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Reviews
Wholetrain (2006)
A fantastic piece of underground Germany
I saw this at the 13th Bradford Film Festival in Yorkshire, England. Due to a serious lack of proper publicity (on the festival's behalf), only six or seven people showed up to the screening. This is a crying shame, because the film is great on so many levels.
For a debut, Gaag has made an amazing piece on a subject sparsely covered in cinema. The characters are complex, well-written human beings and not just there as a backdrop to the graffiti writing. The whole cast give truly natural and intense performances; the main four writers (a crew of ethnic and native backgrounds) showing a deep passion for their art. The film could also be seen as an exposé on the ridiculous stance the German government (and governments world-wide) take on this subject. We gain real sympathy for these characters as their lives are torn apart, mainly because the authorities choose to make life so hard for them.
The cinematography was spot on: a gritty yet delicate portrayal of life on the under-ground. Yet through the grey, dusky palette we get bursts of colour that literally "burn" off the writers' canvases. The train sequences really are joy to behold.
The subject matter of the film should not be seen as a deterrent to spectators unfamiliar with the world of graffiti writing. I for one am no aficionado on the subject, but was drawn in and captivated through-out. The sound-track, also composed by Gaag, really is the icing on the cake and is a glorious testament to the 6/7 years of work he has put in to this film. I implore you to give it a chance - you will not be disappointed.
Doom (2005)
Good Directional Talents/Rubbish Script
Bartkowiak knows what he's doing, there's no doubt about that. The camera-work is good in the film, even the infamous "FPS sequence" must've taken some degree of skill to execute. Alas, the film has been cursed by the usual cheesy script that we've come to know and hate. It's those unneeded one-liners - which you'd think might fit a movie about the DOOM video-game (because the game itself is full of them) - that are just so frequent and repetitive they really top the awful bits off in this movie.
I was surprised to see Dexter Fletcher of all people, and I'm still not sure whether his accent in the film was American or English, if it was an attempt at the former it was so bad it just confused me.
Anyway, I see Bartkowiak directing some superior films in his future career, he's not bad at all. I wasn't won-over by this video-game adaptation, but at least he's not another Uwe Boll!!! A worthy attempt, but wandering away from the Doom ethos like the script-writer has done was not a smart move.