• 10 Reasons to Remember…
  • A Brief Word About…
  • About
  • For One Week Only
  • Happy Birthday
  • Monthly Roundup
  • Old-Time Crime
  • Other Posts
  • Poster of the Week
  • Question of the Week
  • Reviews
  • Trailers

thedullwoodexperiment

~ Viewing movies in a different light

thedullwoodexperiment

Tag Archives: George Shevtsov

Monthly Roundup – July 2016

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Action, Apache War Smoke, Apaches, Australia, Bank robbers, Banshee Chapter, Ben Whishaw, Benjamin Walker, Blair Erickson, Brendan Gleeson, Cambodia, Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Crawl, Daniel Zirilli, Drama, Gena Rowlands, George Shevtsov, Georgina Haig, Gilbert Roland, Glenda Farrell, Harold F. Kress, Herman Melville, Historical drama, Hitman, Home invasion, Horror, In the Heart of the Sea, James Garner, Katia Winter, Literary adaptation, Moby Dick, Nantucket, Nicholas Sparks, Nick Cassavetes, Numbers stations, Offshore Grounds, Online journalist, Paul China, Paul Holmes, Project MK Ultra, Rachel McAdams, Reviews, Robert Horton, Romance, Ron Howard, Ryan Gosling, Steven Seagal, Ted Levine, Thailand, The Asian Connection, The Essex, The Notebook, Thriller, Tom Holland, Tonto Valley Station, True love, True story, Wells Fargo, Western, Whales

Crawl (2011) / D: Paul China / 80m

Cast: George Shevtsov, Georgina Haig, Paul Holmes, Lauren Dillon, Catherine Miller, Bob Newman, Andy Barclay, Lynda Stoner

Crawl

Rating: 7/10 – a hitman (Shevtsov) hired by an unscrupulous bar owner (Holmes) winds up injured while trying to leave town, and ends up playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with a waitress (Haig) when he seeks refuge in her home; a slow-burn thriller that takes its time and relies on tension and atmosphere to keep the viewer hooked, Crawl often belies its low budget, and features terrific performances from Shevtsov (in a role written expressly for him) and Haig, but stops short of being completely effective thanks to some awkward narrative choices and first-timer China’s lack of experience as a director.

The Asian Connection (2016) / D: Daniel Zirilli / 91m

Cast: John Edward Lee, Pim Bubear, Steven Seagal, Sahajak Boonthanakit, Byron Gibson, Byron Bishop, Eoin O’Brien, Michael Jai White

The Asian Connection

Rating: 3/10 – career criminal Jack Elwell (Lee) meets the love of his life, Avalon (Bubear), and decides that robbing a bank is the way to a financially stable relationship, but unfortunately the money he steals belongs to crime boss Gan Sirankiri (Seagal), and soon Jack is being coerced into robbing more of Sirankiri’s banks when one of his men (Boonthanakit) threatens to expose him; what could have been a moderately entertaining action thriller is let down by some atrocious acting (and not just from Seagal), some equally atrocious camerawork, editing that looks like it was done with a hatchet, and the kind of direction that gives “point and shoot” a bad name, all of which leaves The Asian Connection looking like something to be avoided at all costs.

Banshee Chapter (2013) / D: Blair Erickson / 87m

Cast: Katia Winter, Ted Levine, Michael McMillian, Corey Moosa, Monique Candelaria, Jenny Gabrielle, Vivian Nesbitt, Chad Brummett, William Sterchi

Banshee Chapter

Rating: 3/10 – a journalist (Winter) looks into the disappearance of a friend, and discovers a secret world of government experiments that are linked to strange radio broadcasts and the discredited MK Ultra program from the Sixties; a paranoid thriller with supernatural overtones, Banshee Chapter tries extra hard to be unsettling and creepy – much of it takes place at night and has been shot using low light – but fails to make its story of any interest to anyone watching, which means that Winter and Levine put a lot of effort into their roles but are let down by the tortuous script and Erickson’s wayward direction.

