Thirst (2009) – Korean Gothic Horror Underpinned By Psychological Drama and Literary Naturalism

Old Boy director Chan-wook Park gives the vampire genre a brand new twist. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a vampire movie this much in a long time. Not a sparkle in sight!

“This is a violent, visceral, gory, deeply carnal and deeply philosophical vampire movie, if you can picture such a thing. It is beautifully rendered too, and everything from the weekly majong games at Lady Ra’s to the straggling camp of believers that pray for a laying on of hands from the martyr-priest-vampire is thought-provoking as well as visually pleasing.”

Read the rest of my review here: THIRST

Young Adam – One of the Lesser Known Beat Generations Writers Gets a Say

Young Adam (2003) directed by David Mackenzie is based on the novel of the same name by Alexander Trocci, one of the lesser known authors connected with the Beat Generation. The story revolves around Joe (Ewan McGregor) who we are introduced as he works as a deckhand on a barge along with Les (Peter Mullen) and his wife Ella (Tilda Swinton). Les and Joe find the body of a young woman in the river and fish her out, which gains them the kind of quiet and tangential notoriety that you could expect down at the pub after a hard days work. There’s a kind of quiet excitement from Les at being involved in something so obviously outside his ken, the connotation of sex and violence obvious. Joe says nothing, something that turns out to be less surprising as the story unfolds with the split time line of flashbacks that show the relationship between Joe and the dead girl, Cathie (Emily Mortimer).

The first impression you get of the marriage between Les and Ella is that the union is not exactly a happy one. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the barge that travels up and down the Clyde River means there is little or no privacy to be had and Ella seems too hardened and harsh to be anything but beaten down, something which shows itself to be completely wrong the minute Joe and Ella start having an affair. Ella is a force to be reckoned with, she owns the barge and she runs the ship with an iron fist, she is passionate and much stronger than first impressions might lead you to believe. Les gets pushed aside and ends up leaving with nothing but a suitcase in his hand, while Joe slots into place as Ella’s partner.

The thing about this story is that it unfolds in dual time lines, one showing Joe’s relationship with Cathie and his life as a would-be writer, while the other scrupulously follows Joe’s life aboard the barge and his exploits with the women around him. And therein lies the rub, so to speak. There are a couple of really interesting aspects to this movie. The gritty Scottish working-class kitchen-sink realism of the lives portrayed clash and collide with the overt estranged nihilism that brings to mind good old fashioned alienation literature like Camus’ The Stranger. There is obviously a lot going on beneath the surface that we are not all the way privileged to take part of. Joe is not a very likeable character. There is a lot of carnality in this story, Joe not only seduces Ella, he also has a short tryst with her widowed sister, Gwen (Therese Bradley) and the scenes from his relationship with Cathie are definitely not vanilla. There’s vanilla custard involved, though. It all comes together in a murder trial where we, the audience, know that the accused who may be executed for the offense, is innocent. The guilty party is actually in the court room, and the death was an accident, but none of those things are brought to light. Joe is at the center of all this, and I for one was not the least bit surprised at the choices he makes.

There are no visual markers indicating when we’re enjoying a flashback and that is actually enough of break from convention that you have to focus, and it struck me as an odd artistic choice to make. The fact that we are dealing with a morality play blended with an artistic thriller that relies pretty heavily on the mood it manages to set and the intensity of the performances means this is less easy to categorize and that has a certain appeal. It tastes a lot like a Noir thriller at times. The story doesn’t go into overly elaborate explanations or exposition, and in my book, these can be good things.

There is, however, an inherent distance created in the artistic choices made here. Tilda Swinton, Ewan McGregor and Peter Mullen give excellent fine tuned performances, which helps. It won’t make you like any of them any better, but that’s hardly the point. And, oddly enough, I wasn’t terribly impressed while watching this, but I found myself recalling more of it than I expected, which means it does something to stay with you and take on a life off the screen, which actually surprised me a little considering how unassuming the narrative style is. The complete and total lack of sentimentality is appealing, as well as the moral dilemmas that arise. The photography and the score all help with achieving the understated tensions running like deep currents in the narrative. It is certainly worth watching and it lingers with you, which is actually a good thing.

Article first published as Movie Review: Young Adam on Blogcritics.

