This Week’s Netflix
This week’s stash includes the Outback true-horror Wolf Creek, the live action anime Initial D, and the 1980’s classic Broadcast News.
If you read the reviews, Wolf Creek is either the best or worst foreign horror flick of 2005. For me it’s somewhere in the middle (for the record, the scarriest non-US film of last year is The Descent). Wolf Creek itself is actually a giant metor crater in the middle of the Australian Outback, where our 3 main characters are going to for a hiking trip. After their hike, they find their car has broken down. Is the sweet-natured but weird Crocodile Dundee wannabe that helps them out gonna torture and kill the poor hikers? Uh, yeah probably.
The structure is very similar to this year’s Hostel, sans boobs - first half you get to know the characters, second half they get tortured or killed. It’s also a classic “what would you do?” horror movie. Halfway through, our female lead wakes up bound and gagged in a shed. The situation is obvious to her and the audience…she’s been drugged and something bad is happening to her friends at this very moment. Unfortunately she’s a little too slow, timid, and stupid for us. She jumps the killer but doesn’t finish the job. It’s annoying when the entire final act of a movie shouldn’t have existed if the character would have just done what any thinking person would do. 2.5 out of 5.
Initial D is the Hong Kong live action version of the car racing Anime directed by the Infernal Affairs team of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. It’s about a group of teenage street racers who repeatedly speed around the local mountain. They’re a lot more wholesome and good-natured than the American street racers of The Fast and the Furious. The main character is a tofu delivery boy who’s been driving the mountain at top speeds since he was 13. He doesn’t say much, or even care about racing, so it’s hard for us to care too. It doesn’t help that every race—as cool as they’re all shot—take place on the exact same course.
The film was shot in Japan, but features Hong Kong filmmakers and talent, which of course pissed off all the anime fanboys. Just imagine how pissed they’ll all be if WETA ends up making their live action Evangelion movie. 2.5 out of 5.
James L. Brooks’ 80’s classic Broadcast News is a weird combination of Network and Pretty in Pink. Holly Hunter is Molly Ringwald, William Hurt is the Spader, and Albert Brooks is Ducky. And like Network, it eerily predicts reality TV, Ricki Lake, and Fox News.
It’s a little overlong, but it’s a definite must see in today’s media climate. It’s appalling but not surpising that even though people like Brooks and Paddy Chayevsky saw entertainment and sentimentality taking over the news, the trend kept progressing until we got to where we’re at now. This theme is in the background here though, where it stands front and center with Howard Beale in Network. Holly Hunter and her romantic and moralistic decision between Albert Brooks’ reporter with ethics and William Hurt’s pretty boy opportunist. The choice is never clear cut for her or the audience. 4 out of 5.