In the Heart of the Sea (2015) / D: Ron Howard / 122m

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Tom Holland, Ben Whishaw, Brendan Gleeson, Michelle Fairley, Paul Anderson, Frank Dillane, Joseph Mawle, Charlotte Riley

In the Heart of the Sea

Rating: 5/10 – the writer, Herman Melville (Whishaw), convinces retired sailor Tom Nickerson (Gleeson) to talk about his experiences as a young boy at sea, and in particular his time aboard the Essex, a whaling ship that encountered a creature Melville will call Moby Dick; based on the true story of the Essex, and the voyage that saw it sunk by an enormous whale, In the Heart of the Sea is technically well made but lacks anyone to care about, avoids providing a true sense of the enormity of what happened, sees Ron Howard directing on auto-pilot, and leaves Hemsworth and Walker struggling to make amends for characters who are paper-thin to the point of being caricatures (or worse still, carbon copies of Fletcher Christian and William Bligh from Mutiny on the Bounty).

The Notebook (2004) / D: Nick Cassavetes / 123m

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, James Garner, Gena Rowlands, Sam Shepard, David Thornton, Joan Allen, James Marsden

The Notebook

Rating: 7/10 – in the late Thirties, a young man, Noah (Gosling), sets his cap for the girl of his dreams, Allie (McAdams), and though they fall in love, social conventions keep them apart, while in the modern day their story is told by an old man (Garner) to a woman with dementia (Rowlands); handsomely mounted and told with a genuine feel for the central characters and their travails, Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook is an old-fashioned romantic drama that could have been made in the time period it covers, and which is bolstered by the performances of its four stars, as well as Cassavetes’ (son of Rowlands) sure-footed direction, glorious cinematography by Robert Fraisse, and a sense of inevitable tragedy that permeates the narrative to very good effect indeed.

Apache War Smoke (1952) / D: Harold F. Kress / 67m

Cast: Gilbert Roland, Glenda Farrell, Robert Horton, Barbara Ruick, Gene Lockhart, Harry Morgan, Patricia Tiernan, Hank Worden, Myron Healey

Apache War Smoke

Rating: 6/10 – a stagecoach station finds itself under attack from angry Apaches after a white man kills several of their tribe – and the evidence points to the station agent’s father, a wanted outlaw (Roland), as the killer; a compact, fast-paced Western, Apache War Smoke zips by in low-budget style thanks to the efforts of two-time Oscar winner Kress – editing awards for How the West Was Won (1962) and The Towering Inferno (1974) – and a cast who enter willingly into the spirit of things, making this studio-made Western set in Tonto Valley Station(!) a surprising treat.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • More
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Backtrack (2015)

21 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adrien Brody, Drama, False Creek, George Shevtsov, Ghosts, Michael Petroni, Repressed memories, Review, Robin McLeavy, Sam Neill, Thriller, Train crash

Backtrack

D: Michael Petroni / 90m

Cast: Adrien Brody, George Shevtsov, Robin McLeavy, Sam Neill, Malcolm Kennard, Jenni Baird, Chloe Bayliss, Emma O’Farrell, Bruce Spence, Anna Lise Phillips

Psychotherapist Peter Bowers (Brody) has his own problems. His daughter has recently been killed in a road accident, and his career is being propped up thanks to the help of his mentor, Duncan Stewart (Neill). He seems to be managing his grief but is prone to moping about with a withdrawn, brooding demeanour that his wife (Baird) prefers to sleep through rather than engage with. As Bowers gets back into the routine of seeing patients, some of their eccentricities – one, a musician (Spence), swears he performed the night before at a club that closed down long ago – begin to worry him. He can’t put his finger on what’s bothering him, and a new patient, a young girl, Elizabeth Valentine (Bayliss), who won’t speak, adds further to his sense that something isn’t quite right.

When the mystery surrounding his patients deepens, Bowers does some detective work and discovers they all have something in common, something that sends him back to his hometown of False Creek and an event that happened twenty years before. As he starts to piece together the facts of what happened when he was a boy, Bowers attempts to reconnect with his father, William (Shevtsov), while also piquing the interest of local police officer, Barbara Henning (McLeavy). And when Bowers thinks he’s got to the bottom of it all, he’s unprepared for yet another revelation that puts his life in danger.

