Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

There is a lot to admire in this 2004 film by M. Night Shyamalan: the cinematography by Roger Deakins, the score by James Howard, a terrific cast, and even (somewhat to my surprise) the director's screenplay. All of which makes the derision heaped upon it (44% on Rotten Tomatoes) a bit difficult to understand.  Some of that may simply have been that critics were keen to take the director down a peg or two , for whatever reason. But the elephant in the room here  is the ending.  Roger Ebert said of it "It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore."   Harsh! I guess the problem is that up to that point Shyamalan's main quality as a director had been seen as his ability to deliver a twist ending, as evidenced by 'The Sixth Sense' and 'Unbreakable'.  And judged by the endings of those two films 'The Village' does disappoint.  On the other hand, the film before ...

Although this 2005 film by James Mangold only covers Johnny Cash’s life up to the late 1960s it still manages to include all the familiar tropes that we expect from a music biopic: the early struggle to break through, followed by meteoric success, a broken marriage, drugs and other temptations on the road. The result is that I never got emotionally invested in the story.  In fact my favourite scene was a small and rather inconsequential one early on when Cash is auditioning to the legendary Sam Phillips (owner of Sun Records). After that I was entertained OK but nothing more.  Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon do a fine job of imitating Cash and June Carter on stage but their relationship offstage, which is the main emotional focus of the film, never achieved lift-off for me.  Ultimately I didn’t buy Phoenix as Cash, nor did I find him particularly engaging.  I would guess that the real Johnny Cash had presence and charm to spare but that didn’t come across to me...

This is one of those films where immediately it finishes I need to go to Wikipedia, because although the plot seems simple enough it is presented in such a skeletal fashion that I felt a need to get it fleshed out. Not that the plot is really that important, even in the second half of the film when a state Senator and the state Governor enter the picture, because essentially this is a character study. And because the character in question, Joe (played by Joaquin Phoenix) is severely damaged, through childhood abuse by a violent father, and possibly through some PTSD from military service, this is not  an easy viewing experience.  To add further to the pain on display, Joe's line of work is to rescue under-age girls, specifically in this film Nina, the state Senator's daughter. We get to understand that Joe is damaged through the use of fleeting images from his past, and from various acts of self-harm in the present both actual and imagined.  At times the combination of im...