Sundance 2011 Review: MAD BASTARDS

ReviewMovie Sundance by Ben Pearson

 

Mad Bastards is one of the most average movies I've seen at this year's festival. It's a family drama wrapped in a road trip disguise, following a drifting father who treks across Australia to meet his 13-year-old son for the first time. I felt like the movie had an opportunity to raise an original voice, but the plot points were so tried-and-true that the film was incredibly predictable and felt more like something that had to be endured rather than enjoyed.

Even though the film is set in Australia - one of the most gorgeous landscapes on Earth - the cinematography was average at best, failing to capture the beauty of the area in an original or impressive way. There are plenty of location montages, but they all feel lifeless and uninteresting. The "sense of place" that Michael Rapaport was so brilliantly able to express in his documentary about A Tribe Called Quest (NYC was the main focus there) was an afterthought in this movie, with the atmosphere left in the hands of the actors to create.

I use the term "actors" loosely, considering none of the cast had acted professionally before this movie. But that makes it seem as if they gave bad performances, which is absolutely not true - most of the cast was capable of pulling off their individual character arcs, but perhaps more importantly in a film like this, they were all very interesting to look at. Dean Daley-Jones plays TJ, the wandering drifter father, and Lucas Yeeda plays his son Bullet, who has taken to lighting Molotov cocktails and throwing them at houses because his own home life sucks. The movie may as well have been called "Bullet Goes to Camp," because a majority of the film is a slow, contemplating meditation of life out in the Australian countryside near the camp Bullet has been sent to in place of going to jail. Uncle Texas, played by Greg Taiti, is a central figure in the story: a police officer concerned with the modern man and who also happens to be Bullet's grandfather. But for me, the standout actress was Ngaire Pigram as Bullet's mother, fraught with domestic violence issues but a good heart and her son's best interests at heart.

Now to the good part: the music. The soundtrack of Mad Bastards is beyond incredible and unquestionably tops any other movie at Sundance 2011 for me. The Pigram Brothers are featured heavily in the film, almost as a type of Greek Chorus playing us along from scene to scene; the movie nearly turns into a concert film because of how great these guys are and how much their music is front and center throughout. I'd recommend seeing this movie for the soundtrack alone - which is a recommendation I don't think I've ever made before.

If you don't get around to seeing this, you're not missing much. But if you're really into excellent guitar music with a folksy country relaxed vibe, it's probably worth looking into. Brendan Fletcher's Mad Bastards is an unfortunate example of what happens when visuals can't sustain an entire film and there's not much else to fall back on.

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