Backtrack - scene3

The above synopsis is deliberately vague because it would be unfair to divulge the movie’s central conceit (though there are plenty of websites that will tell you if you absolutely have to know in advance what it is). The movie itself reveals this “twist” around the half hour mark, and once it does, the movie transforms from awkwardly staged psychodrama with supernatural overtones to mystery thriller with supernatural overtones. It’s not an entirely comfortable switch, and there are more than enough clues to suggest that the movie’s narrative is a combination of two separate story ideas that weren’t strong enough on their own.

However, the switch is also welcome, as writer/director Michael Petroni isn’t as sure-footed exploring Bowers’ grief over the loss of his daughter as he is with letting Bowers loose to solve a twenty-year mystery that nobody – including him – knew was a mystery in the first place. Before Bowers arrives at False Creek, Petroni has him questioning his own sanity, but in such a crude, rudimentary way that his behaviour has all the hallmarks of having been created by someone who’s heard that grief-stricken fathers all behave in the same way. Adrien Brody is a very, very talented actor (and Petroni has been lucky to nab him), but even he can’t do anything with a character who alternates between emotionally devastated and psychologically damaged, and does so without any consistency of reasoning.

Backtrack - scene2

But once Bowers is deposited in the rural backwater that serves as his birthplace and the location of a twenty year old tragedy, Brody is freed from all that brooding and is free to loosen up in his portrayal. Unfortunately, the mystery he’s required to solve is one that will have viewers scratching their heads and wondering if they’re missing something. Coincidence is piled atop coincidence with increasing disregard for credibility, and Brody visits the scene of the tragedy so many times it becomes embarrassing as he remembers “everything”. In between times he argues with his father, arouses the suspicions of Officer Henning, and manages to remember – thanks to some ghostly visitations – that he should still be grieving. His actions appear more selfish and cathartic than altruistic, and even when the scope of the tragedy is revealed (and the mystery that goes with it), Bowers ensures that it’s all still about him.

There’s the germ of a good idea for a movie here, but under Petroni’s watch it’s not allowed to develop fully. The script repeatedly makes leaps of faith that are either baffling or absurd, Neill’s character should have all the answers but disappears too quickly, Officer Henning’s connection to the tragedy is handled as awkwardly as Bowers initial malaise, and a secondary character’s fate is decided on entirely so that one particular clue can be introduced and drive the movie forward. But by this time, most viewers will be beginning to wonder just how silly it can all get; the last ten minutes will reassure them: very.

Backtrack - scene4

Backtrack is a movie with a handful of competent performances, but they’re not allowed to flourish thanks to the vagaries of Petroni’s script, and it’s insistence on being two parts obvious thriller and one part supernatural mishmash. Brody must be wondering what’s happened to his career (The Grand Budapest Hotel seems like such a long time ago now), while Shevtsov and McLeavy are reduced to playing pawns at the mercy of the script and Petroni’s wayward sense of direction (in both senses of the phrase), while Neill is lucky enough to escape with a minor role.

And for a movie shot entirely in Australia, this may be one of the few occasions where an Australian movie looks so nondescript. The early scenes in Melbourne could have been filmed in any large city in any number of countries, and the town of False Creek wouldn’t look out of place anywhere in America’s Deep South. DoP Stefan Duscio did some great work on his last feature, The Mule (2014), but here it’s as if he’s been instructed to make everything look bland and/or neutral. With so little to engage with on an emotional level, it’s one last disappointment to have a movie that’s so insipid to look at as well.

