The critics almost universally hate
Freedomland. It only got a 25% fresh rating on
Rotten Tomatoes and
Yahoo's critics and users alike could only muster enough love to give it a "C" grade. I don't get it. I absolutely love this film.
Some of my fondness for it might be exceeded expectations. The trailer made it out to be an interesting, but more or less generic serial killer film. Julianne Moore shows up at an emergency room with bloody hands and tells them that she was just car-jacked. Police detective Samuel L. Jackson shows up to investigate and all hell breaks loose when Moore, still in shock, reveals that her four-year-old son was still in the car. The trailer goes on to show Jackson searching the ruins of an abandoned children's asylum called Freedomland, discovering something shocking, and there are hints that this kind of thing has happened before. And, oh, by the way, all this is complicated by some kind of civil unrest going on in the community. That's the trailer.
I'd accuse the marketers of being liars if
a) that wasn't a repetitive statement and
b) I could think of a better way to get audiences into the theater. Instead, I'll just say that
Freedomland is not the movie the trailer advertises.
Yes, there's a mystery. It's central to the plot and the movie never becomes not-a-mystery, but it's also not
just a mystery. The civil unrest that seems incidental in the trailer is caused by Julianne Moore's description of the car-jacker: a black man. She comes from the rich, white side of town, but she volunteers in a children's program in the predominantly black projects and that's where she was when she was attacked. It isn't long before white cops from her side of town descend on the projects to lock it down until the car-jacker, now a kidnapper, can be found.
The movie's not just about racial issues either. It handles them effectively and helps you empathize with the helplessness and anger of the people who are being held hostage in their own neighborhood, but there's more. Themes that really connect with me as a parent. The movie talks a lot about what it means to be a parent, the person who's responsible for protecting a child. Julianne Moore is absolutely destroyed because she wasn't able to protect her son. Samuel L. Jackson begins to rethink his relationship with his own son who's locked up in prison for commiting armed robbery with Sam's gun. And Sam also has to deal with the fact that the people in the project look to him as their friend and protector, yet he has no control over the other police who are enforcing the lockdown of the neighborhood.
There's so much going on in the movie on so many different levels. Maybe that's why the critics don't like it. They're using words like "overblown," "mess," "sloppy," and "bungled." Maybe it's a more complicated movie than they expected. Roger Ebert, my favorite movie critic, asks questions in
his review that make me wonder which movie he was watching. The answers are in the film. I can't reveal them here without spoiling the film, but they're there. I just think critics were too busy or too lazy to see them.
Freedomland is a thoughtful, provocative, touching, well-acted film that avoids genre conventions. If it's rotten, I don't want fresh.
I'd just like to take a minute to remind everyone that Steve Niles's first 30 Days of Night novel (co-written with Jeff Mariotte) is now available. If you know me, you know that I loves me some Steve Niles stories.
As much as I like the Fantasy genre, I -- like most people -- tend to immediately think "Tolkien rip-off" whenever it's brought up. There are some talented writers who do a pretty good rip-off, but that perception that it's all more or less the same stuff makes me timid of searching out new fantasy.
The critics almost universally hate Freedomland. It only got a 25% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Yahoo's critics and users alike could only muster enough love to give it a "C" grade. I don't get it. I absolutely love this film.
FilmFodder is reporting a Variety story about a new project from the guys who produced Showtime's Masters of Horror. They're calling it Masters of Science Fiction and plan to adapt the works of folks like Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.
Last week I quoted Joss Whedon who mentioned that Serenity star Nathan Fillion is "busy making movies." One of those movies is rumored to be White Noise 2, co-starring Starbuck from SCIFI's Battlestar Galactica. Another is definitely Universal's Slither, a tongue-in-cheek film written and directed by James Gunn (who also wrote the Scooby Doo live-actions and the Dawn of the Dead remake).
I used to post a lot of links on this blog to other writing I was doing around the 'net. I haven't done that in a while, but I think I'll get back to it when it's appropriate stuff. Like this review of Graphic Classics: Arthur Conan Doyle.
A quick note about the script for Jurassic Park IV. In a brief interview with London Free Press, frequent Spielberg producer Frank Marshall said that the dinosaur sequel "has a good script now, so we should have that one up and running next year for release in 2008."
It's not an official prequel, but a German film called Requiem by Hans-Christian Schmid and writer Bernd Lange is going to leave off where The Exorcism of Emily Rose picked up. Inspired by the true story of Anneliese Michel who died in Germany in 1976 after ten, grueling months of weekly and sometimes bi-weekly exorcism sessions, Emily Rose told the story of the court trial to determine who was responsible for the young woman's death. Requiem describes the events that led up to the exorcism and tries to answer the question: why would anyone put themselves through that?
The Academy of Science Fiction Fantasy & Horror Films has recently announced its nominations for this year's recipients of its Saturn Award. It's basically a fan-organization, but they've been doing this for 32 years and have pictures on their website of people like Sam Raimi and James Woods holding Saturn trophies, so they're a respectable fan-organization.
So, everyone's talking about the Russian horror/fantasy movie Night Watch. Did you know that it's based on a novel though?
I'm not a big fan of anthologies. Like Forrest Gump's life, they have a box-of-chocolate quality to them and as I'm reading them I'm never sure if I'm about to bite into a delicious truffle or a nasty orange-creme.
