Change Your Image
mysticalfredo
Reviews
Crushed (2015)
Predictable and artless
Over the years, so many films have utilized the Australian landscape as a moody, atmospheric backdrop. It's such a gorgeous place steeped in mysterious natural history that filmmakers hailing from down under have no choice but to exploit its vast photogenic qualities - and they'd be silly not to use it in an attempt to give their work added visual gravitas.
Megan Riakos' debut feature "Crushed" is no exception, setting its story in the beautiful Mudgee wine region of New South Wales. Our protagonist, Ellia, returns home after her father is crushed and killed by a barrel in the family's winery under suspicious circumstances. Soon, her mother becomes the prime suspect in the murder investigation, and Ellia finds herself embroiled in an ever-deepening web of mystery, tragedy and family secrets.
The film starts off in a slow burn, with lingering shots and scenes that last that little bit longer than they should. Soon, we realize that there's something off about the pacing for a film that's billed as a thriller. We need to get to the meat of the story, and quick, but it's not happening. We spend time with Ellia, who drinks wine. A lot of wine.
The performances reveal themselves as uneven - at best melodramatic, and at worst amateurish. The film focuses in on these characters as a family, but we never feel convinced that they have real chemistry. To work, this film desperately needed believable familial interaction between the actors, and it's just not there. Ellia doesn't even seem particularly phased by the fact that her father has been crushed to death, but perhaps we're meant to attribute that to her being numbed by her constant wine- guzzling.
Between swigs, the plot devolves into Ellia's less-than-riveting investigation of rotting wheat and poisoned soil - and how that may have a connection to her father's death - mostly consisting of internet searches on a fake version of Google. She questions a line of insultingly incompetent sleazy men and the story gets sillier and sillier until it almost implodes during a scene where Ellia uses her seductive feminine wiles to extract information from a local drunkard about the kind of farming soil he laid at the winery. Oh yeah baby, tell me 'bout that hot, hot soil.
Speaking of drunkards... did I mention Ellia drinks a lot of wine?
STOP DRINKING!
Anyway, the plot reaches its denouement in a way that is, frankly, predictable and cringeworthy in its execution. It's unbelievably melodramatic and solidifies the feeling that this two hour affair would have been far more comfortable on midday TV, rather than blown up to a big screen feature film.
"Crushed" takes itself too seriously, and I can't help but think injecting a little Aussie humor may have helped. It's hard to accept this film and its dreary tone without some levity. It's just not very good - but not bad enough to recommend for the midnight movie crowd because it doesn't go far enough in any direction. It's just dull and unengaging.
If I could think of a couple of positives, they would be that it's shot decently (if somewhat artlessly) and that the score is decent, but unremarkable and overdramatic for what's happening on screen. There is potential talent inside the crew of "Crushed", but this film is a stumble perhaps hindered by its financial limitations. I guess as an Australian, I should be grateful that anyone is able to get a film off the ground at all in the country. For that alone, congratulations is in order, since that's more than half of the filmmaking battle these days.
But that doesn't mean I can't hope for a higher standard. Gems like "The Babadook" and "Wolf Creek" are painfully few and far between, but their very existence means IT IS possible to make genre films of international quality in Australia. As it stands, we're stuck with limited budgets and resources, and our industry will continue to wallow in the mud if "Crushed" is anything to go by.
The Love Witch (2016)
Burn the Love Witch!
I recently sat down to watch the "Season of the Witch" for the first time. It's an early 1970's film by George Romero that follows the exploits of a bored, neglected suburban housewife as she becomes involved in a world of witchcraft and murder. It was an entertaining slice of its era, and could probably be described as an early-ish feminist horror film. With it fresh in my memory, I was looking forward to seeing 2016's "The Love Witch" - directed by Anna Biller - which seemed like a perfect companion piece.
You could almost copy and paste the synopsis for "Season of the Witch" and substitute it for that of "The Love Witch", but instead of a suburban housewife, our protagonist here - Elaine, played by Samantha Robinson - is single, already a witch, and she wants a man. A perfect man. And she isn't afraid to use all the witchery in the book to get him, but things just seem to keep going wrong, and the men usually end up dead.
On its surface, "The Love Witch" is a throwback to those bright technicolor melodramas of the 60's and 70's with occult themes like those in Romero's film. I'm not familiar with her previous work, but one look at Biller's filmography shows that she's made a habit of paying tribute to exploitation fare of the past, and visually she nails it.
Shot on glorious 35mm, "The Love Witch" makes one hell of a first impression. The colors are vivid and absolutely striking. The costuming and makeup are dead on, invoking flashbacks to the 1970's more successfully than most films that attempt a retro look. The set design is wonderfully garish and when you realize that Biller herself did just about everything - from directing to writing, costumes to makeup, production design to editing - it's hard not to be impressed.
I was totally on board at the beginning of the film. Elaine captures her first male victim in a long-winded but amusing sequence. There's a revealing, groovy sex scene, but the immersion is broken when you realize that the 70's bush is missing. Come on, the pubic hair should have been growing down their legs like gnarled thickets!
And with an inexplicable lack of hair, things start to fall apart. The downward spiral begins.
You begin noticing the strange on screen mix of vintage cars and brand new models. Is this the 70's, or some bizarre modern visual pastiche? Why? Things aren't quite gelling together as they should visually. There are a couple of shots that make use of the style and setting laid out so well in the first 25 minutes, but you can tell the production is quickly running out of steam.
Then... it happens. The movie stops dead in its tracks for a long, drawn out scene of dialogue that does nothing to further the plot. In fact, at this point in the film, there IS no plot. There is no drive. The audience might as well go home. Everything creaks to a halt as we watch and listen to flatly shot, mundanely written yammering that means absolutely nothing to the story as a whole.
I wanted to get my scissors out and trim this film for Biller. Sure, she's a one-woman cinematic army, wearing all the hats in the production - and I get that it takes a lot of effort to do that - but there's a reason why directors and writers aren't usually given the right to edit their work. I know, you wrote and you filmed all this stuff that in your heart is great, but you need to cut it down to make the movie watchable for us plebs.
At two hours long, "The Love Witch" is disastrous.
The script needs to be firing on all cylinders for this to work, but it never is. The proceedings are completely witless and droll. As the film drags the audience through long dialogue scene after loooooong dialogue scene, Elaine becomes insufferable. She really is a wretchedly selfish and unlikable protagonist. Her stilted, sedate line delivery and bemused look are frustrating to the point of disbelief, and the people around her wander through scenes like denizens of a poorly acted dream.
Ostensibly, the film is about the hold that women have over men with their sexuality... but you know what they say? Beauty is truly skin deep and the old adage applies to the film as well. The appeal of the visual style wears out its welcome by the halfway mark and what started out as unique, vivid, colorful and endearing becomes ugly and distasteful. It's like eating too much candy - the first few bites are great, but after indulging too selfishly, you end up with a stomach ache, which is usually followed by projectile vomiting and violent diarrhea.
About 20 minutes from the end, when you feel like the movie MUST be wrapping up soon, you're subjected to another long, tensionless dialogue scene, and it hammers home just how much time you've wasted watching this thing. When the end mercifully comes, it's mind- numbingly (and I hate to use the word) pretentious, but would you expect anything less after all that?
Go and watch Romero's "Season of the Witch" instead. It's not his best work, but it's not... this.
In closing, all I can say is... burn "The Love Witch".