TRAIN DREAMS is the chillest and maybe artiest of this year’s best picture nominees. It was also nominated for best adapted screenplay (from the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson), best cinematography (Adolpho Veloso) and best original song (Nick Cave). If you never heard of it, it’s because it’s only on Netflix, and because it’s a peaceful, contemplative movie about the unremarkable life of a logger in Idaho. There’s a bit of THE TREE OF LIFE in it, but it’s not as slow or humorless as that might sound. I liked it in more than a “pretty good for homework” type of way.
It tells the story of Robert Grainier (the Master Gardener himself Joel Edgerton), who grows up an orphan in and around Bonners Ferry, Idaho, and doesn’t have much passion for anything until he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones, THE TEMPEST). They get married, buy an acre of land next to a river, build a cabin, have a daughter. He gets some work helping build a bridge for the Spokane International Railway but has a bad experience, then spends most of his life doing seasonal logging work, away from where he wants to be, and worrying he’s cursed. (read the rest of this shit…)
SING SING is an unusual movie with a simple appeal: it’s about a theater program in a prison, and most of the cast is made up of actual graduates of the program playing versions of themselves, so there’s an unmistakable feeling of authenticity completely outside of a normal Hollywood production. We see interjections of unscripted or documentary scenes – auditions, video of real plays – but mostly we just see very natural performances by actors/characters speaking or drawing from their hearts in ways that cut deep.
