PARK CITY, Utah -- Protein makes for protean people in 20th Century Fox's "Ravenous", a dimwitted and gruesomely dunderheaded horror-comedy about cannibalism that emanates around the myth that those who devour human flesh take on the traits of the person they've eaten.
Playing as a special screening at the Sundance Film Festival, this crude offering was not without its admirers among the festival gourmands -- i.e. the cine-sheep who tend to applaud anything because it's in a festival and therefore must be good. But overall prospects, even on the art house circuit, look dim for this immature smattering of cinematic shock-schlock.
Set mainly in Northern California -- not far from Donner Pass, where similar events actually occurred -- "Ravenous" takes place in the giddy, gold days of the late 1840s, a time when folk were flocking to California to stake their fortunes. About the only thing out there in this saga is an outpost, an army fort of outcasts and oddballs, including Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) who has been ostracized there for cowardice during the Mexican-American War. Boyd's comrades include a cadre of standard-issue comedic characters. Among the stereotypes are a burned-out commander (Jeffrey Jones), an alcoholic medic (Stephen Spinella), a gung-ho militarist (Neal McDonough) and a stoned-out cook (David Arquette). Such aggregation is indicative of the comedic originality of Ted Griffin's screenplay.
Unfortunately, the cliched characters are not archetypal in any way but are, perhaps, the most inventive thing about the scenario that gyrates around the central sensation -- cannibalism. While providing a bloody hors d'oeuvre of battle scenes from the war, director Antonia Bird gets to show her visual stuff as the story pushes into its main course with the arrival of a dazed and ashen stranger, Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle). He's a nearly emaciated Scot who had been traveling with a wagon load of settlers that became snowbound in the western Sierras. Colqhoun recounts a grisly tale about how the starving, isolated group resorted to cannibalism.
Mixing bloody, graphic flashbacks of flesh-eating and murdering with the outpost's trek to investigate the skeletal remains of the devoured party, director Antonia Bird serves a revolting array of heinous images, glazed with scenes of the most barbaric of killings and knifings. Aesthetically, it's as if Sam Peckinpah went on a blood-bender as Bird bludgeons our senses with these scenes of cruelty and desperation. Similarly, the outpost group's trek across the mountains is also stylized to feature a fusillade of bone-cracking, face-gashing "adventure."
Unlike such cinematic masters as Luis Bunuel who used shocking images and extravagant juxtaposition to posit philosophical themes or psychological insights, there doesn't seem to be much on the screen to indicate that Bird's brain is interested in more than eliciting shock and revulsion from the audience. Certainly there is nothing to indicate in Ted Griffin's callow scripting of any profound insights into the human psyche or revelations about the depths to which human survival instinct clashes with moral tenets. Overall, the scenario here is more akin to a B-level rampage of gross-outs than a perversely wise graphic into the depths of human behavior. Attempts at deadpan drollery are intermittent and, even on the film's low intellectual level, numbingly dull.
Usually one must go to a demolition derby to approximate the level of sophistication and entertainment one finds here in this slash-and-slurp heap. Since "Ravenous" offers nothing of substance to chew on intellectually, one's mind tends to wander during the blood-letting. Doesn't actor Robert Carlyle, with his wide forehead, stringy hair and dark, piercing eyes remind one of photos of Edgar Allan Poe. And doesn't the angular visage of actor Stephen Spinella, with his grayed hair and trimmed bead, bear a likeness to Vincent Price? Lo, the starved viewer's search for sustenance in this filmic gruel.
A plate of Steak Tartar, however, for the skilled technical team. Cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond's striking, natural compositions are vivid and powerful, while Bryce Perrin's production design smartly captures the squalor and filth of frontier life, akin to the muddy images of a far better film, Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller".
RAVENOUS
20th Century Fox
Fox 2000 Pictures presents
An Adam Fields/Heyday Films production
Producers: Adam Fields, David Heyman
Director : Antonia Bird
Screenwriter: Ted Griffin
Director of photography: Anthony B. Richmond
Executive producer: Tim Van Rellim
Production designer: Bryce Perrin
Editor: Neil Farrell
Music: Michael Nyman, Damon Albarn
Color/stereo
Cast:
Boyd: Guy Pearce
Colqhoun: Robert Carlyle
Cleaves: David Arquette
Toffler: Jeremy Davies
Hart: Jeffrey Jones
Gen. Slauson: John Spencer
Knox: Stephen Spinella
Reich: Neal McDonough
Running time -- 95 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
Playing as a special screening at the Sundance Film Festival, this crude offering was not without its admirers among the festival gourmands -- i.e. the cine-sheep who tend to applaud anything because it's in a festival and therefore must be good. But overall prospects, even on the art house circuit, look dim for this immature smattering of cinematic shock-schlock.