Breakfast On Pluto Movie Review: The Strange and Exotic Tale of Patrick Kitten Braden

Breakfast On Pluto (2005) based on the novel of the same name by Patrick McCabe directed by Neil Jordan stars Cillian Murphy as the unique Patrick “Kitten” Braden. This is a really peculiar mixture of coming of age, personal discovery, picaresque, moral tale, fairy tale, oblique political commentary and hagiography. The opening shot shows Kitten in full regalia pushing a pram down the street and being accosted by construction workers whose lewd cat-calls she responds to with pointed poise. It then loops back on itself to the very beginning of the tale where we are shown a bassinet getting left on the doorstep of Father Liam (Liam Neeson) and the soft spoken voice-over of Kitten is taken over by a pair of robins in true fairy tale fashion. The whole narrative is told in similar style, with each scene introduced by a chapter heading that most often has an ironic attitude to the actual events. Patrick Braden as a young boy dresses up in his stepmother’s (Ruth McCabe) clothes at the tender age of ten and shows no shame when getting caught. We get to follow him through early fey adolescence and school life right up to the point where he leaves home to go in search of his mother Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle)who took off for London.

You can read the rest of the review …  here

The Road (2009) – the road in bleak dystopia

The Road (2009) directed by John Hillcoat is based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same title. This is a post-apocalyptic tale of hope and survival near to the bone where life is sweetest, to paraphrase Thoreau. I’m a huge McCarthy fan, which raises the stakes on the what I hope for from the movie, and I know that’s all kinds of foolish and overly optimistic. In this case, though, the movie delivers well enough.

The father is played by an exceedingly thin and haggard-looking Viggo Mortensen and the Boy by Kodi Smit-McPhee. Because these two are the main protagonists a lot rides on the report between them and it works surprisingly well. One of the main themes of this particular story is the love a father has for his son, the lengths he’s willing to go to to keep him alive and safe. Another theme is how to keep your humanity in a world where rape and cannibalism are real options for survival.

The father and the boy leave their home to travel south in a world where everything has died and the temperature keeps dropping. The animals are gone, the vegetation is dying and the sky is darkened by huge ominous clouds. Not only do the survivors have to worry about scavenging humans, they also have to try and stay alive through bitter cold, earthquakes, wildfires and falling trees. No explanations are given as to what actually happened, but it doesn’t really matter. The uncertainty adds to the sense of overall vulnerability of the few survivors that are still “carrying the fire” and trying to be good guys.

The boy’s mother (Charlize Theron) opts out before the man and the boy leave their home to go south. She simply can’t handle it anymore, something the viewer is showed in flashbacks. She does not want to just survive, so instead she walks away, literally. She takes off her hat and coat and heads out into the freezing night, committing suicide by simply giving up. The father can’t follow her, because of the boy, but the threat of murder/suicide looms large over the pair symbolized by a revolver with only two remaining bullets. Death is still better than being raped and eaten and the gun is kept as a kind of talisman to ward off a fate worse than death.

The wondrous thing about all this, no matter how bleak the circumstance, how hostile the environment, is that there are moments of light and hope, like when the pair find a survival shelter full of supplies when they are right at the brink of death by starvation. Every single human being they encounter is a potential threat, though, and that adds to the oppressive mood. On the road they meet many bad people who are trying to kill and eat them, but they also meet an old man (Robert Duvall) who is merely trying to stay alive.

There is also other things to contend with, like the fact that the father starts coughing and keeps getting progressively more ill as they travel on. There is the distinct sense that he only keeps himself alive to keep the boy alive and in that way the boy becomes a symbol for his hope for humanity. It’s all very grim, but the relationship between the boy and the father is still depicted as loving and above all profoundly important as a means of how to stay human, and keep some humanity intact.

This is not a hugely sentimental tale. The dialogue is restrained, the landscape viciously bleak, the characters constantly dwarfed by the mere scale of the devastation and the interaction between them is tinted by that. The only scenes given richness of texture and color and warmth are the dream sequences showing what life was like for the father and mother before the event. They are a startling contrast and serve mostly to exacerbate the horror of the now. They also act as a reminder that the boy was born after disaster struck and therefore has no idea of what life was like before.

