Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 140 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
Happy Thanksgiving, Cinapse readers! See below for details on our Thanksgiving/Two Cents November Blu-ray giveaway.
It is only our second time out with the new Two Cents film club column, and we went with an underseen, recent, Thanksgiving-set thriller called Deadfall to celebrate the holiday. This isn’t a game-changing film, but there’s a lot to dig in this small thriller with a surprisingly big cast. Director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Austrian film The Kounterfeiters (2008) won the Best Foreign Film Oscar, so the guy has some chops. The Cinapse team are going to have some wildly differing reactions this week, and we’d love to hear your thoughts as well.
Next Week’s Pick: Intolerable Cruelty, in keeping with the limited release of the new Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis. (If you want to contribute YOUR Two Cents on next week’s pick, email us at contact at cinapse.co by next Wednesday and we might put yours up! Remember to limit to 140 words.)
November Blu-ray Giveaway: PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES
To celebrate our new Two Cents column we wanted to offer a quick Thanksgiving Blu-ray giveaway. The comedy classic (and quintessentially Thanksgiving-y) PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES Blu-ray is the prize. We’ll pick one lucky winner at random and announce them by next week’s Two Cents. To enter: 1) Follow us on Twitter: @CinapseNews 2) Tweet out the following message: I entered to win PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES on Blu-ray. Follow @CinapseNews and tweet this message to enter! #thosearentpillows
May the odds be ever in your favor!
Ed: This collision course thriller ensures that all roads lead to the Thanksgiving dinner table. A heist gone wrong, a convict ex-boxer, an underappreciated female detective, and a Norman Rockwell home built on the warmth of Sissy Spacek and Kris Kristofferson’s relationship. Each character only gets one or two dimensions, but the lean and mean screenplay builds each into a plot that ratchets the tension high before tying them up in a nice bow by the closing credits. The cast is uniformly solid with Eric Bana playing ruthless and charismatic as hell, and Charlie Hunnam… doing better than he did in Pacific Rim. Olivia Wilde further proves she is an actress, and not just a female lead. Flourishes of cinematography, character work, and action set pieces make this thriller stand out from the pack while never reaching for greatness. (@Ed_Travis)
Rhea: I don’t know about you, but I like my Thanksgiving movies with just a glimmer of incest. No? Actually, me neither. And I really don’t enjoy Thanksgiving movies that subtly mock Native Americans in their scripts and then kill the only Native character, later referring to him as a “great Indian chief”, even though all we really know about him is he was a dude on a snowmobile who had some wicked dreams. If all of this is making your stomach turn a bit, skip Deadfall. That is, unless, you have a huge thing for that “I smell cat pee” face Charlie Hunnam makes so often on Sons of Anarchy, as it is featured largely in this overall regrettable fake-snow crime flick. (@Rheabette)
James: Kudos to Sissy Spacek’s tough matriarch for keeping it together and delivering a scrumptious Thanksgiving meal whilst a shotgun-wielding, on-the-run Eric Bana decides to hold her and her family hostage and eat all the pumpkin pie. Despite the intriguing, snowy, Canadian setting and some reasonable performances, Deadfall struggles to make you care about the plight of a disparate bunch of ne’re-do-wells, whether it’s a pair of weirdly-too-close siblings evading justice following a botched casino heist or an ex-boxing champ returning home for Thanksgiving turkey after a prison-spell. Attempting to pique our interest and give us something interesting to latch onto via clumsy character quirks (everyone has daddy issues) and needlessly babble on about childhood revelations and their own personal history in an overly-expository fashion. Deadfall ultimately fails in its desperate attempts to stand out from the usual fare.
David: Why is Charlie Hunnam so bad? He has an amazing voice, which is why I think hero GDT cast him in Pacific Rim — his gravelly narration really worked for that movie. But here? He just looks constipated the whole time, even when making love to Olivia Wilde. A random incest plot line leads nowhere while themes of family are paid lip service — the pieces are there but never develop into anything more than surface level stuff, as evidenced by the on-the-nose Thanksgiving setting. The mostly stellar cast are given little to do, namely due to previously mentioned themes not really having any meat on their bones. It was a reasonably OK way to spend an hour and a half, but ends up being totally forgettable. (@daviddelgadoh)
Liam: Deadfall could have been great. The cast is solid, and despite some truly horrifying accent work by Olivia Wilde and Eric Bana, the performances are mostly strong. Even my man Jax Teller is not too bad, though the dude seems most comfortable portraying angry and more angry. However, the film suffers from a ridiculous plot and delivers little in the way of pay off. If the pile of coincidences in this film built towards an action packed and exciting climax, I might have had fun with it. Instead, despite having some interesting action pieces at various points in the film, Deadfall is simply a murder-filled family drama that takes itself far more seriously than it deserves. Every character is dealing with a dark past whose resolution demands an emotional investment from the audience which the film never really earns. (@liamrulz)
Victor: I wasn’t bored. I was, however, annoyed at how the wildly overqualified cast (and Charlie Hunnam) were wasted on such a rote thriller. What kind of movie is this? One where no one seems to acknowledge that winter in Michigan might be a wee bit chilly. It’s one where a New Zealander does a southern accent. Where a Brit seems unsure whether he’s supposed to be from Chi-Town, Newark, or Southie. One where none of the subplots are resolved at the end of the film. Watchable? Sure. No movie with a snowmobile chase is unwatchable. But mostly it’s lazy and dumb and contrived. In the end, perhaps this film works best as aspirational cinema for parolees: If you behave yourself and eat all your veggies, you too can befriend and bed Olivia Wilde within hours of your release…
Dan: Deadfall is one of those rare films you probably haven’t heard of, but once you watch it, you’ll be glad you did. The thriller has an amazing cast, an intriguing plot and delivers a bigger budget film that still manages to hold onto a lot of indie sensibilities. It’s strange when films like this fall between the cracks. What could have easily been a breakout for both the director and its cast is relegated to being streaming fodder that folks will probably click over because of the film’s generic title and poster. While I loved the twisted sensibilities, it did have a tendency to back peddle to make itself a little less morally ambiguous. Deadfall is a great little film and proof that Olivia Wilde is one of the most underrated actresses working today. (@danthefan)
Did you all get a chance to watch along with us? Share your thoughts about Thanksgiving films with us here or on Twitter or Facebook!