Rating: 4/10 – Petroni asks too much of both his cast and the audience in telling such a dreary tale, with the result that Backtrack is a movie that never really gets started; it doesn’t help that it gets sillier and sillier as it progresses, until by the end whatever positives it possessed at the start have been abandoned in favour of a generic thriller outcome that is as tedious as it is absurdly set up.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • More
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Blog Stats

  • 307,620 hits

Recent Posts

  • 10 Reasons to Remember Bibi Andersson (1935-2019)
  • Fantasia (1940)
  • Dances With Wolves (1990) – The Special Edition
  • Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
  • The Three Musketeers (1973)

Top Posts & Pages

  • The Finest Hours (2016)
    The Finest Hours (2016)
  • Black Snow (2017)
    Black Snow (2017)
  • All About Them! (2015)
    All About Them! (2015)
  • Bottom of the World (2017)
    Bottom of the World (2017)
  • Aaaaaaaah! (2015)
    Aaaaaaaah! (2015)
  • Ali's Wedding (2016)
    Ali's Wedding (2016)
  • Flightplan (2005)
    Flightplan (2005)
  • White Boy Rick (2018)
    White Boy Rick (2018)
  • For One Week Only: Unnecessary Sequels - 6. S. Darko (2009)
    For One Week Only: Unnecessary Sequels - 6. S. Darko (2009)
  • Ride Along 2 (2016)
    Ride Along 2 (2016)
Follow thedullwoodexperiment on WordPress.com

Blogs I Follow

  • Rubbish Talk
  • Film 4 Fan
  • Fast Film Reviews
  • The Film Blog
  • All Things Movies UK
  • Police Entertainment Network
  • movieblort
  • Interpreting the Stars
  • Let's Go To The Movies
  • Movie Reviews 101
  • That Moment In
  • Dan the Man's Movie Reviews
  • Sunset Boulevard
  • Jordan and Eddie (The Movie Guys)

Archives

  • April 2019 (13)
  • March 2019 (28)
  • February 2019 (28)
  • January 2019 (32)
  • December 2018 (28)
  • November 2018 (30)
  • October 2018 (29)
  • September 2018 (29)
  • August 2018 (29)
  • July 2018 (30)
  • June 2018 (28)
  • May 2018 (24)
  • April 2018 (21)
  • March 2018 (31)
  • February 2018 (25)
  • January 2018 (30)
  • December 2017 (30)
  • November 2017 (27)
  • October 2017 (27)
  • September 2017 (26)
  • August 2017 (32)
  • July 2017 (32)
  • June 2017 (30)
  • May 2017 (29)
  • April 2017 (29)
  • March 2017 (30)
  • February 2017 (27)
  • January 2017 (32)
  • December 2016 (30)
  • November 2016 (28)
  • October 2016 (30)
  • September 2016 (27)
  • August 2016 (30)
  • July 2016 (30)
  • June 2016 (31)
  • May 2016 (34)
  • April 2016 (30)
  • March 2016 (30)
  • February 2016 (28)
  • January 2016 (35)
  • December 2015 (34)
  • November 2015 (31)
  • October 2015 (31)
  • September 2015 (34)
  • August 2015 (31)
  • July 2015 (33)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (31)
  • April 2015 (32)
  • March 2015 (30)
  • February 2015 (37)
  • January 2015 (39)
  • December 2014 (34)
  • November 2014 (34)
  • October 2014 (36)
  • September 2014 (25)
  • August 2014 (29)
  • July 2014 (29)
  • June 2014 (28)
  • May 2014 (23)
  • April 2014 (21)
  • March 2014 (42)
  • February 2014 (38)
  • January 2014 (29)
  • December 2013 (28)
  • November 2013 (34)
  • October 2013 (4)

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Rubbish Talk

I read, I write, and I sketch. For fun.

Film 4 Fan

A Movie Blog

Fast Film Reviews

for those who like their movie reviews short and sweet

The Film Blog

The official blog of everything in film

All Things Movies UK

Movie Reviews and Original Articles

Police Entertainment Network

From Patrol Cars to Movie Theaters, Real cops share real opinions

movieblort

No-nonsense, unqualified, uneducated & spoiler free movie reviews.

Interpreting the Stars

Dave Examines Movies

Let's Go To The Movies

Film and Theatre Lover!

Movie Reviews 101

Daily Movie Reviews & ABC Film Challenge

That Moment In

Movie Moments & More

Dan the Man's Movie Reviews

All my aimless thoughts, ideas, and ramblings, all packed into one site!

Sunset Boulevard

Writings of a Cinephile

Jordan and Eddie (The Movie Guys)

Australian movie blog - like Margaret and David, just a little younger

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
%d bloggers like this: