In a sleepy coastal village a curse lies waiting. Legend has it one night centuries ago when a smuggler was delivering his illicit wares, the excise men pounced. One of the villagers had betrayed him. The smuggler was caught and quickly hanged as an example but, his widow was more than she seemed, the practitioner of an ancient religion of magic and sorcery. The villagers formed a mob to hunt her down as a witch, they brutalised her, tarred and feathered her, but before they could kill her she put one last curse upon the land; that nothing should flourish, no life or love, before taking her own life and spilling her blood upon the land.
Earth and Blood is slow, but it still has it’s entertaining moments. If you’re into thrillers, or want to watch something new, then this film might be for you. As for me, Earth and Blood was tolerable enough.
It’s easy to dismiss Joel and Ethan Coen for writing from the world they build from outside the box of overarching Hollywood stereotypes, but their inability to compromise their collective vision is precisely what makes the simplistic nature of their world-building and characters so brilliant. It’s also what led Fargo to collect seven Oscar nominations and two wins for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress for Frances McDormand’s brilliant portrayal of the sincere, motherly detective whose wholesome demeanor seizes the day over the selfishness, corruption and evil of the men who don’t comprehend that there’s more to life than a little money.
I understood post-memory as passing down stories and images of one’s experiences that are not your own. For decades, rape has been depicted in cinema through a third-person perspective, leaving the viewer to observe rape; not to experience it.
These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.
Few movies deal with aging (particularly aging women) with as much compassion as Relic does. Yet it’s not sickly sweet and not a soapbox rant against ageism. Relic simply is, allowing the horror to seep in quietly and carefully.
What makes the lighting in Casablanca even more impressive is how it reflects the emotional states of the characters without needing explicit dialogue.