Set mainly in Northern California -- not far from Donner Pass, where similar events actually occurred -- "Ravenous" takes place in the giddy, gold days of the late 1840s, a time when folk were flocking to California to stake their fortunes. About the only thing out there in this saga is an outpost, an army fort of outcasts and oddballs, including Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) who has been ostracized there for cowardice during the Mexican-American War. Boyd's comrades include a cadre of standard-issue comedic characters. Among the stereotypes are a burned-out commander (Jeffrey Jones), an alcoholic medic (Stephen Spinella), a gung-ho militarist (Neal McDonough) and a stoned-out cook (David Arquette). Such aggregation is indicative of the comedic originality of Ted Griffin's screenplay.
Unfortunately, the cliched characters are not archetypal in any way but are, perhaps, the most inventive thing about the scenario that gyrates around the central sensation -- cannibalism. While providing a bloody hors d'oeuvre of battle scenes from the war, director Antonia Bird gets to show her visual stuff as the story pushes into its main course with the arrival of a dazed and ashen stranger, Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle). He's a nearly emaciated Scot who had been traveling with a wagon load of settlers that became snowbound in the western Sierras. Colqhoun recounts a grisly tale about how the starving, isolated group resorted to cannibalism.
Mixing bloody, graphic flashbacks of flesh-eating and murdering with the outpost's trek to investigate the skeletal remains of the devoured party, director Antonia Bird serves a revolting array of heinous images, glazed with scenes of the most barbaric of killings and knifings. Aesthetically, it's as if Sam Peckinpah went on a blood-bender as Bird bludgeons our senses with these scenes of cruelty and desperation. Similarly, the outpost group's trek across the mountains is also stylized to feature a fusillade of bone-cracking, face-gashing "adventure."
Unlike such cinematic masters as Luis Bunuel who used shocking images and extravagant juxtaposition to posit philosophical themes or psychological insights, there doesn't seem to be much on the screen to indicate that Bird's brain is interested in more than eliciting shock and revulsion from the audience. Certainly there is nothing to indicate in Ted Griffin's callow scripting of any profound insights into the human psyche or revelations about the depths to which human survival instinct clashes with moral tenets. Overall, the scenario here is more akin to a B-level rampage of gross-outs than a perversely wise graphic into the depths of human behavior. Attempts at deadpan drollery are intermittent and, even on the film's low intellectual level, numbingly dull.
Usually one must go to a demolition derby to approximate the level of sophistication and entertainment one finds here in this slash-and-slurp heap. Since "Ravenous" offers nothing of substance to chew on intellectually, one's mind tends to wander during the blood-letting. Doesn't actor Robert Carlyle, with his wide forehead, stringy hair and dark, piercing eyes remind one of photos of Edgar Allan Poe. And doesn't the angular visage of actor Stephen Spinella, with his grayed hair and trimmed bead, bear a likeness to Vincent Price? Lo, the starved viewer's search for sustenance in this filmic gruel.
A plate of Steak Tartar, however, for the skilled technical team. Cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond's striking, natural compositions are vivid and powerful, while Bryce Perrin's production design smartly captures the squalor and filth of frontier life, akin to the muddy images of a far better film, Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller".
RAVENOUS
20th Century Fox
Fox 2000 Pictures presents
An Adam Fields/Heyday Films production
Producers: Adam Fields, David Heyman
Director : Antonia Bird
Screenwriter: Ted Griffin
Director of photography: Anthony B. Richmond
Executive producer: Tim Van Rellim
Production designer: Bryce Perrin
Editor: Neil Farrell
Music: Michael Nyman, Damon Albarn
Color/stereo
Cast:
Boyd: Guy Pearce
Colqhoun: Robert Carlyle
Cleaves: David Arquette
Toffler: Jeremy Davies
Hart: Jeffrey Jones
Gen. Slauson: John Spencer
Knox: Stephen Spinella
Reich: Neal McDonough
Running time -- 95 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 1/28/1999
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
"The Sound of One Hand Clapping", a backward-looking melodrama about the daughter of an Eastern European immigrant to Australia, is soaked with tears, dramatic revelations, past trauma and sugary-sweet orchestral music. If an audience of die-hard, teary-eyed melodrama fans can make it through the confused first half-hour, they may like the humorless remainder, but a broader audience will lose interest quickly.
The film screened recently at the Berlin Film Festival.
First-time director-screenwriter Richard Flanagan's own story is an interesting one: He wrote the script but could not set up a production. He turned the story into a novel that got so much attention before its publication, Flanagan was able to set up the picture and even direct it. The book and film will be released almost simultaneously in Australia.
Though his directorial debut is a technically handsome piece of craftsmanship with stunning images and colors (especially because of cameraman Martin McGrath and production designer Bryce Perrin), Flanagan gets in his own way with a script that makes too many novel-like jumps and does not pay enough attention to its characters.
We're not sure who the main character is at first: Flanagan builds up the narrative as a series of jumps between three or four different time periods and between characters and locations we can identify only later.
Finally, we figure out that the story is about Sonja (Kerry Fox), a pregnant woman who wants an abortion because her relationship with her father is less-than-happy and because her mother abandoned her when she was 3.
