- Joined
- Jul 3, 2010
- Messages
- 49,143
- Reaction score
- 31,095
Anybody seen this movie with Sean Penn? It's the one where he looks like Robert Smith from The Cure.
It made it into the big festivals, but didn't get a whole lot of love or awards from the judging panels.
Bare bones of the story is that Sean Penn is the former frontman of a popular 80s band like Depeche Mode or The Cure, who got stuck in arrested development after two of his fans committed suicide and his music got blamed.
Meanwhile his Jewish Holocaust survivor father dies, and when packing up his things, he learns that his father had been hunting one of the Nazi prison guards that had escaped and survived all these years.
Going into much more detail will be spoilers rather than a ploy synopsis.
If it sounds like these are two strange storylines to combine into one film...they are. Either one would have made a very interesting subject for a film (dealing with the grief of your music being associated with suicides or dealing with the father's death and revenge project). And they feel a LITTLE bit glued together.
But they do work well enough together that they I don't feel they needed to be separated. It ended up feeling like a surreal but believable coincidence, rather than a load of horseshit.
Maybe the most interesting thing they did with this movie was use the song that is the title (a Talking Heads song) as a metaphor for what's happening in the movie. At least that's how I took it. The song is presented in a few different forms and arrangements, with different tempos, and in such a way that it highlights how Sean Penn is stuck in a rut by trying to do everything in life with the same arrangement and tempo he had done decades ago, and failing.
Anyway, it's one of my favorite songs (it's the high life montage song from Wall Street).
I don't think this movie got much attention, so I figured I'd give it a mention.
It has a 6.7 on IMDB. I'd give it maybe a 7.2. It wasn't perfect, and was a little clunky at times, but it had some good performances and some interesting ideas.
It was also nice to see Judd Hirsch get a real role to work with, and any time I get to see old Harry Dean Stanton in a movie these days, it's nice. That's this old guy that looks like Alice Cooper's grandfather...
He's 90 now.
It made it into the big festivals, but didn't get a whole lot of love or awards from the judging panels.
Bare bones of the story is that Sean Penn is the former frontman of a popular 80s band like Depeche Mode or The Cure, who got stuck in arrested development after two of his fans committed suicide and his music got blamed.
Meanwhile his Jewish Holocaust survivor father dies, and when packing up his things, he learns that his father had been hunting one of the Nazi prison guards that had escaped and survived all these years.
Going into much more detail will be spoilers rather than a ploy synopsis.
If it sounds like these are two strange storylines to combine into one film...they are. Either one would have made a very interesting subject for a film (dealing with the grief of your music being associated with suicides or dealing with the father's death and revenge project). And they feel a LITTLE bit glued together.
But they do work well enough together that they I don't feel they needed to be separated. It ended up feeling like a surreal but believable coincidence, rather than a load of horseshit.
Maybe the most interesting thing they did with this movie was use the song that is the title (a Talking Heads song) as a metaphor for what's happening in the movie. At least that's how I took it. The song is presented in a few different forms and arrangements, with different tempos, and in such a way that it highlights how Sean Penn is stuck in a rut by trying to do everything in life with the same arrangement and tempo he had done decades ago, and failing.
Anyway, it's one of my favorite songs (it's the high life montage song from Wall Street).
I don't think this movie got much attention, so I figured I'd give it a mention.
It has a 6.7 on IMDB. I'd give it maybe a 7.2. It wasn't perfect, and was a little clunky at times, but it had some good performances and some interesting ideas.
It was also nice to see Judd Hirsch get a real role to work with, and any time I get to see old Harry Dean Stanton in a movie these days, it's nice. That's this old guy that looks like Alice Cooper's grandfather...
He's 90 now.
