Findlaigh Shawe

It's haunting, sad as f*ck, and utterly familiar ... every frame reflects and refracts the universality of loss and the chronicity of loneliness - particularly the alienating and alienated loneliness which seeds are sown inside the queer kid's carpeted closet. Fat tears falls, unacknowledged and uninvestigated by parents whose incuriosity is not so much benign neglect but strategic survival. "I used to hear you cry in your room," his dad tells him, "I figured you were being picked on at school"... "Why didn't you come into my room when you heard me crying?" "I didn't want to know it was true. I didn't want to know you were being bullied, and I knew that if I'd been at school with you, I probably would have bullied you too" These words (p) sound monstrous, but they're shaped by the film's preternatural gnosis into an exchange of such equable tenderness and absolute love that i was riven. Conversely, an earlier scene in which Adam comes out to his mum, is a tableau of hostility and devastation painted over in polite conversational prose. This is not of the happy people, by the happy people, for the happy people. But how many of those are on the planet ? I know one thing; I'd end a decades long relationship before the credits rolled if my partner was unaffected by this flawless creation. This is a gift for anyone who was born, had parents, didn't fit in at school, and lived through parental estrangement. I'll amend that; it's a film for anyone who was born.

Expanded content labelling for this odious opus would have saved me $6... Let me have a go: "coarse language, graphic cliches, gratuitous displays of preachy self-importance, outrageous pretension, immature and uninformed themes shrouded in decameters of spandex and parachute fabric" Basically, a pop starlet's five minute socially relevant music video has stretched to feature film length due to size parity of starlet ego and available funds. The 'music' has drum machine depth and soul and the lyrics are insipid. Offensively so. What the flaming hell is the point of this obscene collage? Who is the intended audience? Where original ideas should be there are retreads and caricatures. I don't know what 'spectrum' the Music character is supposed to represent but there's nothing authentic going on here; a mix of Rainman distress and Downs smiles rolled into in a semi-verbal Level 3 ASD (?) There's just too much and too little going on in this amalgam-minstrel. Is the Music character an intentional neuro-atypical composite/plot device? or did someone cherry pick a handful of incongruent traits for their photogenic appeal? And who cares about such distinctions when the result is a choice between objectionable or offensive? Ugh. Just ugh.

There's nothing in this film's first act to suggest romance. Winslet plays a charmless, unlikeable frump who seldom smiles or speaks. She seethes with passive aggression and seems resentful when offered what she wants, resentful when her wants are thwarted, resentful of anything and anyone who can't be carbon dated. She lives with her mother in monosyllabic austerity and we're left wondering why. Actually, I am left wondering about any film which shows potent lovemaking without poignancy. I really don't care about pounding surf, crawling bugs, fossilized boulders and hyper-atmosphere. It's form over content. Ammonite is a period seaside montage in search of a script. l