Check out my Top 5 Movie Beards in 'Take 5!' and add your own favourite facial foliage aficionados...
Buried 2010 Dir: Rodrigo Cortés
...Black screen. Muffled, acoustic grunts. The sharp, high concept thriller has you enclosed with Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) from the beginning, right through 90 minutes to its climactic close. Conroy is a truck driver ambushed in Iraq by insurgents and wakes up in to a claustrophobic living hell with only a mobile phone and cigarette lighter in his pocket.
The story unfolds for Conroy as it does for us butt-clenched in the audience. Keeping the suspense so successfully on this limited stage requires masterful cinematography and it is provided so skilfully by Edward Grau. Try shining a torch in to a shoe box for 90 minutes and see how long it takes before you get bored and turn the kettle on. Grau finds every interesting crevice, splintered corner and dark fissure. But Reynolds also shows he can go beyond the smirking, grandiloquent character he was in danger of being typecast. His panic etched on his face as deep as the claw marks in my armrest.
We are kept acutely on edge by the excellent dialogue with the interaction over the mobile that keeps Conroy in touch with the world beyond his shallow grave. Corporate duplicity and political double entendre are intertwined with heart wrenching calls to home. In one of his calmer colloquy’s home is to his mother, now living in a rest home coping with Alzheimer’s his situation is mirrored half way across the world, trapped in her own living hell, she frustrates Reynolds with her suppression but both find a glimmer of light in memories of happier times.
At times the story loses traction for the desire to keep 90 minutes of incident. There’s an unnecessary interaction with an uninvited guest shoehorned in to maintain the anxiety.
But when on track the tale is a Hitchcockian in its examination of anxiety on the human mind through a simple set piece.
Verdict: Indie feel to this high suspense thriller makes for an excellent exploration of everyone’s worse nightmare. Claustrophobic and uncomfortable this will leave you wanting to stick your head out of a window and take a deep breath.
Dirty Dancing 1987 Dir: Emile Ardolino
Summer 1963 and Patrick Swayze is cool rogue dance teacher
Along with other boogie flicks Fame (1980) and Footloose (1984), Dirty Dancing built on the appetite for high octane teen dance fare and has since fledged into a cultural nonpareil in its genre - dare I say, a bigger cult classic than
Swayze is in his most memorable role (but at a career best in Donny Darko) is the good-guy-perceived-as-bad in a film that deals with class, youthful promiscuity and forbidden love. Baby belongs to a superior class and it is only her youthful naivety that can open the doors and break down the precincts from her family and their park-owning friends to the under-class workers.
Amongst the dance and angst is a poignant examination of the father - daughter union and how that evolves when a daughter reaches womanhood. Baby grows up fast in her three weeks at Catskills and is desperate to cut the apron strings from her caring, proud father (the excellent Jerry Orbach). He’s a good man and only wants the best for his daughter; it’s easy to accept his horror at the greased-up T-Bird Jonny he sees in his Baby’s arms.
The climatic scene is worth waiting for and although predictable offers some unforgettable, iconic moments as it careens to the final embrace. Swayze announces “Nobody put’s Baby in the corner” – a line he confessed to hating, and swings her in to the final number. The moment Baby takes flight, in the arms of her beau, like a hatchling soaring from the safety of her parental nest, pitches perfectly with the paradigmatic Oscar winning hit “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life”. The goose bumps will spin down your spine like a free-styling funambulist!
Verdict: Toe – tapping fun with some toe-curling talk, DD gets the girls reaching for their spandex and finding the nearest log. Strutting good fun.
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