The devotion between the father and son is sincere, but there’s no doubt that the father is moribund. The main question seems to be how to retain your humanity when faced with overwhelming odds and how to go on after disaster has struck. All McCarthy’s novels are deeply language driven and The Road is no exception, spare to the point of terseness. It’s difficult to translate that into moving images and not lose something vital, though this does a decent job of that. The color desaturation and the choice of locations, it all helps to give the scale of the destruction. This tale also ends on a strangely hopeful note, in a way. It’s not that anyone is going to live happily ever after, but more that life will go on as long as there are those that are “carrying the fire”. Sometimes that is really the best you can hope for.

All in all this is well worth watching, but it’s not easy fare and it’s not supposed to be, which you are well aware of if you’re familiar with the unrelenting nature of McCarthy’s fiction.

You’ll find what I thought of the book here;

http://librarianmule.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/on-the-road-in-dystopia/

Mule

Article first published as Movie Review: The Road (2009) on Blogcritics.

Winter’s Bone (2010) – It is Life Near the Bone Where It Is Sweetest

The main character of Winter’s Bone (2010), the seventeen-year old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is as tough as old boot leather. She lives up in the Missouri Ozarks with her mama, who is physically present but mentally absent, her twelve-year old brother Sonny (Isaiah Stone) and her six-year old sister Ashlee (Ashlee Thompson). Her father, Jessup, has been missing for some time and the story begins when Ree gets told that her father has to show up for court or they’re going to lose their house because he put it up to get the bond for the bail money.

It’s well known that Ree’s father cooks methamphetamine and that he’s been in trouble with the law before. Now that he is missing and the immediate safety of her family is threatened, Ree goes looking for him, asking a lot of uncomfortable questions of some very dangerous people.

Ree is shown right from the start as self-sufficient and strong in the sense that she does what has to be done. In her case that means taking care of her mother and her siblings, chopping wood and hunting squirrel and trying to make ends meet. There are poignant instances where Ree is taking her siblings to school and then looking in through the doors of the classrooms with something like longing in her eyes, showing plainly that she knows what she has to give up for her family.

Ree goes in search of her father, talking to relatives and people her father has had dealings with all over the community. She forms an uneasy alliance with her volatile uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) in trying to get to the truth, though it’s pretty clear right from the get-go that her father is gone for good, if not dead.

One of the more interesting things about this story is that even if the culture is portrayed as predominantly and pretty aggressively patriarchal, the women are given a lot of weight and substance. Most everywhere Ree goes she is greeted at the door by the wives and girlfriends of the men she has to ask questions of, and they are all cast in the same tough-as-nails Cerberus dye. The region’s patriarch Thump Milton (Ronnie Hall) is guarded by his spouse Merab (Dale Dickey), who also delivers an almighty beating to Ree when she won’t stop her investigation.

This is a tale of family, perseverance and doing what has to be done and Ree is undoubtedly a heroine in the most basic and best sense of the word. Jennifer Lawrence gives her portrayal of Ree all the gravitas and subtlety you could hope for, showing both her strength and her weakness, her fear and her deep and abiding sense of loyalty without it ever becoming overly sentimental. This could so easily have tripped into a stereotypical portrayal of degenerate hillbillies and gratuitous poverty porn, but instead each character is shown as doing what they have to do in order to live under extremely harsh conditions. Some manage to rise above their circumstance and some succumb to them. Drugs are in abundance, both as a means of making money and for everyday use and this is presented as a fact of life. The harsh things are snugged up right against the gentle in this tale. The landscape and the color palette shows just how bleak and difficult life is, and it also shows the undeniable haunting beauty of the scarcity of the mountains.

This is a thriller in the best sense of the word. The object is to find out what has happened to Ree’s father, and the viewer is taken along for the ride right up to the inevitable conclusion. What makes this rise above the run of the mill thrillers is that the devil is in the details all the way. The dialogue is sparse, the characters kept true and given context and depth even though they are not explained to death. In amidst of all the violence and danger we are also shown how Ree’s little brother and sister run and play and seem genuinely happy to be together, with no sense that they are deprived of anything essential.

There are visually lyrical moments that underscore the characters themselves without intruding on the story, sometimes in black and white and sometimes in a muted colour scheme that adds to the overall impression created in the narrative. It is gripping and harrowing and reminiscent of true Southern Gothic tales underscored with a sense of almost documentary quality frankness, which makes it well worth watching.

