I'm definitely going to watch this since I'm neither cool nor chic... nor do I follow the crowd like a lost sheep. All I see is everyone parroting everyone else about this guy, and I'm willing to bet 1/2 of you haven't even seen the movie yet.
shareYou're right, i haven't seen this movie yet, i have however sat through 5 of his movies.
Each of his movies did the same 2 things to me, firstly: " How the hell did he convince him/her to be in this" and secondly "God this bad, turn it off".
The only films i have ever rented and turned off half way through have been Uwe Boll works....well except for Ghosts of Mars, he is just a genuinely poor movie maker, i want to like his films as i do find the guy interesting and appreciate that he works hard, unfortunately he is practically talentless and his reputation is warranted.
I have to agree that some of his movies (BloodRayne, Postal) are just unwatchable garbage.
But, Blackwoods - a direct-to-dvd film he wrote and directed in 2002 is not half bad, especially considering some of the other Direct-to-DVD releases out there. It also has one of the coolest shots I've ever seen in a movie period (a car accident scene, specifically.)
I'm not all about bashing this director, or saying he's the greatest. But at least the guy is doing what he loves, and making movies. Some of them may be awful, but some of them are not all that bad.
Well I just watched it and I'll give it a solid 8. I don't know what other movies he's made, as I'm not a wannabe, self-proclaimed, film critic. But as for this movie, it's a good movie. Very straight forward script, with a not so simple look at what humans are capable of doing to each other; in this case a small group caught up in a mob mentality. All shot in one room, except for the scenes of them being interviewed. The acting was good, and the script was good. I recommend it, but it's definitely not for the timid. It's very graphic and tough to watch at times.
shareHave you seen Heart of America? There's a very cool shot in that where he takes a camera down a street and in and out of various houses - all (apparently) done in a single take...
shareNo I haven't seen any of his other movies that I know of, but I'll definitely check out Heart of America. Apparently most of the dialogue for Stoic was improv, so don't know how accurate it is in terms of it being based on actual events, but it was very well acted by Furlong and the others. I'm not sure why folks insist on voting a 1 for a movie before they've even seen it.. especially where this director is concerned.
It's easy to jump on the bandwagon and bash a director, but I doubt very much that any of those folks have the courage to put THEIR balls on the chopping block and put a movie out there. Maybe he's made some bad movies, but that doesn't mean he'll always make bad movies. Like I said, I'm not a sheep willing to just blindly follow the crowd. I'm glad I watched this film. I'll definitely check out the one you mentioned... thanks for the heads up.
AFAIK (read this in an interview a couple of months back - forget where), all the actual atrocities as depicted onscreen really happened and were taken straight from the court documents. I think he also said that in real life, they also made the poor sod defecate on the floor, eat it, then eat his faeces vomit when he threw up. I guess that Boll thought that was a bit much. Or it was cut from the final film for length/rating. Dunno.
Does anyone have a link to news of the actual incident, btw? I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility that a crime this horrific made it to the English-language media.
In the short making-of on the DVD, it seemed that Boll was sitting with the actors, telling them what he wanted the outcome of the scene to be, then asking them what they wanted to do in order to get there and to play it however they thought best. Unconventional - but in the case of this film, it worked very well, IMO.
Seed is another Boll movie worth checking out. It's more a conventional piece of horror and is quite silly in places - but it's one of the more truly horrific horror films that I've seen in the last few years. Heh, I've read a few reviews of it where horror critics complained that some of the scenes in the film were *too* nasty, or nihilistic, or vicious, or whatever.