The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy takes the reader on a journey of profound horror. The setting is a post-apocalyptic United States of America. McCarthy imagines a world where every living thing has been destroyed, save for a few resilient humans. There is nothing to eat, no plants to harvest, no animals to hunt. Not even an insect to swat.

The nature of the apocalyptic event is never revealed. Was it environmental? An unstoppable virus? A nuclear firestorm? A meteor from the heavens? Did humans bring this catastrophe upon themselves? The reader doesn’t know and never does find out. This adds to the desolation, the hopeless dread that this story continuously invokes.

The novel tells the story of a father and son traveling down a desolate highway, heading west in an attempt to escape the winter weather that is inexorably coming. The two main characters remain unnamed throughout. Names are irrelevant, McCarthy seems to be saying, their struggle to remain alive is robbing them of their humanity.

Civilization has collapsed. Technology has vanished. Life has been reduced to a search for food. All that is left are the caches of canned and preserved goods that have survived the catastrophe, whatever it was. These supplies are dwindling. The supermarkets were trashed long ago, virtually every home and building emptied of edible material. Some of the remaining humans have banded together in desperation. And some of these gangs have resorted to eating the flesh of the only animal remaining on the planet.

The horrors mount. At one point, they fall upon a house with a room that’s locked and barred. What treasures are hidden inside? The man thinks it must be food. It has to be food. The boy is deathly afraid. The man breaks down the door with an axe, only to find a room full of emaciated people, chained amidst their own filth, kept like a small, precious herd of cattle.

Another time, they sense another presence and hide in the woods, watching a small troupe of men pass by, with a pregnant girl in tow. All other humans are potential dangers. Some days later, they happen by an old campfire, a tiny skull adrift in the ashes.

The father and son live (if you can call it that) in constant fear. They have only a small pistol to protect themselves, and a limited number of bullets. The boy is the man’s conscience, keeping him from descending into the depths that others have. Hope remains somehow, despite the utter absence of any semblance of a logical hope that mankind will survive. This hope is irrational, but still it remains.

Big Love - Year 1, Episodes 1 -2

Watching Big Love can be an exhausting experience. I feel for Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) and his trials. I couldn’t imagine being in his shoes. Or in and out of his three marital beds. Big Love is a HBO series that portrays the saga of a polygamous family living in Mormon-dominated Utah. It’s just your regular, normal suburban household, except that it consists of three side-by-side houses, all sharing one backyard.

Three houses means three wives - boss wife Barb, ever-pouting Nicki, and bouncy, busty Margie - and a bushel of kids. Bill somehow finds time to run a Home Depot type store in order to afford this brood. And in the pilot episode, amidst all the introductions to the myriad characters and inter-relationships, Bill discovers the magic pill that will help him keep up with the wives. Yes, Bill, doing a google search for Viagra will elicit a few hits. A few billion, I’m sure. And for once, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button will have extra resonance.

As one might imagine, this series is dominated by sex. All the wives are very good-looking, and not as reserved as good Mormons are assumed to be. The wives bicker with jealous fervor. Each one has a scheduled day (and night) with Bill - though they manage to find ways to cheat (if that’s the right word) the system and spend some extra quality romp time. Barb’s memorable motto is “Oral is Moral”. Margie has a tendency to be vocally enthusiastic and doesn’t remember to close her bedroom window - I guess Bill can’t find time to install central air for the moment. And Nicki just smolders seductively and proceeds to max out Bill’s credit cards at the first opportunity.

Of course, if we haven’t got the point by now, enter Bill’s derelict father (played by a disheveled Bruce Dern). As he reminds his son, when one lives in a polygamous community, the competition to wed the young girls is intense. Bill apparently got kicked out of the ‘compound’ when he reached puberty. And then there’s one of the father-in-laws, the mysterious Roman, who helped fund Bill’s business ventures and is intent on collecting his ten-percent tithe forever more. Roman’s new fourteen year-old bride is paraded in a creepy scene that will have the squeamish reaching for the remote.