Winter’s Bone (2010) directed by Debra Granik stars Jennifer Lawrence (Ree), Isaiah Stone (Sonny), Ashlee Thompson (Ashlee), John Hawkes (Teardrop), Valerie Richards (Connie), Shelley Waggener (Sonya), Garret Dillahunt (Sheriff Baskin), William White (Blond Milton), Lauren Sweetser (Gail), Dale Dickey (Merab), Sheryl Lee (April), Marideth Sisco (Singer at Party) and Ronnie Hall (Thump Milton). Based on the novel of the same name written by Daniel Woodrell.

Article first published as Movie Review Winter’s Bone on Blogcritics.

And on The Topic of the End of the World…

T.S. Eliot put it best in his poem “The Hollow Men”

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I feel the need to amend myself for the previous post about the post-apocalyptic world of The Book of Eli. There’s a lot more to that story than I first indicated, such as the plucky young female side-kick Solara and the dirty western frontier feeling of Carnegie’s town and the fact that Eli is the book, embodies it, carries it within himself, cradled close to his heart. And the fact that people eat each other is just icing on the cake. Uhm. Well, maybe not icing. Well, strange icing then.

There are all kinds of post-apocalyptic landscapes. There’s excess and decay in Blade Runner (1984), a world where there is too much of everything but it’s all broken down and at odds with the high level of technological advancement. There’s the same general sense of too much stuff and an increasing level of urban ruins in Split Second (1992) where the futuristic London looks more like Venice, complete with rain and rising water levels. Hardware (1990) is post nuclear in the same way as The Book of Eli (2009), but here there’s an interesting mix of blasted wastelands and excess and changed climate. Technology features heavily in that movie as well, and it’s the same kind of retrofitted architecture in a dying structure where the difference between ghetto and high-end living are slim to none, merely depending on weather the technology works or not.

The future of the whole Terminator-series is blasted landscapes, ruins and dangers and technology gone rogue. It’s mostly a hostile environment, more fitted for machines than humans.
Mad Max (1979) had that same blasted desert feel to it even if it was still basically a revenge tale. And the following movies in that series had their merits and flaws. It’s still a forerunner in its genre, no matter what you might think of the leading actor today.

“If the future isn’t bright at least it’s colorful” Blixa Bargeld sings in one of Einstürzende Neubauten’s songs. That certainly applies to the movies mentioned above.

In Equilibrium (2002) the world still works, but things are not the way they should be. Just like with 1984 (1956 and again in 1984) things are bad, but the pressure is concentrated to the psychological realm in a totalitarian structure where you actually can’t argue that things aren’t what they should be, that the future isn’t a bright, clean and shiny place. These aren’t post-apocalyptic worlds in the same sense, they are dystopias, but there’s more to it than that. Reasons why aren’t always given, but the viewer can infer. And does, at least if they’re constructed like this viewer. You can argue where the line between post-apocalypse and dystopia should be drawn, but sometimes they are one and the same and sometimes they teeter-totter back and forth across that line.

There are plenty of post-apocalyptic scenarios that involve some kind of plague or bio-warfare, touching on our paranoia about diseases. Pandemic outbreaks of vampirism as in Daybreakers (2009) or I Am Legend (2007) or, tangentially, The Omega Man (1971) or any of the droves of zombie-movies, starting with the George Romero movies go at the topic slightly differently. The Last man on Earth (1964) combines vampirism, viruses and what-not. And David Cronenberg’s inimitable Rabid (1977) that creeps in under your skin for more reasons than one.

The premise is basically that everything else is the same, but the people needed to keep society going are the broken part of the machine, with the exception of small pockets of survivors. 28 Days Later… (2002) give us the modern view of the virus spreading in a world where communication and travel have developed to the point where pandemics are moving at epic speeds. Then there’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) of course, which is all of these things, decay and viruses and time travel and a hallucinatory drift in the fabric of reality with a cherry on top.

Planet of the Apes (1984) is of course another time-honoured classic that deserves a mention. Nothing’s really wrong here if you don’t take the fact that the human race managed to bomb themselves into the stone age proving themselves to be nothing more than an interesting footnote in history, reduced to myth at best. It’s that old fear of degeneration, a reversed Darwinian evolutionary curve making us irrelevant, which is something that not even Matrix (1999) took all the way. At least there humans serve some kind of utilitarian purpose, even if it’s not that great from our perspective.

