2015 #57
Andrew Dominik | 93 mins | TV | 2.35:1 | USA / English | 18 / R
Andrew Dominik | 93 mins | TV | 2.35:1 | USA / English | 18 / R
As presidential nominee Barack Obama talks about the American Dream, in a run-down corner of the nation a trio of small-timers plot a robbery, landing them in hot water with some nasty people.
Writer-director Dominik uses news audio about the financial crisis to comment on the plot, an inclusion somewhere between neat dramatic irony and heavy-handed affectation. He gets better mileage from the mundane mechanics and economics of organised crime, but it’s small consolation among flabby storytelling: pointless subplots; flashy camerawork that contains little weight or meaning (ironically); even well written and performed scenes eventually drag, outstaying their welcome.
Disappointing.
Killing Them Softly is on Film4 tonight at 10:55pm.
Never seen this but remember the trailer looked good. But why air it so late? I know people can record stuff to watch later, but its never ceased to bug me how late some channels show movies. Last week FIGHT CLUB was on but it started about 11:30 pm and finished something near 2 am. Okay, I have it on disc but thats not the point; there was an evening of awful reality shows/ chat shows etc beforehand and I had to wonder what enters the schedulers heads. How late do they think people stay up and don’t they think viewers have jobs?
(Conspiracy theory= they are all in league with the Devil/Sky Movies (or at least secretly on their payroll) and setting up dedicated Movie Channels as the only alternative to discs, as Terrestrial channels just aren’t trying anymore).
Oh well. Rant over. But it is a daft time to screen a movie on a Sunday. Especially considering the rubbish likely filling the schedule before it.
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Whoops. Film4. So in this case its not one of the ‘normal’ channels at fault. My bad. But its still a lousy time for a movie for those of us with lives/jobs.
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I can only speculate, but I wonder if it’s partly regulatory. For one thing, they can’t show certain things too early without editing them for content. There might also be some kind of Ofcom rules in play — like how there are limits on how many repeats can be shown in prime time, and that the amount of programming between ad breaks has to maintain a certain average, etc. — perhaps something along those lines imposes how early they can show films?
I guess they feel it works for them, anyway, because it’s a pretty fixed aspect of scheduling nowadays.
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I haven’t seen this since it came out in the cinema, so it my opinion might be different now but I remember really enjoying it. Probably because I’m a Ben Mendlesohn fanboy.
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I know it has its fans, but it just didn’t work for me. I loved Dominik’s last film too, The Assassination of Jesse James, so that made it particularly disappointing.
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