The first two episodes leave the viewer hanging. Who is poisoning Bill’s father? Is it Bill’s mother? Or is it Roman, via the sip bottle of homemade brew that the camera looks at suspiciously, but no one ever comments on?

And more importantly, will Bill be able to renew his Viagra prescription in time?

Next

Next is an apt title for this film. As in next please. The movie left me dumbfounded. And then it ended - it’s not every movie that could upstage a nuclear explosion with a Dallas-like Bobby-out-of-the-shower-type moment. You mean I wasted ninety minutes of my life watching a film that couldn’t even decide what it was about. What happened? Nothing happened? Nicolas Cage looked two minutes into the future, envisioned all the possible scenarios in his obviously-computer like brain, and this story was the best he could do?

It’s unfortunate that the film is supposedly based on a Phillip K. Dick short story. I’m sure that the original story, The Golden Man, was more coherent and entertaining. It had to be.

Nicolas Cage plays a Las Vegas magician Chris Johnson aka Frank Cadillac who has a terribly unentertaining mentalist act. The highlight of his act was a prediction that a necklace would fall off a woman’s neck into her drink. Woohoo! You have to wonder why he bothered, since it seems he makes all his money at the blackjack table. Mr. Johnson helpfully tells the audience that the key is to stay under the radar, not to win too much at one time. He then proceeds to do exactly that! Switch to the control room where the head of casino security is keeping an eye on the erstwhile magician via a video feed. They’re talking about him - so Chris stares woefully up at the hidden camera. Hey, I thought his talent was to see the future - but it seems he also has some latent telepathic abilities, not to mention a nose for ferreting out surveillance cameras.

Cue the FBI, in the person of a hyper-aggressive and annoying agent Ferris played by Julianne Moore. She’s after him to help some French-speaking terrorists from deploying a nuclear bomb somewhere in the vicinity. I suppose Jack Bauer is busy elsewhere, and this is the best idea the FBI’s got at the moment. It’s never explained why or how the FBI heard of Johnson - perhaps an agent named Mulder tipped them off.

But the bad guys are also after the magician - presumably there’s a leak in the FBI, a very bad leak, since it’s clear they’ve no idea why he’s important. Then again, there’s no clear reason why the terrorists are planting a bomb, or even where they’re from. Perhaps they’re FLQ refugees from the 70's. Or they’re from France, pissed off about the Freedom Fries thing. Or maybe it’s all the damn American tourists.

Of course, as Johnson explains more than once, he can’t see any future, just his. So cue the beautiful damsel in distress. This also gives the writers’ an excuse to throw in a miniaturized and compressed version of a Groundhog Day type seduction. But Nicolas Cage is no Bill Murray. And Jessica Biel is definitely no Andie MacDowell. For some unexplained (again) reason - no doubt due to destiny and love and all that - the magician can see farther into the future when it comes to this woman.

So conveniently, the villains kidnap her. Johnson perfects his dodging skills in saving her life. The viewer is surprised just how much can be done in two minute. All the possibilities. I can barely remember one time line, even two minutes at a time. He juggles time like a hyperactive stockbroker on meth.

Next please!

Fracture

Fracture is a film that entertains despite its flaws. Ordinarily, the cliched nature of its characters would have grated. But the quality of the acting saves the day. Anthony Hopkins plays the too-smart killer, Ted Crawford, with the gusto of a practiced egotist, while Ryan Gosling steals the show with his performance of the ambitious, over-achieving prosecutor Willy Beachum who, despite all odds, is ruled by an infatuation with Lady Justice.

The young lawyer decides to give up the perfect job and the perfect girlfriend in order to pursue the murderer beyond any reasonable hope of success. Crawford does his best to make the confrontation personal, a duel of titular intellects, a fight that he feels sure to win given that he’s a amoral genius engineer with a really sexy sports car. Still, it is difficult to believe Beachum would abandon his life-long pursuit of the American ideal of wealth and privilege. After all, he seemed quite willing to sleep with his future boss, which should have been the list of no-nos in his ethics course. Perhaps he missed that class hobnobbing with the other future corporate lawyers.