Then there’s a lot of … uhm, let’s call them less successful movies on the same basic topic, like Interzone (1987), the storyline of which is given in haiku-style as “Humans fight mutants in a post-holocaust world.” Hmm… I haven’t seen that one. A Boy and His Dog (1975) I have seen, but I can’t exactly claim to have any interesting memories of it, apart from thinking that the sound quality was really bad and the voice-over of the Dog just felt incredibly wrong.

We bring it on ourselves.
That is surprisingly often the moral lesson in these narratives. It doesn’t matter if we are pawns in the game or victims of chance or just caught in the maelstrom of circumstance that are outside our control.

Our fears are pretty much the usual ones. Things ending badly, for whatever reason, are often brought about by greed and stupidity and all the things connected to excess and any of a variation of combinations of the seven deadly sins. Sometimes the humans in these narratives are like cockroaches, surviving despite of it all. Sometimes they are righteous men in a bleak free-for-all where people who eat people are the luckiest people in the world.

Mule

Gone Baby Gone – Little Girl Lost and Boston at its Grittiest

Article first published as Movie Review: Gone Baby Gone – Little Girl Lost and Boston at its Grittiest on Blogcritics.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) takes place in the poorer neighborhoods of Boston, mainly Dorchester, where it’s also filmed. The story itself revolves around the case of a missing four year old girl, Amanda McCready (Madeline O’Brian). Amanda’s aunt Bea (Amy Madigan) hires the private detectives Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) to help with the investigation on the assumption that because Patrick is at home in the neighborhood he can get more information than the police.

The Boston police take missing children cases seriously, mostly because of the personal history of the police chief Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), who has lost a child himself, so there is already a full media circus when the Patrick and Angie get involved. The police chief assigns detectives Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton) to the case and they have a good report with the private detectives. It turns out that the girl’s mother, Helene McCready (Amy Ryan) is involved in drug running, and a user herself, and not the most suitable mother, which seems to have something to do with Amanda’s abduction.

The whole investigation crawls through the underbelly of the working class neighborhood with its petty, and not so petty, criminals, some of which are old friends of Patrick’s. It takes a sharp turn for the worse when a ransom is suggested by the drug dealer Cheese (Edi Gathegi) who is everyone’s prime suspect. There is an exchange at a quarry that winds up looking like Amanda simply ran off a cliff and was drowned. Patrick can’t stop worrying at the case, though, there are too many things that don’t add up.

The story is complex, but not confusing, multi-layered and rich. It’s got an undeniable feeling of authenticity which is certainly due to some extent to the fact that Affleck has chosen authentic locations and cast a lot of non-professional local extras that sort of make you go “where did he find these people?”. It gives the street scenes and the occasional interiors of bars and clubs a flavor of overall gritty reality that makes the story hit all the harder.

The performances in this are really outstanding. Amy Ryan as Helene gives one of those performances where you just want to slap her character for not understanding what her behavior does to her daughter. The cast in general is stellar, to the point where it’s actually hard to single out any particular performance as carrying more weight than any other.

There are several interesting moral questions raised here, not only through the details revealed in connection with the missing child case. There are further reaching implications than you can glean at a first glance and they are all treated with the same understated gravitas in the context given by the story. So, yeah, it’s not simple. There’s an undeniable air of Noir over the whole story too, which I personally really like. It’s not only realistic and understated, it also challenges the viewer to pay attention and stay with the story, despite how dark it occasionally gets. The characters are genuinely interesting and complex enough that whatever moral questions arise they don’t feel tacked-on and gratuitous.

Ben Affleck has done an excellent job of directing this movie, his familiarity with Boston certainly adds layers to his interpretation of the story and what looks like blatant nepotism at a first glance, choosing Casey Affleck for his lead, is actually a very smart choice.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) is based on a Dennis Lehane novel with the same title. Directed by Ben Affleck it stars Casey Affleck (Patrick Kenzie), Michelle Monaghan (Angie Gennaro), Morgan Freeman (Jack Doyle), Ed Harris (Remy Bressant), John Ashton (Nick Poole), Amy Ryan (Helene McCready), Amy Madigan (Bea McCready), Titus Welliver (Lionel McCready), Michael K. Williams (Devin), Edi Gathegi (Cheese), Mark Margolis (Leon Trett), Madeline O’Brien (Amanda McCready), Trudi Goodman (Roberta Trett) and Matthew Maher (Corwin Earle).

