thomas4cinema

What a nasty little flick! That’s a compliment, of course. From the setting, there is not much difference to things like “Hostel” or similar rubbish flicks of the last years. What makes the difference is… everything related to film-making: the actors are very good and very natural, no Hollywood glamour, but just a couple of (English and Aussie) kids, as averagely looking and as averagely talking and as averagely intelligent as people are. The camera work is very well done, too, sometimes with the shaky handheld look, sometimes with a glance at the awesome scenery – again: natural appears to be the word to grasp it. The script has a rather intelligent way of approaching the unavoidable (as people know they go into some form of slasher movie to begin with). It takes its time to show the people doing what people do in their holidays, not too interested in the characters’ depth (maybe there is none) or any conflicts within the group (maybe there are none), but just taking the time of feeling very acquainted to the personnel.

The switch over to the darker aspects of the story comes without artificial drama, but with refreshing sobriety. From then on, it’s a decline into a nightmare that draws its absurdity in particular from the contrast to the long intro. And if you expect heroes in this story: there are none. In that respect the film has a nice happy ending: at last, a film without an idiotic superhero saving the world. There are lucky people and less lucky people, and there are bad guys and un-bad guys. The one does not necessarily coincide with the other. Quick and dirty and enjoyable for those who can endure some mutilation – because there is some…

Overview at Rottentomatoes: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wolf_creek/
Schnitt-Review (German): http://www.schnitt.de/filme/artikel/wolf_creek.shtml

Better late than never. My excuse for watching this at all is that it promises to be a dramatized series (at least I think that was the term they use), meaning that it is actually one long film, cut down into 24 installments. Reminds me of the pleasant moments I spent with "24", and reviewers repeatedly refer to "24" and "Lost" as the most interesting (fictional) moving images that can be found on today’s screens. Here we go, let’s give it a try.

Most characters of the first season are actually quite likeable and played by decent actors. You have the usual amount of uselessness: most pointedly in the character of Kate, whose only function in the whole season appears to be a potential lover for JackHero, but also in her who I like to refer to as Boone’sSister. I never bothered to remeber her name, as I suspected that pain-in-the-arse annoyance of my tv nights would please us with a soon demise. Unfortunately, it did not turn out that way, but she does not get too much screen time, so I guess I will survive it. JackHero is a bit too good to be true, Sawyer a bit too cool for comfort (but still my favourite character), Michael and Wayne have their own problems, which I do not care too much about, JohnFaithful is one of these mysterious persons I quite appreciate. I don’t savour knowing everything about everybody, so Locke is my man. CurleyHurley is always on the verge of becoming the comic relief character, but sometimes actually manages to grab the moments of deepest drama for himself, maybe because he starts off into each catastrophe from this comic level, so the throat gets all the more dry once he loses his humour. Some Koreans around, too, who will surely have some more stories to tell in Season 2, and a couple of short appearances by guys that were either needed as victims of short-term explosions, or for future reference, no doubt.

No way of deying that once you sit down with the DVD box and a sufficiently large stock of beer, it is very hard to get off the hook. The writing is very professional in alterating between thrills and comic. The questions about the accuracy of the gentlemen’s three-day beards have been asked, but what the heck? That little world is able to engulf you, and the flashbacks about the characters’ back stories are consinderably interesting, too. A bit too much coincidence, in some cases, but as JohnFaithful says: you don’t really believe all this is a coincidence?

For my taste, it has not the quality of 24, the main reason being that the story is not resolved at the end. I generally feel abused when a season of a tv drama ends with a cliffhanger, because I find it complete plausible that the authors never needed to bother about how to resolve the story in the first place – knowing they can just continue handling open threads. But if you don’t want to complete the narration, you are closer to any given "Miami Vice" or "Cosby Show", and you lose connection to the cinematic qualities of "24"’s narration. Similar thing happened with the "X-Files", I remember, in all episodes not related to the "Alien Invasion" red thread. These things tend to keep falling apart because it does not matter whether you skip the episode or not. As there is Season 3 currently on the US screens, I fear that there will be more of this arbitrariness, if on a high level. No doubt, I will check it out soon…