The Crossing Guard
|
List Price: Our Price: $1.49 You Save: $8.50 (85%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.99 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of The Crossing Guard
Movie Review: cheap, fast, perfect
Summary: 5 Stars
Product was extremely cheap, in great condition (new) and arrived swiftly during the Holiday season.Movie Review: Powerful Performances
Summary: 4 Stars
The Crossing Guard marked Sean Penn's second outing as a writer and director. Even today, The Crossing Guard receives a cool reception from those who stumble upon it. While almost all agree that the film is not a masterpiece, some go so far as to say it's not even a good film. It's not perfect, it's not a masterpiece, but I can't tell you that The Crossing Guard is not a good film that proves Sean Penn is a true film director.
Jack Nicholson plays Freddy, an alcoholic jeweler whose daughter was killed some years ago by a drunk driver named John Booth (David Morse). Booth has recently been released from prison, moving into a trailer in his parent's driveway and Freddy plans to kill him. Since the death of his daughter, Freddy has nothing. His ex-wife Mary (Anjelica Huston) has re-married and his two sons call him by his first name; his nights are spent drinking and socializing in a strip club. He's hit rock bottom and has nothing worth holding on to. When Freddy finally attempts to kill Booth, he has gun troubles and tells Booth he has 3 days. Booth is still suffering from the guilt that he no longer fears his own mortality.
This synopsis makes the film sound like a cheap, conventional, and contrived thriller. There are parts of Penn's story that are contrived, without a doubt...But this a strong, character-driven piece that allowed me to slightly overlook blemishes in the story.
The film is driven by Nicholson and Morse, two vastly contrasted performances, with Morse giving a subdued performance as Nicholson immerses himself into the character, once again crating a memorable character while essentially playing a variation on himself. The fact that Sean Penn is an actor greatly helps him get great performances out of his actors. 20 minutes in there is a scene between Nicholson and Huston (who had gone through a tumultuous breakup only a few years earlier) which seethes intensity. Quite late into the movie, they have yet another scene together and it's easy to see both of them drawing from their personal history to get through the scenes correctly. While both Freddy and Booth are appropriately fleshed out, I felt that Penn didn't fully flesh out Huston's character and Jojo (Robin Wright), Booth's love interest. They felt more like devices of the plot rather than actual characters.
I do find it funny to note (due to Penn's famously hot temper) that, despite playing Booth's love interest, there is not a single scene of Wright and Morse kissing.
Penn proves himself with this film that he's a strong director and a strong writer, but he still hadn't fully matured as one. His script is "good," but would not have worked as a film without the cast he chose to populate the movie. The saddest thing about The Crossing Guard is that it's not a great film, although it certainly had the potential to be just that. The contrived story, specifically the happy ending, is what killed it for me. In the end, I felt the film would've worked better as a grim story about revenge than a dark tale about redemption. There are great scenes in the film, but others that are just too forced and predictable to ignore...The paradox of Freddy in particular. I saw that coming from the very beginning of the film. The Crossing Guard has great performances, great direction, and is entertaining enough but it could've been so much more.
