The Road

The Road reviewed by Showbiz411

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Roger Friedman at Showbiz411 has posted his review of The Road. Here are a few quotes:

Hillcoat has done justice to McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winner. “The Road” is elegiac and moving, artful and yet suspenseful. No, it’s not a raucous good time. It can be thoughtful and grim. But here’s the interesting thing: Viggo Mortensen’s performance as a father walking through a post-apocalypse America with his young son is just fascinating. It stays with you long after leaving the theater. Mortensen is that good.

There aren’t a lot of other actors in “The Road.” Charlize Theron is very good as Viggo’s wife, in flashbacks. Both Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce make cameo appearances. Eleven-year-old (he’s 13 now) Kodi Smit-McPhee is just right as the couple’s son.

What Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall do is accurately capture McCarthy’s tone and lauguage. This isn’t easy to do. “The Road” is a bleak trip, told in muted blacks, blues, and grays. There are no blue skies after whatever caused the apocalypse (is it nuclear war? we don’t know. Everything left, including the trees, is dying.)

You can read the full article here.

The Road – first review, official release date, trailer rumours

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Esquire’s Tom Chiarella has a lengthy piece about The Road up (“The Road Is the Most Important Movie of the Year“) which is also the first official review of the film in a major publication. Here are some snippets:

The Road is no tease. It is a brilliantly directed adaptation of a beloved novel, a delicate and anachronistically loving look at the immodest and brutish end of us all. You want them to get there, you want them to get there, you want them to get there — and yet you do not want it, any of it, to end.

You should see it for the simplest of reasons: Because it is a good story. Not because it may be important. Not because it is unforgettable, unyielding. Not because it horrifies. Not because the score is creepily spiritual. Not because it is littered with small lines of dialogue you will remember later. Not because it contains warnings against our own demise. All of that is so. Don’t see it just because you loved the book. The movie stands alone. Go see it because it’s two small people set against the ugly backdrop of the world undone. A story without guarantees. In every moment — even the last one — you’ll want to know what happens next, even if you can hardly stand to look. Because The Road is a story about the persistence of love between a father and a son, and in that way it’s more like a remake of The Godfather than some echo of I Am Legend.

Only this one is different: You won’t want to see this one twice.

The other certainty is that everyone involved in this movie is working against the predictable imperatives of perhaps the most predictable movie genre of them all: the apocalyptic thriller. The great experiment of the movie is that it hangs on nothing if not the subversion of the conventions of the genre. These people want the same thing from The Road that Busby Berkeley wanted, the same thing any artist with a sense of urgency wants. They want for people to walk out of the theater feeling it in their chest plate. They want them to say, perhaps for reasons they cannot consciously fathom, to everyone they know: You have to see it. Really.

You do. Not because it’s grim, not because it’s depressing, or even scary. The Road is all of those things, both acutely and chronically. But there was not a single stupid choice made in turning this book into this movie. No wrongheaded lyric tribute to the novel. No moment engineered simply to make you jump.

The terror of it is in a normal world made vacant. There is a surprising terror in a landscape of farmhouses full of possessions that have no function, a remarkable danger in a pile of old hammers, in the possibility of forgetting what things were once for.

The article also raises some concerns about Bob Weinstein’s marketing strategy for the film:

Weinstein acknowledges that loyal readers of Cormac McCarthy’s book, which was published in 2006, are probably worried. He’s sitting in a conference room in Manhattan, about to pop in a DVD containing two potential trailers. He seems to be figuring out how to talk about the film as he goes, fighting contrary tugs from some internal narrator, giving in only by the slenderest of degrees to the urge to mollify two, three, four different audiences.

First, he calls it a literate action movie. At one point he calls it a zombie movie. Then he starts talking about his kids. “When I had my kids, I was grateful. I was like, Now there’s something other to think about than me,” he says, and that word — me — echoes in the star chamber. “Every parent has that. You don’t have to have kids. You’re human. If you can’t relate to this story, then check your humanity somewhere. I felt this whole relationship with this father and son. Yeah. And yet it was thrilling.”

When Bob Weinstein rolls those trailers, each one assumes the predictable arc of a story compressed to its essence. There is a speed to them that the actual movie — which I saw before seeing the trailers — does not possess or seek to possess, an urgency that feels manufactured. The music is pulse-pounding and urgent, driven to create absurd expectations of action in a movie that quietly elicits worry about the relative friability of the invisible paths that exist between people and what they need. Still, every utterance, every cry for help or hand clasped across the mouth of the boy to suppress a sob, is a fair-enough emanation from the heart of the movie.

The odd thing is, the start of each trailer includes glimpses of a storm, panicky news footage, little puzzle pieces of the world before it ended. No one — not the director or the myriad producers, not the novelist or the screenwriter — had ever even hinted at how it happened, until this.

For someone who loves the book, for anyone who knows the story going in, this is a moment you hoped would never come. Why remind us of the reductive logic of cause and effect? Before the question can be asked, Weinstein stands up, offers his hand, and says, “Okay, we’re going with the first one.” He gives no rationale. And so it seems the metonymic references to the national news, to the weather, to presumed military conflicts laid in as a tonally quiet explanation of what is never known in book or movie, for now will stay in the trailer.

The Road also finally has an official release date: it’s October 16, 2009.

The Road – style frames, new unconfirmed release date

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The Road style frames,Chris KennedyThe Road style frames,Chris KennedyHugh Marchant, a designer, sketch artist and screenwriter who worked on The Road, posted a set of style frames (concept art) created by the film’s production designer Chris Kennedy.

