime action film; A story about two victims of traumatic childhoods who become lovers and mass murderers and are irresponsibly glorified by the mass media. The film is about how the media is electrified and how some sections of the general public become exhilarated by criminals. It deals with how criminals could be made into celebrities indirectly by the media and the feeding frenzy they inspire in the media and their audience. The film also captured the moral inattention and passiveness of the mass murderer accurately, which Americans often saw on Court TV. Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis were both frightening for their performances, showing amorality and disdain. The film has some graphic power, but not so much for the scenes of violence that were not overly graphic but more a frenzied and psychedelic style that questioned subjectivity itself on a subject of criminality - the cross-cut editing and the lurid exposition elicited a response to the notion of violence. It was effective in incorporating visual elements of popular television into the film's visual tableau, including commercials and a mixture of stocks and styles present in late 80s and early 90s television. The film succeeds in calling attention to a topic through gonzo satire, and the film has verve with its visceral bluntness, but this inevitably leads the social criticism to hollow out in the second act. The good pace and flow it enjoyed led it to lose its footing with the introduction of the prison sequences.