evman... I do appreciate that you can see that I'm not a stupid person posting to the boards (even though your statement regarding me needing to have been sedated while watching it is a bit snarky - I tend to consider myself to be both quite aware, yet critical of films that don't seem to meet their hype).
Possibly I should have explained more thoroughly what I mean (though my subject heading says it all, really). While yes, I understood, and caught all of the plot points that you explain, I can also tell you that the movie, to me, seemed to be written in a manner in which they surgically removed (or didn't even care to provide me with in the first place) the interest that I had for these other plot points. And, yes, that's terrible writing, in my opinion. At least it is, for me. Like I said, I was done with the film halfway through, and it's specifically because of that reason. I watched the rest, hoping they'd do something to make me care again, but they just didn't. That's kind of what I was asking with my question - did others feel this way?
Still, I'll explain some of my feelings as to why I do feel this way.
To continue our theme, obviously SPOILERS below.
Since they really had very little explanation as to why the opposing family was so insane, I found them to be highly unbelievable, or at least relatively unexplained (unless you'd like to tell me that a mother cheating with another man drives an ENTIRE family crazy to revenge - and if you don't want to say it, just let me know why I should understand any kind of motivation for every single one of their actions being relatively identical - essentially meaning, all-out violence at nearly every moment). I basically had to just explain to myself, that these people are all simply naturally insane, for no great reason to accept them.
I think the biggest problem with this story was the virtual absence of character development (many characters starting with almost no background, or very basic background elements to begin with, that were never attempted to be expounded upon). Hell, I'd even have been happier for a good reason that Dwight's father would want to get involved with someone from this apparently insane family, considering he seemed like he had at least a comparably somewhat more sane family himself (not that out main character shows this trait much, either).
Did I care what was going to happen to his sister? Not really. They honestly didn't give me enough motivation to do so. Yes, I felt pity that her children would then be effected, but again, not enough. I didn't quite see where she fit in all that naturally (aside from being his sister) with Dwight, and they didn't really spend enough time making her sympathetic for me. That would have been huge, that would have made the rest of the film somewhat matter to me, but, in my opinion, they didn't provide it.
To be honest, the semi-sacrifical way that Dwight wound up trying to get to the bottom of things, seemed inexplicably cruel to his own family. He was assumably devastated by his parent's death, but then lived his life, and likely felt he might give his life just to protect his sister, without weighing the consequences that may have on her, despite the way that he felt about the loss of his family. Emotionally, and rationally, it didn't make much sense to me.
If I was supposed to be interested that the half-brother (and I assumed he was the half-brother - if that wasn't supposed to have been made clear, I like it even less) might now have access to his sister's house, then great - but for the reasons listed above, as well as the fact that I was simply already just primed for constant insanity and violence from this family, as well as the fact that the film felt like it had gone on far too long at this point already, I just didn't care. The logical assumption would probably be that he would either go and kill her to continue the family tradition, or he wouldn't - though if that was the case, that may have made for a more interesting ending, which wasn't provided. I don't always need a fully-tied up ending to make me happy, but since I didn't care anyway at that point, it didn't really make me want to consider much past what they were providing us with.
I truly feel they simplified many things way too much to make this an enjoyable film, and just did much less with it with the writing than they could have. Sorry, but that doesn't feel like a good movie to me. Not saying it couldn't have been, but the balance was off, if they were trying to tell a good story. And I was very much looking forward to seeing one, from all I had read about it.
I did like the setting, and a lot of the scenery, though. Just definitely wish I hadn't paid $14 bucks to see it. Listen - to each their own, anyway, to get back to it - the question I was posing was wondering if others felt as I did. Thanks for your opinion.
reply
share
emvan
11 years ago
Great reply, which I will get back to tomorrow (today being my 60th birthday, and full of plans!). I think I understand why we had different reactions at the character level, and want to run those ideas past you.
I apologize for the snark, but if it helped motivate you to be so articulate about what didn't work for you, then maybe I'm not sorry!
Being an ex-psych grad student and crazy film buff (personal best: saw 172 films released in the U.S. in 2011, and there are still six late discoveries left in my Netflix queue!), I come to these boards because I'm fascinated by the way different minds engage with the same film and come up with perfectly legitimate different reactions. I always hope to find someone who dug a film I didn't, or who didn't dig a film I did, and who is able to explain why rather than just inarticulately proclaim it be "great" or "garbage." The hope is to start (in perhaps two years when I'll have some free time) a blog called "This is Your Brain at the Movies" where I'll explore all that, and possibly write spoiler-free reviews that try to tip people off as to whether or not their cognitive personality is a good match for the movie. Because that's really what most of "taste" is. (Ebert's gift was having a very flexible brain that was a good mesh for almost every style of cinema, and yet still realizing that his responses were personal.)
Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.
reply
share
emvan
11 years ago
But here's an awesome teaser trailer for the full reply.
Notice that I literally couldn't conceive that anyone wouldn't have an empathic connection to the sister, and hence care about the rest of the film -- and hence I thought you must have missed that plot point.
Whereas you literally couldn't conceive that anyone would have an empathic connection, and hence didn't feel it was necessary to explain that when you said you felt the movie was over at that point, you meant at the level of caring what happens (as opposed to knowing the back story).
(Of course, it's actually more that I couldn't conceive that you couldn't conceive, and you couldn't conceive that I couldn't conceive, but the fact remains that those thoughts didn't cross our minds.)
No wonder why we often end up talking past each other about movies!
Now, why we had such different empathic reactions is the next question (and the answer, I think, has very little to do with how empathic we are in general. I have trouble empathizing when directors don't move the camera, for instance.)
Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.
reply
share
billnadsley
11 years ago
Thanks again for your response - looking forward to hearing more of what you have to say about it. Always nice to have civil conversations when there are differences of opinion. Also, nice to discuss with a film buff - I'd say my only shortcoming as someone who loves film, is that I tend to avoid blockbusters and much mainstream stuff like the plague, though will see them if friends I'm with are only interested in that kind of stuff. I get that that makes me a bit snotty, and may reduce my field of samples, I suppose, but really, I think that's less about being a snob, and more just about what I tend to like and not like.
Quickly, I very much agree on your point about the empathetic nature of the person watching the film. While you'd be hard pressed to say that I'm not empathetic in real-life (possibly too much so, sometimes, frankly), I do feel like sometimes I can let that go when I watch a fictional tale. Mind you, as was my problem here, I don't mind if you make me feel it in a film, and I always feel well-written characters can do that for me, but that's what I missed out on here.
Frankly, I'm not much one for trusting reviewers... some might agree with my taste, some may not, some may go back and forth, but I do think it's the difference in people (and possibly even their own life experiences and whatnot) that influence their opinions, so I can't expect them to know what I'll want to see and/or like. That's simply up to me to decide.
That said, of course I'm a bit of a hypocrite, and am more influenced by rave reviews than I'd like to be. It's often hard to believe that if say, 90% of people love something, that it can be all that bad. However, as I said in another post, I'm starting to feel a bit of a "bandwagon"-y kind of approach to reviews these days (tons of people say something is great, so other reviewers potentially allow themselves to gush more positively than they might truly feel to not seem like the odd one out). I feel this, because I've recently been pretty disappointed in a number of films a lot of people seem to be thinking are great pieces of work.
I know this isn't the place to necessarily discuss this, but I'd be interested in your thoughts on a few others that I saw in the theater over the past few weeks, that really didn't live up to the hype, in my opinion. One was "Mistaken For Strangers", and the other was "Cheap Thrills". Maybe we can meet in the other boards to chat on those if you have thoughts to share.
Cool to speak with you - looking forward to more.
reply
share
emvan
11 years ago
Haven't seen the two films you mentioned. I have a membership to one of the local arthouse cinemas, and see everything that plays there for free, and anything of that ilk that doesn't play there I wait and end up renting, if worthwhile.
However, if you go back in time towards 2011, the odds of my having seen any film go up. I can think of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives as a film I thought was overrated by critics, as well as Putty Hill and To Die Like a Man. But I'm much likelier to have the opposite reaction -- adoring Cloud Atlas, The Great Gatsby, and so on.
In terms of who to trust -- I've rated c. 1500 films at Netflix, and I've essentially never regretted seeing a movie that they predicted I would rate a 4.1 or better. 4.0 is nearly as reliable, and 3.9 and 3.8 have proven to be such a strong group that I check reviews (looking to see what they identified as strengths or weaknesses, and matching those up with things that do or don't bother me) and usually end up renting most of those as well. Add a smattering of 3.5 to 3.7, and you've got it!
The goal is to see every B+ movie (highly recommended, glad I didn't miss it) released every year, while minimizing the C+ (not worth the time) and below. I'm almost done with 2011; I've seen 116 B+ or better, just 27 C+ or below (along with 15 B and 14 B-; a B is a movie I'm ultimately glad I saw as a bonus of sorts, where a B- is a good, solid, completely watchable and entertaining movie, but ultimately, one I could have missed).
For blockbusters, being an official ubergeek, I've got a formula that predicts the Netflix user rating (.33 * Rotten Tomatoes Average Rating + .19 * IMDB rating + .16) for those cases where I don't already know that I want to see the movie. Hence I saw Frozen (4.2) and skipped Divergent (3.4). (Some of the don't-see decisions might later get a Netflix override, of course.)
