Look Both Ways (2006)

Waste of time

Truly Dreadful Film

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

I had the great fortune of viewing this film and seeing a stage performance of Chekovs "Three Sisters" in the same weekend. It was the second time I had seen Look Both Ways. Once is usually enough for me to see a film, but Look Both Ways is eminently re-viewable. There is something new every time. Just as we can look at Three Sisters over and over again, Look Both Ways has the 'everybody is related" thread, as has Chekov's great drama. So Chekov has to be staged; it is "formal" drama. LBW is naturalistic, and the actors perform to style. Both scripts are about death - death past, and death to come. The Doctor in TS says "It doesn't matter". In LBW, it does matter, but it draws people together. Did anyone else notice that the condolence card the train driver delivered to the widow was writer/director Sarah Watt's work? The conversation is recorded as a quote at the top of this site. I love this film.

I had never heard of this movie, but watched in on the IFC film channel. Did not recognize any of the actors, but within the first 5 minutes I was hooked. Every day people, some of them getting various "shocking" news delivered to them....and how they deal with it and how their lives intersect. One of the main characters, a relatively young man, is told in the very beginning of the story that he has cancer....testicular and it's already spread to his lungs. You really feel for him, and relate to all the things he goes through (montage flashbacks of his life, thoughts about all the things he has done that could have caused the cancer, imaging it taking over his body, etc. There are various animated segments, but not too many to be distracting. All the characters seem very believable, and you want things to work out for them. Happily, for the most part they do. A real gem of an indie!

The film had some likable aspects. Perhaps too many for my taste. It felt as though the writer/director was desperately trying to get us to feel the inner conflict of ALL of its characters. Not once, a few times...but all of the time. This is the job of television, not cinema. The location of the train station was well chosen and I enjoyed Sascha Horler's performance as the pregnant friend. I felt as though Justine Clarke's performance was wan. Her reactions to things felt forced, as though the director were trying to vocalise the themes of the film through her protagonist's expressions. I also can't believe that a director can make the wonderful Daniela Farinacci into an unbelievable presence. I cannot understand the choice of pop music slapped over entire sequences. This is a lazy device, especially where the pop music comes from no place diagetic to the film and/or where the lyrics of the song feel embarrassingly earnest. That said, there is a breezy quality about the film that evokes the Australian heat and local attitude with originality. It does create an atmosphere of heat and sunshine. Especially with the usage of wonderful animation sequences that rescue the film from complete mediocrity, infusing it with passion and hand-crafted charm. I am curious why the dialogue feels so overworked. "Who knows if there's a god? Like some guy sitting there up in the sky telling us what to do" or whatever the line was. Perhaps one of the more embarrassing moments was the friend returning home from cricket with a bunch of flowers to declare to his wife "I'm giving up smoking." An anti-smoking commercial? A TAC ad with some tasteful animation? I had to leave the cinema at the 50 minute mark -- it was all too much.

I did not like this movie at all. Everyone in it is depressed for one reason or another. The characters are so thinly drawn that I did not care what happened to any of them. It took so long to get going. I kept asking myself, "is this going to get interesting? because it is so boring! The folk rock music was over the top sappy and in the way and the animation was so abrupt and fast that it contrasted too much with the bland story. I know many people will say the film has deep meaning and is life affirming while it just a small story that says nothing new or different about death and dying. The colors in the movie were washed out and as well as look of the town.The streets were so dull looking that watching the characters run around them in and out of the rain did not keep my interest going.