Movie Recommendation
It's possible that I'm the last one to see this movie, but if you haven't seen Frailty, Bill Paxton's 2002 directorial debut, check it out. Genre: horror, but one with a strange set of twists at the end. You really won't be able to guess the ending. Strong performances by Paxton and God's gift to women (and some men), Matthew McConaughey.
The basic setup: There's a father and his two sons (mother is dead), poor but happy . . . until father starts having visions from God instructing him to start killing "demons." One son believes that the visions are true, the other does not . . .
posted by Number Three @ 3:54 PM
2 Comments:
I saw that movie a few years back on the teevee. Much of the movie is great. Paxton and (really? yeah) McConaughey are at their best. And the twist is a super twist. But then I felt like the movie punked me in the last 10 minutes. Powers Booth's character was the problem. We were doing just fine, reveling in all our moral and epistemological ambiguity, and then what we discover about him seems to stack the deck. Worse, it stacks the deck in favor of religious extremism. I don't want to say much more, in case someone here hasn't yet seen the movie. But it left a bad taste in my mouth after what had been an unexpected pleasure.
Not sure how much one can say on this point w/o SPOILER ALERT, but the risk the movie takes in the last 10 minutes is why I thought it went from good to great. It's just a movie. It's like assuming that there really are vampires or zombies, in the horror context. Maybe there really are demons. And demon killers.
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