So I guess I spend a lot of time deciding what to see, but it's been hugely worth it. There are movies I waffled on seeing for a while, based on all of this logic, that have ended up in my all-time top 100 (Mysteries of Lisbon and Love Exposure). It's much easier to be inclusive when you're just renting from Netflix!
Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.
reply
share
emvan
11 years ago
OK, point of difference one: the sanity, or lack of sanity, of the Cleland clan.
This seems to me to be a a simple lack of knowledge on your part, about a dark corner of the rural American psyche. Because everything they did made perfect sense to me, within a certain mind-set, which is very real and well-established. Let me just go through the history and explain their reasoning.
Big Wade Cleland, who is impotent and dying of cancer, discovers that his wife is having an affair with Dwight's father (call him Papa Evans). In his culture, this is an insult to his honor that calls for him to kill the man who cuckolded him. (There are other cultures where you, or your relatives, would kill your wife, I believe.) If you are caught by the police, you serve the time ("Don't do the crime if you can't serve the time.")
Big Wade does so, and inadvertently kills Mama Evans. This is regretted by the Cleland family, but her death is regarded, it seems, as acceptable collateral damage which unfortunately proved hard to avoid.
Also, in this culture, you would never let a parent die in jail. So Little Wade takes the rap for his Dad and serves 20 years. This is considered the right and very honorable thing to do.
Dwight murders Little Wade before he ever gets home to see the "Welcome Home Wade" banner. The Clelands know that Wade, Jr. was innocent of the crime, and that furthermore he had done a righteous thing by serving jail time in his father's stead. You can imagine how angry they are. To them, Wade, Jr. was a hero.
They do not regard the murder of Papa Evans as a murder; that was a justifiable killing. The death of Mama Evans was an accident. But Wade, Jr.s death is a murder, and by their code, you answer murder with another killing (an eye for an eye, a life for a life): preferably of the murderer, but if that is impossible, you can substitute a close relative to even the score. The one thing you never do is take the matter to the police, who are never to be trusted.
Note that I'm not making this up. I recognized it. It's the code of conduct that drove the Hatfield / McCoy feud, and I have no doubt that there are still Southerners who live by it. (It's a good code to follow if you are engaged in petty criminal activity, like making moonshine, and can never go to the police for any reason.) It is internally consistent and even has a sick sort of primitive Biblical nobility to it.
Once the younger Cleland brother is killed, the score to be avenged is 2-0. Dwight and the sister must die. Dwight thinks the score is 2-2, but he doesn't realize that the Clelands don't regard the deaths of Dwight's parents as needing to be avenged.
Now, there is some stupidity here. It doesn't occur to the Clelands that the Evans family may not have known about the affair and that therefore Dwight may be planning to settle a perceived score by killing Wade, Jr. upon his release, else they would have been on the lookout for him. So this is the same mistake that Dwight makes -- keeping score, and mistakenly thinking that the other side has the same score you do.
So rather than just an insane murderous family, I saw a detailed, very logical code of behavior being played out by both sides, with its fatal flaw being exposed. Because in these revenge feuds, there is always disagreement about the score.
Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.
reply
share
film_ophile
10 years ago
emvan,
very articulate description. th you.
The way to have what we want
Is to share what we have.
reply
share
StaunchWoman
10 years ago
I don`t think Wade Jr. was innocent. He was innocent of killing Dwight`s parents, yes. But he didn`t go to jail for nothing. Teddy, while sitting in the trunk, told Dwight that Wade didn`t kill his parents but had killed others, using a racial slur to describe who.
Wade Jr. may not have killed Dwight`s parents, but he was not an innocent man.
We've met before, haven't we?
reply
share
emvan
10 years ago
Wade Jr., in the minds of his clan, was innocent of any crime by their standards of what is criminal, by their own code of conduct. That's all I meant. That would not nearly guarantee his being an "innocent man" by any generally recognized societal criteria.
I saw this almost a year ago, and I had forgotten that detail, so I'm not sure precisely how casually racist they were portrayed as being. But I believe that the implication of that detail was that they consider the killing of people they regard as racially inferior as not a crime, either. And it would seem likely that the filmmaker added that bit to add complexity to the moral situation. Having Wade, Jr. deserve to be punished, but not for the reasons Dwight thinks, is a good moral twist.
Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.
reply
share
JrnlofEddieDeezenStudies
11 years ago
****BIG spoilers in my post*****
Since they really had very little explanation as to why the opposing family was so insane
It seems to me like you're completely overlooking that Dwight murdered Wade right when Wade got out of prison after serving a 10-year sentence for a crime he didn't commit.