The other all-too-convenient plot point rests upon the contrivance that Crawford’s wife is having an affair with the local police’s hostage negotiator. Okay, he obviously designed his plan around that fact - it all hinged on the belief that this cop would be called in - and that was a rather large leap of faith for a meticulous killer to take.

Year of the Dog

‘Year of the Dog’ is a sad movie. And not sad in a good way, if there is such a thing. No, unfortunately, it’s sad in a pathetic way. It’s a depressing film, especially since I believe it was meant to be funny. But someone should tell the screenwriter that quirky does not always equal funny. In this case, quirky manages to equate to unreal. Plastic. Totally unbelievable. In other words, fake.

Molly Shannon (formerly of Saturday Night Live fame) stumbles through the entire movie with a silly grin plastered on her face. It’s almost as if she’s been kidnapped, lobotomized and forced to live in a world that’s slightly off-kilter. And if she stops smiling, if she shows some awareness that things aren’t right, she’ll be killed. Perhaps she’ll be killed and processed into nuggets like the chickens she’s so concerned about.

I suppose I’m confusing this movie with another ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ remake - except we get Molly Shannon instead of Nicole Kidman and the zombies are vegan. It’s just as frightening, except it’s not meant to be a scary film.

There’s so much wrong, it’s hard to catalogue. There’s the neighbour who’s conveniently hunting-obsessed. The egoistical yet strangely insecure boss with no sense of empathy. The co-worker who talks about nothing but her quest for marriage. The brother’s family that personifies the crassness of suburbia. The SPCA worker who’s been so badly damaged by a cult-ridden childhood, he chooses celibacy over any type of relationship.

There’s no one to like, nobody to identify with. All the characters are one-dimensional prototypes of reality. I kept waiting for the lead character to come to some realisation. But she just falls deeper and deeper into the morass of misplaced emotion. She gets drunk and gives her sister-in-law’s fur coats a soaking bath. She has a complete breakdown and tries to stab her neighbour.

“I just wanted him to feel what it’s like to be hunted.”

That’s the huge insight of the movie. One would be better off going for a walk, with or without a dog.

Feast of Love

We went looking for a comedy, but ended up at a screening of a tear-jerker, ‘Feast of Love’. The movie is centered around Greg Kinnear’s character Bradley Thomas as he stumbles through a couple of heartbreaks on his way to true love. The sad-faced Bradley is saddled with a couple of the cliches of modern romantic comedy - his first wife dumps him for her lesbian lover, while the second, a blonde bombshell, treats the marriage as a pit stop on her way to true love with someone else’s husband. The fact that he eventually finds his soul mate in the hospital emergency ward, a beautiful doctor with a sexy accent who sews up his self-inflicted pinkie wound of love, is just the last hard-to-believe scene in his three-act play.

The moral focus of the story is supplied by the supernaturally-wise Morgan Freeman, whose character can spot a love affair blooming before the participants themselves realize it. His character, along with his wife played by Jane Alexander, are grieving over the recent loss of their son. The two actors portray this struggle with heartfelt dignity, even as the storyline drifts into melodrama and Morgan Freeman is allowed to show off his deft boxing skills.

The third couple highlighted in the film is young and beautiful, featuring a guy saddled with a junkie past and an one-dimensional, violent, alcoholic father, and a girl with no history to speak of (at least as far as the script was concerned). The message here seems to be that true love requires a blind eye to misfortune, even if it needed a convenient trip to a fortune-teller to deliver it.

Unfortunately, it is these devices of the obvious - the silly fortune-teller - the evil, stupid father - the plethora of gratuitous female nudity - that ultimately undermine the theme of love that this film attempts to celebrate. A Feast of Love does not reach the sumptuous heights it is clearly aiming for. Rather, it would seem more at home in the fast-food-courts that inhabit the same malls as the cineplex’s that are showing this film.