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Reviews
Trauma (2004)
someone should be beaten for this
I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe in consequences. How's this for an idea: take a generic male character, give him some sympathetic circumstances, slowly add "character" by revealing at a snail's pace nothing but at best irritating instincts and characteristics, then pull a long-telegraphed whammy by undoing the sympathetic circumstances, then have him do something truly disgusting, then have him watch some TV.
Or, how about this: just film your own bowel movement? Same difference, and you could have saved us a lot of time.
There is not one positive thing to say about this experience, other than I'm hoping it will prove to have been carcinogenic, and that mercifully I'll die soon and the painful memory of having sat through this visual bile along with it. I understand that studios have budgets they have to spend, or they'll get smaller budgets the next year. Dear BBC: next time, buy crack with your end-of-fiscal-year surplus. Do something at least plausibly worthwhile with your cash. How they found a Colin Firth lookalike to sleepwalk through this tripe begs the question as to why they would want to in the first place.
Evidence (2012)
Probably a spoiler; I'm just guessing at the running time (felt like a month)
As a rule, I don't like experiments, statement-movies nor parlor-trick stories, but I read this as "what if we spent all our budget on the last sixty seconds?" The from-nowhere minutes-long third act is so over the top, I wasn't expecting ANY exposition, ANY logic -- just an expensive, slick battering ram, which is what I got.
If I'm right about the point of the movie, then the more painful the first 88 minutes, the greater the payoff of the last two. In which case, near-perfect execution, because there's not one accidental reason to sit through the first 88 except for the punishment necessary for the reward.
I knew nothing about this movie when I saw it, forced myself to sit through the first 88 minutes, and was terribly, happily surprised. As long as it's stipulated that this has officially been done, and as long as no one does this ever, ever again, you can't say this tired-genre movie doesn't deliver something new. And even as an experiment, the punchline-action sequence sets you up for every cliché imaginable and almost always manages to deliver something else, shot-by-shot. Pretty impressive.
And the fact that they sacrifice some of the end credits' readability for the extension of their tempertantrum says a lot to me regarding their motives as well. It would be nice if all 90 minute segments in life could be filled with "Casablanca." Assuming that's almost always too much to ask, this movie doesn't attempt one frame of "Casablanca," in spades.