the Blackthorn Orphans
  • B L O G
  • The Blackthorn Orphans: read it onsite
  • The Blackthorn Orphans TRANSLATIONS PAGE
  • Lovely R BLOG
  • PHOTOESSAYS
  • SELECTED RAVINGS: essays & opinion
  • RUBYHUE Lipstick Review
  • blackthorn ROSE REVIEW
  • KITCHEN BITCH: Recipes etc.
  • verse
  • Hostile Witness FILM REVIEW
  • ALOES & SUCCULENTS
  • Blackthorn Perfume Review
  • B I O
  • C O N T A C T

Hostile Witness Film Review: Black Mass, Slow West

18/2/2016

 
Picture
Slow West  (2015, John Maclean)
I know it cleaned up at Sundance, but these days that sort of acclaim gives me more pause than encouragement and just so you know, I fucking loathe whimsical improbability.  Improbability should put its dick in your mouth and make you love it or we're just wasting valuable nose-picking time.  Example: I made it through eight minutes of The Grand Budapest Hotel and six of them were spent writhing in visceral agony.  That's where we stand on the issue.  

We endured half an hour of 
Slow West, not because it was slow, but because it was boring, gingerly improbably whimsical, poorly written, badly cast and listing portside with a queasy gutful of quirky stock characters (stabs self repeatedly) before halftime sounded.  Kodi Smit-McPhee as Jay the gormless Scottish youth in search of his great love Rose in the titular colonial wilds is... well, I could say a few things, but they would all be unkind.  He looks twelve, exactly like the sort of pissant who wouldn't know passion from a jar of fucking capers and that matters when amour fou is supposed to be driving him across an unknown vastness into mortal peril.  Especially in contrast to Michael Fassbender's Silas, a crusty-with-a-heart-of-gold bounty hunter (it burns!),  Michael tries too hard and will always be too much in such a sea of not enough.

Picture
This titanic discrepancy between the two leads howls at you from their first shared frames but that wasn't my first clue that Slow West would piss me off.  It's also incredibly derivative and I can't help but wonder what sort of critical reception this twee, indulgent bollocks would have attracted had a woman been responsible.  Then I remember that a chick could never have gotten Slow West green-lit in the first place.  Phew, eh?
​      
And can I just say that as a New Zealander I’ve had it up to my tits with our local landscapes (in this case someone's shitty pine plantation and back-country sheep block) being lazily passed off as everything from Mexico to the Himalayas?  
Slow West scrapes that budget visual barrel to the extent that I expected to see someone wander into shot scratching their arse in a fucking Swandri, and all while no one can get a specifically, authentically New Zealand story funded.  The NZ Film Commission that bankrolled this obtuse shite wouldn't throw five bucks at Flight of the Conchords.  Fuck you, NZFC, seriously.  Both thumbs down.


Picture
Black Mass (2015, Scott Cooper)
Sitting through this account of James 'Whitey' Bulger's personal shortcomings was like being dunked in a bucket of muddy water and sloshed around, bumping into stuff like Depp in crusty prosthetics again, Joel Egerton's squinty mugging while the XXXL supporting cast flails with you, often valiantly, in a mass of pointless, sluggish reiteration.  The dull palette unwittingly reflects the played-out nature of the material, from the deeply cliché-humping script to the makeweight murder sequences that underscore just how tawdry such an existence must be and prompts one to ponder all this scribal fascination with these skanky and vacuous hoods.

​The Bulger story is beset with challenges to successful adaptation; scungy parochial settings, stunted unsightly protagonists and tedious procedures etc., but 
Black Mass's biggest problem is the fact that it doubles down on that DGAF material with a shoegazing treatment.  Scorsese understands the breathless point of his own gangster voyeurism; Cooper seemed to miss it altogether, even in the midst of some brow-raising plagiarism.  If it was gritty authenticity he was going after why the hell did he tap Johnny the Homeless Santa, who's about as gangster as his BFF Marilyn 'lol Brian' Manson?  Our minds boggled in unison.

