Gulp - Watch - DVDs, Movies, TV Shows
WATCH is FourThousand's guide to movies in Brisbane. While we focus on art-house and independent releases, we never shun our secret pop-culture pleasures. WATCH also has its fingers on the pulse of film-festivals and specially programmed events and we give tickets away every week. We have also been known to organise special preview screenings, which we always chicken out of introducing on the microphone before the previews start playing.
Brothers
"Sounds Biblical," was my initial summary of this domestic melodrama. Kinda - its characters are more like figures in a parable than individual human beings. But Jim Sheridan's powerful, intimate remake of the 2004 Danish original offers little salvation. Bleak, uncertain, Brothers is a fable that's lost its moral.
The Hurt Locker
Sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner) is the kind of maverick that war movies sooften ask us to admire: fearless, resourceful, wisecracking and soft-hearted with kids. But screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow slowly reveal the devastating truth: James is fucked in the head... and he likes it that way.
Daybreakers
Vampires are everywhere these days, so Daybreakers - a film imagining what happens when vampires take over the world - makes sense, right? It's the near future and everyone dresses like they're in the 1940s and everything looks like a Tool music video. Human blood is low in supply and starving vamps are turning into screeching bat-creatures.
The Wolfman
This year, Valentine's Day falls on a new moon. But you'd still better watch out for the signs you may be dating a werewolf. Has your Valentine ever been into ripping villagers to shreds? Does he or she do a really good Chewbacca impression? If you look up a book called Lycanthropy and flip to chapter two, "Ancient Gypsy Lore", do you see a woodcut of your Valentine with a furry head and no pants?
The Wolfman is Universal's homage to its own classic 1941 monster flick.
Precious
Watching Precious is emotionally gruelling. This isn't a date movie or a Friday-night escapist flick. But it does that rare thing: introducing a character whose journey is hard but whose victories are small. Director Lee Daniels finds a compelling poetry in hyperrealistic close-ups, jump-cuts and R&B musical montages, although I was unimpressed by the heavy-handed fantasy sequences.
The Road
What foolio made that absurd, misleading trailer? The Road is no action-packed post-apocalyptic thriller. Readers of Cormac McCarthy's novel will be familiar with its episodic, elegiac and even allegorical tone, which John Hillcoat (The Proposition) has beautifully captured. I feel strongly that people who've read The Road will have a very different (but no less powerful) cinematic experience to those who haven't.
Sauna
Packed with symbolism and almost unbearable tension, this Finnish horror film doesn't confuse atonement with redemption. In 1595, after a 25-year war between Russia and Sweden, two brothers, veteran soldier Eerik (Ville Virtanen) and sheltered geography professor Knut (Tommi Eronen), join a border delegation sent to divide Finland between the two nations.
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