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MONSTER'S BALL By Rachel Deahl Review Film Critic It's fitting that Billy Bob Thornton's character vomits in the opening scene of Monster's Ball, a stark southern drama about an unlikely inter-racial love affair. All the characters in director Marc Forster's film are prone to vomiting and bleeding, which is actually quite apropos as their lives are marked by incalculable heartache and gut-wrenching discomfort. Thornton stars as Hank Grotowski, a soft-spoken, embittered and racist prison guard who lives in a rural Georgia town with his angry father, Buck (Peter Boyle) and sweet son, Sonny (Heath Ledger). The tenor of Grotowski's life is best summed up by the fact that his only intimate contact is through brief encounters with the same local prostitute his son frequents. Silently adhering to the blindsided ignorance his father spouts (Boyle's character is a vulgarized Archie Bunker), Hank putters about, seemingly without feeling or regard for anything. He cares for his father, goes to his job, comes home and begins all over - he lives for his rigid routine. Unmoved, and often disgusted, by his son's sensitivity and kindness, Hank exists in an unhappy medium between the ways of his father and those of his son. As Thornton quietly makes his way in the early parts of the film, he wonderfully conveys the sense that his character always knows better. Whether listening to his father's ramblings, dealing with his son or confronting his African American neighbors, there is always a subtle hint in Thornton's facial expressions and movements that Hank is better than the things he does and says. Thornton conveys the crucial idea that Hank hates what his father stands for, but that he can't help from saying and doing the things his old man has done. As depressing and horrifying as Monster's Ball is-all the characters are plagued by intense grief and hardship-the story is a redemptive one.
Mourning over the sudden loss of her son, Leticia clings to Hank for support and the two discover an unlikely second chance at happiness together. Shortly after getting involved though, Hank learns that Leticia is in fact the wife of the man whose execution he just carried out. Monster's Ball is a satisfyingly symmetrical and, at times, silently powerful film. To its credit, it never attempts to simplify or reduce the complexities of racism. Reminiscent, in tone, of Paul Schrader's bleak drama about the devastating cycle of violence that permeates male behavior, Affliction, Monster's Ball is also a film about men coming to terms with the sins of their fathers and it, too, does its best work in offering portraits of human beings who are not simply good or bad, evil or kind, but more disturbingly, both at once. BLACK HAWK DOWN Click for the Official Site! Gruesome, entertaining and honest without being anti-American, Black Hawk Down is the perfect war movie for this historical moment. About a failed U.S. military operation that occurred in Somalia in 1992, conventional wisdom indicates that now would be the worst time for a film like this. Not only does Ridley Scott's grisly war drama depict an event which was embarrassing for the American military (clearly a bad idea at a time when patriotism is at record highs), it depicts an event which raised a host of questions about the special forces division within the military -the very troops who've been touted as our secret weapon in Afghanistan; the very troops who are supposed to deliver Osama bin Laden on a silver platter. But Scott ingeniously melds Platoon with Gladiator, capitalizing on the in-your-face battle scenes of the former and the apolitical adrenaline-fueled pyrotechnics of the latter.
Josh Hartnett leads an all-star cast that includes Tom Sizemore and Ewan McGregor, as they portray American soldiers who are deployed on foot, in tanks and by air to seize a Somali warlord in a trafficked area of a Somali village. Deployed with bad information, the troops quickly find themselves in dire straits as they are surrounded by armed Somalis looking to oust them. As the mission enters a downward spiral, the troops are forced to continually return to the belly of the beast in order to save their comrades. While the mission was reminiscent of the kind of warfare Americans saw in Vietnam, the film portrays a type of fighting that's rarely seen on film--fighting that isn't part of a larger war but stands on its own as a singular mission. With its gut wrenching fight scenes, Black Hawk Down does a particularly good job of showing the nature of battle itself. Like a misunderstood game plan, the film documents just how confusing and haphazard ground warfare can be--it also draws attention to the difficulties of efficiently coordinating ground and air attacks. An engaging & momentarily discomforting experience, Black Hawk Down assigns no blame for what happened in Somalia. In this way Scott's film manages to condemn war, without condemning the actions of governments and individuals that propagate and participate in wars. Almost an indifferent stance, certainly that's a message even a country engaged in a fully supported war can get behind. Racheal Deal is the new film critic for Review Magazine. Her work has appeared in 'Time Out New York,' ' The Baltimore City Paper,' and the 'StreetMiami'. |
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