Actorily, everyone else does an okay job but whether vanity or delusion induced Depp to accept this utterly remote and inapposite role is anyone's guess.  Shorn of his former beauty, comfy pirate cosplay or fucktacular Burtonian staging, his inability to project much more than canned tics past that old man drag is laid pretty bare.  Were there really no other, more appropriate candidates?  Whatever.  Black Mass was overlong, overpopulated, overly into itself and fucking unrewarding.
Picture

* I'm sorry, but they just weren't very good.  Other stuff was.  More Hostile Witness Review  *



Comments are closed.

    RSS Feed

    Picture

    Independent Creativity
    Hi-Fi Introversion

    ORIGINAL CONTENT
    HONEST REVIEWS
    VELVETEEN VERBIAGE
    VISUAL LUXURY
    MORBID IDLING
    THE NATURAL WORLD
     
    ​photography  
    film
    flora  fauna  culinary
    ethnography  objet
    ​

    modest living
    ​vintage shit

    A U T H O R
    Picture
    K ✂︎ l l y
    congenital delinquent
    Human Durian
    celebrating
    glorious deviation in the land of
     the long white cloud

    -  New Zealand  -


    - T h e   B o o k -

    Picture
    T H E  
    B L A C K T H O R N
    O R P H A N S


    What is freedom, when it is
    all that remains to you?
    In exile two brothers pursue an anarchist's trajectory,  from an old world into the new, from East to West, subject always to the pleasures & horrors of an enduring flesh, to the ironies of karma & impunity. Love bears thorns, the lost return & the dead are haunted by the living. 
    ​

    E P I C   D A R K   F I C T I O N
    *   R E A D   *
    T H E
    B L A C K T H O R N 
    O R P H A N S
     O N S I T E  

    H e r e



    Picture

    Selected
    ​Ravings

    opinion essays observation private regret public 
    exaltation semicoherent speculation 

    Picture

    Photoessay​

    epic undertakings
    documented

    ​
    Picture

    Hostile Witness FilmReview

    Cruel but fair

    Picture

    RubyHue 
    ​
    Lipstick Review

    Lipstick: love it
    ​

    Picture

    Our Photography​

    we've seen worse
    ​

    Picture

    Port Chalmers​

    Dunedin, New Zealand
    ​

    Picture

    Blackthorn ​
    ​Rose Review

    Garden Hoe Wisdom
    Picture

    Verse​

    Loss, love, truth, beauty everything, everything
    ​
    Picture

    The  Lovely R's Blog​

    Likes photography  Knows a bit about it

    Picture

    We Liked This​

    Amazing things from other people
    ​

    Picture

    Cacti, Aloes
    ​&
     
    Flora​

    Our garden & general vegetal splendours
    ​

    Picture

    KitchenBitch

    Home cooking
    & raw ingredients
    ​
    Picture

    Ethnographic​

    Strange wonderful things from elsewhere
    ​

    Picture

    Jewellery
    ​

    Picture

    Tiny Little 
    Dinosaurs
    - a book for children -


    All images & text property of the authors 
    ​
    unless stated

    © us
    & original sources
    All Rights Reserved



    Picture

    Privacy Policy
    ​This is a noncommercial site.
    No ads. No shady data jacks. 
    No interest in your bizniz.

    ​We don't personally view, utilise or sell your data, apart from occasionally checking totally anonymous + super basic site view stats. We don't even know how to monetise that stuff, so don't worry.  Everyone's privacy is important to us.

    Our platform is probably harvesting your data, though, via their cookies. Look at their privacy page so you can see what they're up to.

    Please use Adblock or something similar.
    ​
    Google et al superimpose ads that we never see a penny from so fuck them.

    Picture

    Archives

    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013


    Picture

    Categories

    All
    A Thing Of Beauty
    Blackthorn Orphans
    Blackthorn Rose Review
    Cacti & Aloes
    Ethnographica
    Flora
    Hostile Witness Film Reviews
    Jewellery
    Kitchen Bitch
    Make Up Review
    Maximum Respect
    Perfume Reviews
    Photo Du Jour
    Photo Essay
    Places & Things: A Blackthorn Review
    Port Chalmers
    Remembering Dreams
    Roses
    Selected Ravings
    Softcore Rendition
    Sweetmeat
    Textiles
    The Lovely R
    Verse
    We Liked This

    Picture
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.