GRADE: B
Movie Review: Vengeance and guilt are blind alleys
Summary: 4 Stars
What happens when your child is killed in a car accident by a drunken driver ? What happens when you have killed a child in a car accident when you were driving under the influence ? For one, the drunken driver goes to prison for a while which always seems to be too short for the victim's father. For two, the drunken driver develops a sense of guilt that makes him desire to die, to be killed, to disappear. For three, the drunken driver cannot develop a normal life because of this guilt that keeps him away from his forgiving parents, that prevents him from building a normal relation with anyone, particularly a love relation. For four, the father of the victim develops a desire to really take justice in his own hands, unable that he is to forgive, to accept the death of his child as an event that cannot be repaired by any action on his part. Gone is gone and bygones must be accepted as such. But even if you let the sleeping dog sleep, there is a this dog gnawing at your innards and your soul, perverting it, rotting it, destroying it, and all reason along with it. Then you embark into a chase after the killer and try to destroy him in his turn. You become kind of schizophrenic and real life disappears for this virtual mission that you think, feel and know you have been entrusted with by fate and suffering, some even say God. Vengeance is the word for it : an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. And there is a perfect meeting of the sense of guilt in the killer and the desire to kill in the father. And yet, the film comes to a positive end, comes to forgiveness and repentance. This ending is very unrealistic. Vengeance does not know any stop, any limit, any mastering force because it comes from the deepest layers of one's instincts, impulses and drives, totally unconscious in its real motivations. Guilt cannot alleviate the suffering of the other nor the suffering of the drunken driver because it comes from the deepest ethical layers of the unconscious. On one side the desire to kill because the other has killed : a false balancing justice that is fundamentally barbaric. On the other side the desire to die because he has killed and cannot accept the fact and change his neurotic if not psychotic vision of the world and himself. Sean Penn just dreams of a way out that does exist in society, among men, for most of them, but is unrealistic when the two protagonists have reached their levels of derangement, because vengeance and unabating guilt are derangements of reason and the mind. Make it a mass reaction and you have a simple cause for war. The stronger will go at war against the weaker but the weaker will become the stronger because of his massive nature and of his sense of being invaded by some undeserved injustice. Never play with vengeance : it is no toy, it brings no joy, it only brings unwarranted death and unrighteous action that prompts the desire and the will to resist, to righteously defend oneself. Then it is a vicious circle going down into hell.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Movie Review: ACTOR'S MOVIE
Summary: 4 Stars
Sean Penn, recently winning his first Oscar for MYSTIC RIVER, directed this film, and as an actor he is vastly aware of the importance of good performances. While the movie itself is a flawed film, one can hardly fault the performances. The movie is about going on with one's life, even when that seems the furthest thing in mind. Jack Nicholson in a very strong performance plays Freddy, a man who lost his seven year old daughter to a drunk driver. After this loss, his marriage to Mary (Anjelica Huston) has fallen apart, and she has remarried a stable and nice enough man (played with restraint by Robbie Robertson). Freddy has been living for one thing: revenge. Now that the driver, John Booth (David Morse) has been released from prison, Freddy wants to kill him. Booth, however, is a changed, desolate man as well, bearing the guilt of ruining not only Nicholson's life, but hurting his loving parents (Piper Laurie and Richard Bradford) as well. How these two face their demons is the crux of the plot. What makes it so good are the performances. Huston is magnificent; a scene between her and Nicholson in a restaurant late at night is devastating in how it switches from what starts out as sentimental and caring, but then turns despicably ugly. Although not on screen much, Ms. Huston asserts her power as an actress. Robin Wright Penn as the girlfriend of Booth has some powerful moments, although her "dancing" sequence is both absurd and unmeaningful. David Morse is brilliant as John Booth, an obviously gentle man who made that horrible mistake of drinking too much and driving. His guilt weighs heavy on his shoulders, and in the convoluted ending, he and Nicholson still make it potent.
Not a happy film by any means, but a good exercise in cinematic performance.
Movie Review: Unforgiven
Summary: 4 Stars
It's too long, too unfocused and way too self-indulgent. But in the end, none of this matters. Sean Penn's second effort as a director-screenwriter is compelling and emotionally resonant ways that more conventionally well-made films never manage to be. Jack Nicholson gives one of his finest performances as Freddy Gale, a jewelry store owner whose daughter was killed by a drunken driver six years before the story begins. Since then, the devastated Freddy has remained alive only by nursing the hope that he will be able to kill John Booth (David Morse), the man who accidentally killed his daughter. But as the guilt-racked Booth is released from prison, it becomes very clear that perhaps neither man really wants to live much longer. Throughout "Crossing Guard," Penn has a tendency to sledgehammer his way through walls rather than simply opening doors. Even so, he always gets where he wants to go -- to that dark corner of our hearts where we can forgive no one, not even ourselves. Co-star Anjelica Huston has a couple of terrific scenes as Freddy's ex-wife, a woman with her own share of guilt, fear and loathing.