Film Words

There’s no easy way to talk about your deepest, darkest problems; to do it in a very public fashion must be damn near impossible, but that’s what Ben Affleck is attempting in The Way Back , which sees him re-teaming with Accountant director Gavin O’Connor. It’s a film about a man struggling with alcoholism, something Affleck has had unfortunately well know issues with, and he must be commended for being willing to lay it all out there for this sombre and touching basketball movie. Yes, basketball movie. Affleck’s Jack Cunningham is hired to coach the high school team he used to be the star of, but in order to do so he needs to get control of his own rapidly spiralling life, in which he drowns his crushing sorrows with a never ending stream of booze. As is customary with these kinds of stories (think Coach Carter, for example) the teams various players also have exactly one big life lesson they each need to learn, not just to excel on the court, but to excel in the game of life....

One of the things cinema is great at is exposing your biases, forcing you to acknowledge the humanity in others, even if you are diametrically opposed ideologically to whoever is on screen, and look inwards at you own flaws. One of the more surprising examples of this recently is the Blumhouse produced Get Out, which made a slice of liberal leaning America recon with its own deeply held prejudices right as it was positioning itself as smugly superior to the newly emerged ‘deplorable’ Trump fan base. The Hunt sees Blumhouse once again trying to infuse a nuts-and-bolts horror/thriller with an incisive contemporary political edge, this time with muted results. The premise is that a group of redneck deplorables wakes up in the middle of a ‘Dangerous Game’ style kill zone, set up by a separate group of wealthy liberal elites. As the victims are quickly picked off with bloody glee, Crystal (Betty Gilpin) emerges as a protagonist that no one should want to fuck with, possessing superhum...