Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Thursday, April 24, 2014

BROKEN (2012)

This indie pic, the megging debut of British theatrical director Rufus Norris, is heartfelt, sensitive and lousy; a fine example of a literary work that refuses to take to the screen. The story centers on young Scout, I mean, Skunk, an independent, motherless adolescent girl with a daddy fixation (pop’s a lawyer), an older brother, a problem with school bullies, a nose for trouble and various neighbors & plot elements also clandestinely retrofitted out of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. (A rape allegation from a slutty white-trash blonde as central narrative device? MOCKINGBIRD only had one; why not two wrongly accused for twice the drama?) As played by Eloise Laurence, Skunk even looks a bit like Scout (I mean, Mary Badham), and gets to know a mentally handicapped grown-up across the cul-de-sac from her house, he lives just past that British white-trash place with the explosive widowed dad and the three viciously psychotic sisters. (What? No tree with a hollow for secret knickknacks?) Director Norris knows things don’t quite add up so he tries a bit of non-linear editing, opening scenes at their climax then jumping a few steps back to show how we got here. Stylistic subterfuge that can’t hide all the inexplicably incurious lawyers, cops & teachers who make up the cast of characters. Though that’s preferable to the dream-of-death climax, a bathetic arthouse version of the current Fundamentalist Christian hit HEAVEN IS FOR REAL/’14. Yikes!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: As mentioned above, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD/’62 or, for a fine British coming-of-age pic, AN EDUCATION/’09.

No comments: