With “Birthday,” writer and director Chris King tells the story of thousands of heroic veterans and their courageous wives. Many of whom have to endure hardships and years of struggles after their loved ones have come home disfigured or crippled after being injured in combat. Stars Mandy Moody and Chris Gouchoe are superb as a husband and wife separated by thousands of mile as her Marine husband, played by Gouchoe, fights in the war. After being injured in combat thanks to a land mine, he arrives home with both legs and one arm amputated.
Tag Archives: Drama
Panic Room (2002) (DVD)
David Fincher’s “Panic Room” isn’t a thriller I’d call classic or even groundbreaking, but it takes a unique twist on the home invasion formula, and allows his protagonists a plot device that’s both an advantage and a weakness to them. Jodie Foster is very good as divorcee Meg Altman, a woman who has just gone through a bitter break up. After moving in to a large four story brownstone in the middle of New York, Meg and daughter Sarah are told their apartment has a foolproof panic room, which was installed by the previous owner. After moving in and preparing for a new life, three robbers break in and are shocked to discover Meg and daughter Sarah have already moved in.
Green Room (2016)
Jeremy Saulnier has a habit for taking the characters he writes and literally throwing them in to the furnace to be scorched. With “Blue Ruin” he set his character down a path of destructive revenge, and in “Green Room” he takes absolutely zero prisoners. He doesn’t just build on four characters that end up in the wrong place in the wrong time, but he punishes them severely. “Green Room” is yet another superb dramatic thriller about innocence succumbing to evil that’s beyond pure emotion and impulse. Patrick Stewart’s character is a villain who works with a horrific sense of swiftness and cold instruction like a businessman trying to clean up an insignificant spill. The moment we meet him he’s a man unencumbered by emotion or anger, despite the fact every move he makes could mean the end of his lifestyle as he knows it.
Little Miss Perfect (2016)
As changes happen around her, an overambitious teen turns to weight control in order to feel more in charge of her life and herself. Written and directed by Marlee Roberts, Little Miss Perfect is an intimate look at an exemplary student’s descent into anorexia as a way to feel in control of her life while also being a cautionary t tale about the dangers of leaving teenagers unsupervised and about the influence online strangers can have on one person. The film’s story gathers the perfect confluence of reasons for this to happen: Disappearance of her mother, absent father, peer pressure, starting to date, internet influences, popularity of “thinspo”, etc.
Kammati Paadam (2016) [Ithaca Fantastik 2016]
After a friend’s frantic call, Krishnan returns to his childhood and teenage years’ village to find his friend and what happened to him. Through a series of flashbacks, their lives are shown through school age, teen years, early adulthood, etc. With a script written by P. Balachandran with collaborative writing by Ajithkumar and G. Sethunath and directed by Rajeev Ravi, the film weaves back and forth through time showing more and more of lead Krishnan’s live as well as his friends and love’s lives. The way the years are mixed together with different actors for only a section of them requires one to pay attention to film as only details such as more white hair show the time passing. Even with this, the film is fairly easy to follow until the search for Ganga really heats up and more characters are added.
Hive (2016)
In the end what will win out and be our undoing will be apathy. It’s the willingness to just sit back and allow evil, to apathetically cling to our faith without challenging those that seek to do wrong. It’s our talent for not doing anything, and allowing injustice. It doesn’t matter what we believe, what politics we subscribe to, but when the world comes literally crashing down on us, we’re all just bugs ready to be squashed. “Hive” is set in a world where its breed of insectoid people have been split and divided by beliefs, religion, and class.
Numb (2016)
Rebecca Martos is a pretty fantastic and mesmerizing actress who manages to successfully lead what is an utterly compelling look at the state of grief and depression. Martos plays Astrid a young woman who has been driven to alcoholism thanks to her utterly consuming depression. Most of her time is spent in a perpetual state of numbness as she hangs out in bars and looks for new ways to feel something. She’s accepted a long time ago that she can’t feel anymore, and now looks for new sensations that could potentially drive her down a dark road.