Of Mice and Men – Playing with the bunnies

Article first published as Movie Review: Of Mice and Men (1992) – Just Playing With the Bunnies on Blogcritics.

Set during the Depression in California the story follows two young men, George (Gary Sinise) and Lennie (John Malcovich), who are living the rootless migrating life of day labourers. It quickly becomes obvious that Lennie isn’t all the way there, but he is strong as an ox. That is actually part of the problem. We start in medias res with George and Lennie running from a posse, something that is explained later.

The gentle giant Lennie has a soft spot for animals. The only problem is that he loves them a little too much, squeezing the life out of the things he pets. The viewer quickly understands that Lennie really does mean no harm, he just does not understand how strong he really is and he doesn’t seem to be able to learn. George takes care of Lennie as they travel together, but the relationship is not an uncomplicated one. All the tension and apprehension between the two is played beautifully by Sinise and Malkovich.

Lennie is obviously mentally still a child in some ways. The communication between him and George has a reoccurring refrain, something you have the feeling George has said a thousand times. It is mainly a plan for a better life for the two of them, where they will settle down on a little farm with cows and pig and rabbits. The rabbits are particularly important to Lennie who chimes in that he will “tend the rabbits”.

The farm where George and Lennie end up working is peopled with about as many quirky characters as you would expect from any movie based on a Steinbeck novel. There’s the short and even more short-tempered Curley (Casey Siemaszko) and his bombshell of a wife (Sherilyn Fenn), the old farmhand Candy (Ray Walston), Slim (John Terry) who acts as a kind of voice of reason and the old bent and broken Crooks (Joe Morton).

There is a very basic quality to the telling of this particular story. It relies heavily on the actors’ ability to convey much of what is left between the lines, and I personally think it is never entirely fair to compare the movie to the book anyway. Movies are collective efforts where cinematography and characterization are subject to interpretation and some things are elided by necessity. Sinise does a good job directing and starring, something that has always seemed a difficult thing to pull off to me, whereas it carries with it the temptation of letting the movie become a vehicle for one actor only. To my mind there is none of that going on here, even though there is obvious care taken to make sure that the actors are given room to work. It is also beautifully shot.

Coming into this story we already know it can’t end well. It’s just a matter of knowing how bad things will get before we get to the inevitable. Curley’s wife (Sherilyn Fenn) is the siren here, coming into the bunkhouse and getting the workers into trouble in various ways. Curley is possessive and jealous and abusive and there is never any doubt that his wife is unhappy with the situation, lonely and bored and locked into a life she does not really want. She winds up trying to befriend Lennie, and that is where things turn dark and desperate. Lennie just does what he always does, petting the bunnies until they break and it is done without any real malice. He breaks Curley’s wife’s neck without really meaning any harm. George knows that this is the end and there’s nothing he can do for Lennie now, except make sure he does not wind up in a cage.

Tragedy always hits harder when preceded by hope for the future and circumstance outside the lead characters’ control. We know this story well enough that there is no real surprise at the way things will end, but the actors make the journey well worth the time. Malcovich, who we are more used to seeing as a cerebral cool villain, really knocks this one out of the park. And Sinise understates all his reactions so well that it is kind of fascinating to watch. Sherilyn Fenn is drop-dead gorgeous and plays this well enough to elevate something that could have been a bad cartoon cliché.

It’s not the book, but it is far too well executed to be dismissed despite the fact that you probably have your own images and ideas even as you step into the vision Sinise creates with a great and obvious love for the material. In short, well worth watching.

Of Mice and Men (1992) is based on the Steinbeck novel of the same name. Horton Foote has written the screenplay and this version is directed by Gary Sinise, who also stars as George Milton. The rest of the cast consists of John Malkovich (Lennie Small), Sherilyn Fenn (Curley’s wife), Casey Siemaszko (Curley), Ray Walstone (Candy), John Terry (Slim), Richard Riehle (Carlson), Alexis Arquette (Whitt), Joe Morton(Crooks), Noble Willingham (The Boss), Joe D’Angerio (Jack), Tuck Milligan (Mike) and David Steen (Tom).

Mule