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Rose Bryne plays a long-grieving sister in The Dead Girl (2006).
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At a glance:
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Kerry Washington plays a lesbian hooker.
Not a very flattering shot, though. |
Sometimes when I'm reminded of
Brittany Murphy's sudden demise, I think of two things. One would be her boinkin Eminem at the car factory in
8 Mile (2002). The other would be her titular role in
The Dead Girl (2008), somethin that will forever be a chillin irony after her tragic death in December 2009.
Karen Moncrieff's
The Dead Girl is a
disturbingly powerful vignette piece about a dead girl and five women
who are connected in some way or another to her.
The Stranger (
Toni
Collette) is the awkward daughter of an abusive mother who finds
empowerment when she finds the titular corpse.
The Sister (
Rose Byrne)
is a depressed forensics student who tries to find closure by insisting
that the corpse is that of her lost sister.
The Wife (
Mary Beth Hurt) is
the thankless murderer's wife who almost reports her husband to the
authorities but for a change of heart.
The Mother (
Marcia Gay Harden) is
a clueless middle-class woman who cannot understand why her dead
daughter left home even before she was killed; and finds some answers
via a whore who used to live with her daughter. Lastly,
The Dead Girl is a young woman who is
shown to live a blameless life just days before she meets her grisly
end. No - it's not a horror. It's not a murder thriller either.
It's a beautifully restrained character study that benefits from a
stellar cast and their solid performances. Flyin in the face of the
adage ‘the dead tell no tales', this movie asks the questions nobody
likes to hear; all through the cinematic device of a motionless corpse.
Contrasted against a wasteland of a backdrop, we see characters and
their motives - some noble, some ugly; but always unflinchingly
realistic. It's the sort of movie that finds appreciation only through
what we want to understand and derive from it.
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| Marcia Gay Hayden |
Bad news on the doorstep:
Of course,
what we understand and derive from it will always be contingent on the
emotional force that drives it. Herein
The Dead Girl suffered from the
age-old censorship bug when I first viewed it in 2008 under Cathey-Keris' banner in Malaysia. The full texture of the film has been
compromised by the cuttin of scenes instrumental
to conveying the bleakness of the subject matter at hand.
Perennial wonderment:
What
did happen to Brittany Murphy? Widower died at the same house, too. It had somethin to do with toxic mould, they said.
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| Mary Beth Hurt |
Reminds me of:
Jindabyne (2006),
The Invisible (2007),
The Burning Plain (2008) and
Brick (2005).
Amacam joker, berapa bintang lu mau kasi?
Thankfully,
the strength of its performances survives this. I cannot think of a
single poor movie with
Toni Collette in it - this one just improves the
statistic. Hers is just one of five characters and the rest of the cast
are, pardon the pun, dead solid. Permeatin the emotional undercurrent
is also a well-chosen music score to bring out the best in that
sun-bleached, dry discomfort of L.A. backcountry. There is
little more you can ask from
The Dead Girl, except maybe another five
stories from this excitin director. Maybe this time we could be spared
the veiled feminism though, eh?
★★★
The day the music died:
R.I.P. Brittany Murphy
(November 10, 1977 – December 20, 2009)
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Brittany Murphy at The Dead Girl World Premiere and AFI Special Presentation
at AFI FEST 2006 / The Loft in Los Angeles, California.
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If you ever knew a drug dealer, then Pusher is an exercise in déjà vu of great nihilistic pleasure. All grit and grain with no glamour, embattled filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn (writer and director of films like Valhalla Rising and Bronson) made this outstandingly powerful film about a week in life of a drug dealer that went on to spawn two sequels. It's a pressure cooker of a movie that delivers some remarkable resonance, as we follow Copenhagen crime through the eyes of Kim Bodnia's character Frank (foreground), a disenchanted pusher who has to deal with his best mate Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen, background) and prostitute girlfriend Vic (Laura Drasbæk), not to mention the Serb kingpin Milo played by Zlatko Buric and his burly henchman Radovan (Slavko Labovic). It's the smilin gangsters that get you shivering; and that's where Pusher hits all the right notes, despite bein hand-held and unintentionally underlit presumably due to budget constraints.
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