If you're talking about the murder of Dwight's parents in the first place, Dwight's dad was having an affair with Wade's mother. Wade's father killed Dwight's father over this--a crime of passion, really. That Dwight's mother was also killed was apparently unintentional.
http://rateyourmusic.com/~JrnlofEddieDeezenStudies
reply
share
billnadsley
11 years ago
Yeah, I understood all of what you're saying, but my point was more just the fact that I had the impression that the family was just over-the-top insane to begin with, even before the whole affair business (obviously we didn't see that, but they certainly seemed set up to be that way).
I mean, I get one person's crime of passion murder, to a degree. I also get a family being angry about their newly released son being killed. But I don't get the all-out insane vigilante pursuit of Dwight by members of the family, nor do I understand others of them just being so ready to kill at all times, just because of either of those incidents. I mean, the ENTIRE family was nuts except for the one that got away.
I guess they could just be a militant-style backwoods family, but that's kind of a stereotypical yawner of an explanation to me. And I don't get why Dwight's dad would have gotten involved in an affair with one of them, if that was the case, considering I was assuming that Dwight's family weren't a bunch of wackos as well (though that's just my feeling).
reply
share
JrnlofEddieDeezenStudies
11 years ago
Well, the family were definitely rednecks, etc., but what seems weird to me is that you wouldn't understand (not necessarily empathize with, but simply understand) people being ready to murder folks in retaliation for another murder. Not that I think realism is a requirement (in fact, I hate that stance--I call it a "realism fetish"), but this is definitely realistic. Don't you watch the news at all? Don't you read or watch any true crime stuff? Any historical works about tribal conflicts? Haven't you ever heard of family feuds among hillbillies, such as the infamous Hatfield and McCoy feud?
At the very least, check out this article on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feud
That's not fiction.
It's unfortunate that people are like this at times, but we can't deny that it happens.
http://rateyourmusic.com/~JrnlofEddieDeezenStudies
reply
share
billnadsley
11 years ago
True, I suppose I am aware of the real things that happen, but it still just feels to easy for me in this case. Still didn't do much to help me like it, as it just felt a little too stereotypical redneck maniac to me - kind of like these people were taken from a slasher film where you could actually kill the slashers without as much effort as usual. So I do suppose it could be real, maybe it's more that it just came off as kind of dumb to me. I suppose it's fair, and can be realistic, just was kind of dull, IMO.
As far as the revenge aspect of the family, I do understand their feeling on it. I think the impact of their actions just got sort of watered down by the fact that they were already simply nuts to begin with. I think part of what I wished for in this film was something that was a little more complex, and it just never arrived, in my opinion. Sort of like I said when I started this thread, it's like the movie blew it's whole wad about halfway through, then just kind of trudged on with the story we all already understood, and wound up with a climax I imagine we all were predicting. Anyway, I take nothing away from those who liked it, but it just didn't get there for me.
Out of curiosity, what is your feeling on the whole setup for the thing, which is Dwight's dad having an affair with someone from this killer redneck clan? I think it could have gone a long way for me to explain that a bit more. I don't need complete believability in a film either, but I'd be interested to know how a guy I assume to be relatively non-redneck would somehow meet a woman from this kind of family, know her for a while, and have an affair with her. Yeah, I know it's possible for anything to happen in the world of cheating, but I just wish they had gotten into it a bit more than they did. It kind of threw me a bit out of the story when I tried to imagine this. But then again, I wasn't thrilled with the writing, so I feel there could be a lot more done in that way during many portions of the film.
But, it is what it is, I guess. Some people will like this, and some won't. I just wanted something a bit deeper from this.
reply
share
pc_buttspasm
10 years ago
I don't need complete believability in a film either, but I'd be interested to know how a guy I assume to be relatively non-redneck would somehow meet a woman from this kind of family, know her for a while, and have an affair with her. Yeah, I know it's possible for anything to happen in the world of cheating, but I just wish they had gotten into it a bit more than they did.
I thought that gaps in information like this were deliberate. One of the things I liked about the movie is that it's essentially anti-revenge, in that it shows people running around committing murder when they only have part of the story. For example, Dwight doesn't know why his parents were killed. To him it's just a random act that he thinks he needs to get revenge for.
We don't even know that the woman was from "this kind of family" - we just know that she married a redneck. She could have been someone from a middle-class family who fell in with a bad crowd. We don't even know her name. She's a complete blank, a mystery. Just like the characters in the movie, we don't know the whole story, because nobody ever does.
I also wonder if I missed anything, as the movie relied heavily on visual storytelling rather than dumping everything into dialogue (something I appreciated about it). For example I never clicked that the bullet holes in the car were from the parents being killed in it. Perhaps I should have been paying more attention to the photo album Dwight was looking through at the other family's home, for example.
All in all I thought this movie was a huge advancement over the writer/director's previous movie Murder Party, so I'd be interested seeing a third movie to see if he advances further again.
reply
share