That's about all that happens in the present: The rest of the film is backstory, backstory and more backstory. Sonja at 3 is abandoned by her mother (Melita Jurisic); a slightly older Sonja is nearly abandoned by her father after they move to Australia, but he relents and makes a happy life for them for a while. But Sonja ruins his chance for happiness when she comes between him and his potential bride, and he beats a teenage Sonja when he is drunk.
Meanwhile, Sonja suspects that there is a deep, dark secret in the way her mother abandoned her, and she is right. When finally revealed, the secret is not spectacular as we hope, but it is satisfying. In fact, Flanagan likes this secret so much, he uses it as the film's climax, even though it happened in the distant past.
The purpose of all this confusing time-jumping is to put the mother-abandons-child scene, which comes first chronologically, at the end. Otherwise, there would be no climax.
Fox ("Angel at My Table") may be the star, but her acting talents are confined to the few present-time scenes. Her only jobs are to wonder whether she really wants an abortion and to ask about her mother's dark secret.
More than anyone, it is Kristof Kaczmarek as Sonja's father who turns in a moving, accomplished performance as the immigrant who tries to make a new life in a new world but fails because he cannot drive the old world and the love he lost there out of his heart. His is a tragic, poetic character. One can't help thinking that his story, handled in a neater, more engaging way, could have been a powerful one.
THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Director-screenwriter: Richard Flanagan
Producer: Rolf De Heer
Co-producers: David Lightfoot, Deborah Cox, Stephen Thomas
Camera: Martin McGrath
Production designer: Bryce Perrin
Editors: John Scott, Tania Nehme
Music: Cezary Skubiszewksi
Costume designer: Aphrodite Kondos
Casting: Elly Bradbury
Color/stereo
Cast:
Sonja: Kerry Fox
Bojan: Kristof Kaczmarek
Sonja (age 8): Rosie Flanagan
Jenja: Evelyn Krape
Maria: Melita Jurisic
Picotti: Jacek Koman
Running time -- 93 minutes
No MPAA rating...
The film screened recently at the Berlin Film Festival.
First-time director-screenwriter Richard Flanagan's own story is an interesting one: He wrote the script but could not set up a production. He turned the story into a novel that got so much attention before its publication, Flanagan was able to set up the picture and even direct it. The book and film will be released almost simultaneously in Australia.
Though his directorial debut is a technically handsome piece of craftsmanship with stunning images and colors (especially because of cameraman Martin McGrath and production designer Bryce Perrin), Flanagan gets in his own way with a script that makes too many novel-like jumps and does not pay enough attention to its characters.
We're not sure who the main character is at first: Flanagan builds up the narrative as a series of jumps between three or four different time periods and between characters and locations we can identify only later.
Finally, we figure out that the story is about Sonja (Kerry Fox), a pregnant woman who wants an abortion because her relationship with her father is less-than-happy and because her mother abandoned her when she was 3.
That's about all that happens in the present: The rest of the film is backstory, backstory and more backstory. Sonja at 3 is abandoned by her mother (Melita Jurisic); a slightly older Sonja is nearly abandoned by her father after they move to Australia, but he relents and makes a happy life for them for a while. But Sonja ruins his chance for happiness when she comes between him and his potential bride, and he beats a teenage Sonja when he is drunk.
Meanwhile, Sonja suspects that there is a deep, dark secret in the way her mother abandoned her, and she is right. When finally revealed, the secret is not spectacular as we hope, but it is satisfying. In fact, Flanagan likes this secret so much, he uses it as the film's climax, even though it happened in the distant past.
The purpose of all this confusing time-jumping is to put the mother-abandons-child scene, which comes first chronologically, at the end. Otherwise, there would be no climax.
Fox ("Angel at My Table") may be the star, but her acting talents are confined to the few present-time scenes. Her only jobs are to wonder whether she really wants an abortion and to ask about her mother's dark secret.
More than anyone, it is Kristof Kaczmarek as Sonja's father who turns in a moving, accomplished performance as the immigrant who tries to make a new life in a new world but fails because he cannot drive the old world and the love he lost there out of his heart. His is a tragic, poetic character. One can't help thinking that his story, handled in a neater, more engaging way, could have been a powerful one.
THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Director-screenwriter: Richard Flanagan
Producer: Rolf De Heer
Co-producers: David Lightfoot, Deborah Cox, Stephen Thomas
Camera: Martin McGrath
Production designer: Bryce Perrin
Editors: John Scott, Tania Nehme
Music: Cezary Skubiszewksi
Costume designer: Aphrodite Kondos
Casting: Elly Bradbury
Color/stereo
Cast:
Sonja: Kerry Fox
Bojan: Kristof Kaczmarek
Sonja (age 8): Rosie Flanagan
Jenja: Evelyn Krape
Maria: Melita Jurisic
Picotti: Jacek Koman
Running time -- 93 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 2/23/1998
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.