Thu, 20 August 2009
There's art house and then there's art school, and Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America is neither. Tony Stone is the writer/director behind the movie, and I have to be completely honest – I don’t quite understand what his point was. I mean, it’s not like the movie’s incomprehensible. I get it. It’s not hard to follow. Vikings show up on the shores of Greenland, a couple of them get left behind, and . . . heavy metal plays in the background. Severed Ways isn’t necessarily an experimental movie – there’s a semblance of narrative here. And it’s easy to follow, especially since we have Chapter title cards guiding us through the film. Why we have Chapter marks in the movie itself I don’t quite understand, but in case you’re having trouble following along, or if you a writer/director who’s having a hard time connecting story sequences, I suppose they’re helpful. I'd like to mention what I liked about the movie. It looks great. The minimalist production design succeeds in making the woods and coast of modern-day Just turn down the volume. The movie’s gimmick . . . er, soundtrack is made up of songs from Popol Vuh, Judas Priest and Burzum. I understand the connection between Vikings and Norwegian death metal, as tenuous as the connection might be, but to drop Morbid Angel’s 'Desolate Ways' into a movie that the filmmakers are obviously trying to present in a somewhat realistic sense didn’t seem to make sense. Stone takes great care in presenting how real, or as the DVD cover tells us, how “gritty” the Vikings’ reality was, but the inclusion of this music made the movie feel like a long experimental music video. Whether Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America is a long music video or a gritty historical epic, including a scene in which one of the characters defecates and then wipes himself with the available foliage does nothing to make the movie interesting or worth your time.
Category:general
-- posted at: 3:34pm PST
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Thu, 20 August 2009
Mail Order Zombie forums - http://www.popsyndicate.com/forums/viewforum/86/ Email us at MailOrderZombie@gmail.com or call us at 206-202-2505! Vote for us at Podcast Alley at http://tinyurl.com/mozvote Support the show at http://www.tinyurl.com/mozsupport Dread Media - http://www.dreadmedia.net Grave Mistakes - http://www.myspace.com/gravemistakesmovie Know Nothing Music Show - http://knownothingmusicshow.podomatic.com/ Don't Be a Zombie at Work - http://www.dontbeazombieatwork.org 28 Days Later comic - http://tinyurl.com/28dayslatercomic Third Left 4 Dead 2 campaign revealed - http://tinyurl.com/thirdl4d2 When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection - http://tinyurl.com/zombiemath Zombie Ants Controlled by fungus - http://tinyurl.com/antzombie Donny Dirk's Zombie Den - http://tinyurl.com/donnydirk Resident Evil 4 moved up three weeks - http://tinyurl.com/re4update New pics from Survival of the Dead - http://tinyurl.com/newsurvpics (Various production music produced by Kevin MacLeod) |