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(87) |
127 |
145 |
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(26) |
38 |
43 |
Male |
(61) |
89 |
101 |
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Plot: A deadly car accident brings together a group of previously unrelated people, each of whom is forced to deal with the emotional fallout.
Recent Reviews
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MCT:August 24, 2008One of the very reasons I like those under the radar telefilm canada flicks.
More on this later. It's different, it's sad...and it's got a lesson in it...more or less.
What the hell does normal mean anyways? See: Mersault...re: L'Etranger. -
MCT:August 19, 2008An interesting movie. I find it interesting how the various people who are only related through a fatal car accident deal with the death of the teenager. Almost everyone blames themselves, yet everyone's reactions are quite different.
One thing that drove me nuts -- until 2/3's of the way through the movie I did not understand the connections between the players. It was almost enough to make me switch channels to an easier movie. -
MCT:August 17, 2008
This is an interesting drama. Moss fives a performance that is well done. The other actors mostly do a good job in their roles. There is one relationship in the movie between 2 characters that I didn't find believable.
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There are times when I feel that I was too harsh or even radical in my critical opinion about certain pictures, supposedly good or mediocre. But when I happen to see a bad picture, my hands hesitate to write a word about it since I don't want to advertize it, feeling that, after all, bad publicity is still a publicity. I want it to be gone, to be buried under the ground. Even though I'll admit I had some perverse pleasure out of mocking certain titles here and there, being it mostly a need to compensate the lost time, I really don't like reviewing bad movies and I don't even remember most of the bad ones I'd seen. Once I see a bad picture, some mechanism I have in my mind makes me forget it and - usually - it succeeds.
But it's unlikely that I will forget "Normal" anytime soon. And when it finally ended, for the first time I felt truly obligated - somewhat like a madman with a sense of mission, yes - to get to the bottom of how bad this picture actually was. Or, I should say, is, because I won't make it disappear, as sad as it sounds.
Let's make something clear before going into it: Carl Bessai must be one of the very incompetent directors working today. How he managed to make couple of pictures in the past before landing with "Normal" before us is basically beyond my imagination. I sure hope previous ones were better, even though I'm not one bit eager to find out. Making a picture like "Normal", hell, even writing it to do it the way it was written, has to have something to do between narcissism, infancy and sheer ignorance.
Aside from the awfully shallow, plot holled as a Swiss chesse script, stiff, amateurish acting and dull pace, "Normal" is also absurdishly flawed in its intercutted multi-character storytelling, turning it into a mess, really, almost impossible to describe. The most important event - and we see in the end, the most interesting - happens before we enter the picture. There's been a car accident in which a young man died, a tragedy that supposed to have a great impact on three main characters - his mother, his friend who's been with him at the time of his death, and the perpetrator himself. The picture stars with the mother being in the state of mourning; his rebelious, somewhat non-conformistic friend getting out of the prison and the perpetrator, being a teacher at the university, having an affair with one of his female students. There's also sub-plot - God only knows for what - of perpetrator's autistic brother, who acts like someone with this mental disability usually do, only without any cinematic motivation, nor any relevance to the story. That's for the premise.
It's clear what Bessai wishes to do here. Presenting three characters after the traumatic event is a good point to start, but when you decide to go such route, you might need something equally strong to carry the story, especially in case of three, completely different characters and that's what Bessai seems to forget. Thinking that it's enough, having no clue how to carry out either of them, he makes us follow their boring lives. Can you imagine it?
Nothing works in this picture. And nothing ever really happens. Everything that's going on is irrelevant to the subject, nor has any real meaning. The mother doesn't do anything besides being sad simply because she's not given any motivation to act. Same goes for a friend of the dead. He goes back home and soon become sexually involved with his father's girlfriend only to find that he likes much younger girls, like the girl he meets between time in bed with his older lover, later to be discovered by her, kissing the girl. The plot of the perpetrator is equally hopeless. The student he has affair with reintroduces him to wild ways of drugs and sex, then leaves him, then he tries to get back to her but it's no use. And what the hell's that got to do with anything?
And since we landed on sex. The bad movies sometimes share certain awkward similarities with erotic movies. Erotic films almost always treat their stories as a fillers between sex scenes so we wouldn't get bored, even if we eventually do. In bad movies, only sex seems to fill the gaps in the story. "Normal" is a perfect example of that observation. And naturally, it fails even in that department.
So how does it end. It ends horribly since all of a sudden, exactly ten minutes before the end, the director wants to sort this mess out. Without any real reason the friend of the dead and the mother meet each other, even though they could've met up at the beginning but who would pay attention to that. Then, the friend, after triumphal couple of blows on his father's face, gets out of the city with a new-found love, just like in a cheap melodrama. The autistic guy also finds a woman, as if we cared one bit from the beginning. The mother trashes the perpetrator who suddenly lands in front of her house, making an awful judgement on him, so we could see that there's no forgiveness in the world and shouldn't be, even though, of course, politically correct of not taking eye for an eye since he's left on the street to grow in guilt for the rest of his life. And as she drives off the street she says to her younger son that she feels "allright now". Oh sure, that's the answer. And that's what cinema, the drama, are for.
Have some shame, Carl Bessai. -
MCT:June 24, 2008
We all live different lives and everything that happens around us affects us in different ways depending on where we are. Emotional with some good performances.
