Director Amir Masud’s short supernatural thriller entitled “Affliction” gave me a lot of flashbacks to films like “Donnie Darko” and “Carrie” for the fact that we can never be sure what our main character Sara’s destiny is. Is she meant to be a messiah or a prophet? Is she the beginning of a new wave of holy warriors, or merely a fluke or pure evil masquerading as good? Nevertheless, “Affliction” manages to be a powerful and disturbing journey in to a mind of a mentally unbalanced girl whose own religious beliefs has managed to unlock something in her that she never knew she had.
As the Nickelodeon network’s most sophisticated and probably most brilliant animated series of all time, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” set a standard for modern animated series and raised the bar. Pseudo-anime it surely was, but it didn’t pretend to be anything more than an American animated series with Eastern influences. As a surefire landmark in children’s entertainment for the US network, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” is a remarkable fantasy series that is sprawling and absolutely mesmerizing. So it was only a matter of time until Nickelodeon in America would attempt to duplicate the success and branch off with a brand new spin off of the original series. Fans were almost expecting it. Nickelodeon has to be respected for having the guts to try and catch lightning in a bottle twice.
Robert Nolan is perhaps one of my favorite indie film actors already and he’s only been in two films I’ve seen in over the course of three years. Richard Powell and Zach Green formerly cast Mr. Nolan is the dark disturbing short “Worm” about a teacher on the brink of a breakdown and they catch lightning in a bottle yet again with Mr. Nolan as a man on the verge of madness as he soaks in every aspect of his life that is both mundane and maddening. Clearly unfulfilled and trapped, Nolan plays Chris who is a husband and dad seething with anger and hatred so bile that he can barely contain himself from committing horrible crimes against his own family. He can predict every aspect of his life and despises that fact until one night his wife reveals that she is pregnant.