First 5 minutes?
Saw the film today in the Pan-African Film Festival, but missed a few minutes. When I walked in, Lawrence was being carted away to the hospital. What preceeded this?
shareYou see a long shot up a rural road from the POV of a driver who pulls in front of a small frame house. He knocks at the door, calling for Lawrence, saying something like, you haven't been in at the store, people are worried, and you see Lawrence, sitting in a chair with a blanket pulled up to his chin. He does not answer.
The neighbor (John) forces his way in, and you see a reaction to what must be a bad smell in the room. He is obviously concerned about Lawrence and has known him for some time.Something about Lawrence's demeanor clues him in that something is terribly wrong, and through the doorway, you see a shot of Lawrence's brother lying in bed.
John goes to check on him, realizes he's been dead for some time, and gets on his cell phone to 911, calling for assistance. He has to check the house numbers to give the operator a specific address, and as he ducks outside, Lawrence, who has said nothing at all (in fact, is almost catatonic--I wasn't sure if he was dead at first) jumps up and takes off through the front door across a field.
There's a quick reaction shot from John, and a blurry action shot, and in it, Lawrence produces a gun and shoots himself in the chest. That sounds like about where you came in. Hope that helped.
Trespassers will be shot.
Survivors will be shot again.
Thanks a bunch, amigo! You're a prince! Great film it is!
shareIt's "princess," actually, but I'll take it ;).
Yeah, Ballast and Wendy and Lucy have helped restore my faith in the state of the American independent film.
Trespassers will be shot.
Survivors will be shot again.
Lol...ok, princess! I've not seen WENDY AND LUCY, but I saw the same director's short film ODE at a festival years ago. It's a retelling of the 70s classic ODE TO BILLY JOE, if you're familiar with that. Also, check out FROZEN RIVER and CHOP SHOP. Those films and BALLAST were discussed in an article about a neo-realist "movement" in American independent cinema.
shareI have seen Frozen River and thought Melissa Leo got robbed at the Oscars, but isn't that always the case? Chop Shop played our one of our local independent film resources and I missed it thanks to work, but one of the guys there said something like, Slumdog Millionaire is the fantasy, Chop Shop is the reality. I put it in my Netflix queue.
If you liked Chop Shop, though, you would appreciate Wendy and Lucy--you'll never look at a broken down old car by the side of the road in quite the same way ever again. Really, all the films we've referred to here are similar in world their characters inhabit: the unadorned, unromanticized working class. They are people for whom something like losing a crappy job as a hotel maid or getting your car towed is a catastrophe of the magnitude of 9/11.
This is just as dramatic as, to use an example of a video I just saw (and already forgot the title to), a model-pretty Park Avenue couple losing their son to kidnappers. And much more relative to most of the world--maybe that's why most movies are about those fantasy creatures. People want escapism, not reality.
Trespassers will be shot.
Survivors will be shot again.
I caught FROZEN RIVER in a theater - just like BALLAST - but saw "Chop" on home vid, which I picked up in a public library. Yeah, there's nothing prettified about CHOP SHOP. The film's director, Ramin Bahrani, has a new picture out, GOODBYE, SOLO, which is getting terrific notices.
Well, I stopped taking the Oscars seriously quite some time ago, watching it now purely for curiosity. It's largely a politicized dog-and-pony show. I saw Leo on "The Tavis Smiley Show" and she was unrecognizable! I do remember her fondly from NBC's "Homicide", back in the 90s. I always felt she could have played Janis Joplin, but she's aged out of the role.
I liked "Slumdog", but there is some validity to claims that it's "poverty porn". I called BLACKHAWK DOWN "war porn" years ago. I'll check out WENDY AND LUCY on video; hoping that "Ode" will be included in the extras.