Prince Avalanche. (15.)
Directed by David Gordon Green.
Starring Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch, Lance LeGault and Joyce Payne. 94 mins
Prince Avalanche is like an odd little sit com that ran late night on BBC2 or Channel 4 for one series and whose small band of devotees tried to drum up cult status for before their efforts tailed off after two or three years. The sit was two characters engaged in a lonely, demeaning anti-social job. The com was the interplay between the older supposedly wiser one and his dopey apprentice as the older one tried to pass on his wisdom and world view on to the younger.
But instead of being cancelled the two of them were crated up and shipped off to the States and then abandoned on the side of a deserted Texas country road where they begin again. Now in the person of Rudd and Hirsch they banter, discuss women and fall out while painting the yellow lines down the middle of the road
Director Green has had a schizophrenic career, starting out as a backwoods art house director with quiet meditative films like George Washington and All The Real Girls before abruptly becoming a maker of loud, non-meditative Hollywood comedies such as Pineapple Express and Your Highness. This perplexed serious reviewers who don’t like their pet artists to develop out of their assigned boxes, particularly when a Derek Jarman turns into Johnny Vegas.
In Prince Avalanche, which is based on an Icelandic film called Either Way, Green has found a way to unify the two strands of his career. The relationship between Rudd and Hirsch is played for subtler, more character based humour than his previous comedies, but it still recognisably a double act. What surrounds them though is beautiful, mysterious and otherworldly, shot in a stretch of parkland that had been decimated by a forest fire a year earlier. It’s the most potently atmospheric piece of woodland since Miller’s Crossing.
It is a bold and charming oddity but maybe not entirely effective. Rudd and Hirch are skilful performers but the film is better when the camera is allowed to wander off on its own and the marvellous score (by Explosions in the Sky and David Wingo) really takes off. You welcome the occasional new face such as Lance LeGault as a garrulous old timer truck driver or Joyce Payne who the production found wondering through the charred debris of her burnt down home and put in the film. Compared to these wonders the Rudd/ Hirch double act makes for an ever so slightly perfunctory centrepiece.
Directed by David Gordon Green.
Starring Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch, Lance LeGault and Joyce Payne. 94 mins
Prince Avalanche is like an odd little sit com that ran late night on BBC2 or Channel 4 for one series and whose small band of devotees tried to drum up cult status for before their efforts tailed off after two or three years. The sit was two characters engaged in a lonely, demeaning anti-social job. The com was the interplay between the older supposedly wiser one and his dopey apprentice as the older one tried to pass on his wisdom and world view on to the younger.
But instead of being cancelled the two of them were crated up and shipped off to the States and then abandoned on the side of a deserted Texas country road where they begin again. Now in the person of Rudd and Hirsch they banter, discuss women and fall out while painting the yellow lines down the middle of the road
Director Green has had a schizophrenic career, starting out as a backwoods art house director with quiet meditative films like George Washington and All The Real Girls before abruptly becoming a maker of loud, non-meditative Hollywood comedies such as Pineapple Express and Your Highness. This perplexed serious reviewers who don’t like their pet artists to develop out of their assigned boxes, particularly when a Derek Jarman turns into Johnny Vegas.
In Prince Avalanche, which is based on an Icelandic film called Either Way, Green has found a way to unify the two strands of his career. The relationship between Rudd and Hirsch is played for subtler, more character based humour than his previous comedies, but it still recognisably a double act. What surrounds them though is beautiful, mysterious and otherworldly, shot in a stretch of parkland that had been decimated by a forest fire a year earlier. It’s the most potently atmospheric piece of woodland since Miller’s Crossing.
It is a bold and charming oddity but maybe not entirely effective. Rudd and Hirch are skilful performers but the film is better when the camera is allowed to wander off on its own and the marvellous score (by Explosions in the Sky and David Wingo) really takes off. You welcome the occasional new face such as Lance LeGault as a garrulous old timer truck driver or Joyce Payne who the production found wondering through the charred debris of her burnt down home and put in the film. Compared to these wonders the Rudd/ Hirch double act makes for an ever so slightly perfunctory centrepiece.