Click on either picture to go to Marchant’s page on Flickr.

In related news, there’s been some new unconfirmed gossip about the release date.

Last week, the IMDb and several other entertainment sites reported that the film would be released in October, but there is still no official word on when The Road will actually hit the theatres.

The one thing that is for sure is that the Cannes Film Festival lineup was released this week and The Road is not on the list of movies that will be screened there this year.

The official site for the film still says “coming soon.”

New interview – Terminator, Last House, The Road

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There’s a relatively recent interview with Garret at CraveOnline.com. Some quotes below.

About the big death of season 2.0 on Terminator:

First question is how did you feel when it turned out to be you?

Garret Dillahunt: I was nervous at first. None of us knew at Comic Con. We were all being really cool about our new show and then they were like, “One of these people will die.” And you were like, “What?” It was like the last supper all of a sudden. Is it I? Is it I, lord? Then it was me but then they told me also right away that I’d be this different thing which hadn’t completely evolved yet. I was kind of sad because I liked Cromartie. I liked playing Cromartie. I liked the simplicity and the directness of him and getting to do all those cool things, but John Henry’s going to be pretty cool.

Garret Dillahunt,John Henry,Terminator,The Sarah Connor ChroniclesSo did it occur to you, as it did me, that you were the one character who could still be alive via his exterior?

Garret Dillahunt: Exactly, really could it be killed? Was he ever alive? But I’m happy about it. Now I get to be this sort of super powered baby turned loose in the world.

How is this totally new character for you?

Garret Dillahunt: Well, I’m getting anxious to get out of that computer room. They clip this thing into my head, this chord and you feel very limited but I understand the necessity for it. He’s got to learn so much he’s sucking all this information out of the internet and the world and television, just cramming his head full of this stuff and trying to understand what it is to be human. So I think the opportunity is kind of limitless. It’s an interesting way for the writers to explore what it is to be a human almost.

Do you know what kind of big finale we can expect this season?

Garret Dillahunt: I don’t. I wish they’d tell me. They just handed me some talking points. I think it changes too. I think they have an idea of what they wanna do and then it’ll evolve into something slightly different by the time we get there. It’s kind of like how Deadwood was because I remember David would come up to me like, “Yeah, then your character and the Doc are going to have this whole relationship and you’re going to talk about Catullus.” I’m like, “What happened to that? I never saw that.” Oh, well, it didn’t work out. It’s a little bit like that. They have so many things they’re trying to tie up that some things fall by the wayside.

About The Road:

What do you play in The Road?

Garret Dillahunt: Well, no one has names. I don’t know if you read the book. I loved it. Some of the scenes are harrowing but it was so beautiful too. In a way, the world has been so pared down, it’s a very simple story and it raises a lot of questions about what you would do in that situation. It’s kind of like Terminator in a way. But no one has names. Viggo Mortensen plays The Man. Cody Smit-McPhee plays The Boy. So it’s The Man and The Boy moving through the world and they meet The Old Man, The Thief, The Woman. No one has names, no one uses them. I played The Gang Member. We meet up sort of in the first quarter of the novel. I make some decisions about Viggo and I decide that he’s weak and I can take from him what I want and we have a fight about that.

So we’ll see you and Viggo with supplies?

Garret Dillahunt: Oh yeah, that’s what the whole story’s about. You’ll see. It’s just like an endless search. It’s like we’re animals who are pawing through the snow for some grass. The search for food never stops. The search for food motivates all actions in the movie from the bad guys and the good guys.

And about The Last House on the Left:

That’s the question. Is it as hardcore as the original?

Garret Dillahunt,The Last House on the Left,screencap,KrugGarret Dillahunt: I don’t know if it’ll be seen as being as hardcore because that was something new at the time. There’s something about that story that’s also very primal. I think people f*cking with your family is a real primal thing that happens to all of us. The most mild mannered of us can vision real violence if someone threatens our families or people we love. It’s like what am I capable of? Maybe I’ve never been in a fight in my life but I’m not going to rest until I’m dead to try to stop you from doing something to my family. It thrusts this normal group of people into that very situation. I think there’s a lot of sympathy for Krug in a way. You can see how life has frustrated him but he’s taken it out the wrong way. But the end result, which I think is rare in a horror movie, I really cared about the victims, but you really care about this family which is odd. I didn’t know that it was odd until it happened when I saw it. It left me feeling mugged and beat up. I felt tired after I’d seen it. It’s just relentless cruelty and tension, just relentless tension. It went by really fast and it’s tested really well. The audience has been skeptical too because there’s been a lot of people who are fans of the original that thought this was a horrible idea. I don’t think they’ll be disappointed.

Sounds like they went for it.

Garret Dillahunt,The Last House on the LeftGarret Dillahunt: Yeah, boy, ugh. There are some scenes you’re just like why? What’s the purpose of that?

You weren’t sure how it would go over now, since we’ve seen so much. Did they have to up it, because that rape scene is still so awful you feel bad for watching it.

Garret Dillahunt: Well, I think that’s the most important thing. You’ll see a lot more blood in Saw movies or something like that than you will in either of the Last House movies. I kind of think it owes more to The Virgin Spring which is the original source material, the Bergman movie. There’s a scene in there where these shepherds have raped this girl and then they’re sort of horrified by what they’ve done. One of them kicks some dirt, like he can’t take the face. He sort of shovels some dirt and there’s just this dirt on her face. She’s in this awkward position and it’s just so pale, and half under a bush. There’s an emptiness about the movie that’s different. I don’t even know if it’s a horror movie is what you should call it. I don’t know what it is.