1/1/2024 0 Comments Human traffic movie![]() ![]() The uninitiated may not pick up on the red-yarn-and-corkboard subtext pinned onto a mostly straightforward extraction mission in South America, pretty much Taken with a faint whiff of something noxious in the air. Judging by the robust round of applause that concluded the fully-seated screening I attended on Wednesday evening – and this, in the liberal Sodom of Manhattan! – it would seem that the folks at the two-year-old Angel Studios have tapped into a substantial and eagerly marshaled viewership.įollowing that money leads back to a more unsavory network of astroturfed boosterism among the far-right fringe, a constellation of paranoids now attempting to spin a cause célèbre out of a movie with vaguely simpatico leanings. However one chooses to slice it, Sound of Freedom has over-delivered on expectations in dollars and cents, a feat of profitability uncommon for a comparatively low-budget production without a major Hollywood-led promotional campaign. No matter that these figures require selective, almost willfully misleading framing to allow for the David-and-Goliath narrative trumpeted by supporters as the copious tweets accusing Disney of being in cahoots with a global cabal of high-power pedophiles make clear, the truth doesn’t have too much purchase around these parts. But for a fleeting moment this past Fourth of July, while the intended audience of Indy’s latest outing was presumably spending time with their families and friends at barbecues or in other social situations, an unoccupied fandom rallied by the star Jim Caviezel claimed the day with a $14.2m gross versus Dial of Destiny’s $11.7m. As for the 2002 rehash, Human Traffic Remixed, this has been disavowed by Kerrigan and his star John Simm.That’s not, strictly speaking, accurate – Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny had already been out for five days, the first three of which out-earned Sound of Freedom’s opening-day take, when the new independent thriller came to theaters on Tuesday. The US retread doesn’t do terrible things to the language, merely clearing up a few chin-scratchers that just don’t translate, but it does make some visual cuts on moralistic grounds, which surely is just plain wrong. For authenticity, go for the UK original version. And it does, quite unashamedly, love its drugs.Ī word on versions. Which is very unBritish, almost French even. Which brings us to the real reason why the film hangs together – it wrings comedy, pathos and drama out of character, rather than soap-style psychological exposition or the standard set-up/pay-off gag structure. It is a piece of grade A observational comedy. Among the inspired scenes in Human Traffic is one in which a TV news reporter does a drugs expose speaking in jive-talk he reckons is “street”. Kerrigan is, if anything, a better writer than he is a director. John Simm and Shaun Parkes are the real standouts, and I think this was the film debut of Danny Dyer, who’s managed since to parlay that druggy hangdog thing he delivers here into an entire career. Look no further than the performances of the cast. Ah yes, “block rocking beats” – the soundtrack, includes Underworld, Fatboy Slim and Orbital and was supervised by Pete Tong, a DJ so famous at the time that his name had become rhyming slang.īut there is timelessness in here too. ![]() As to the “great” label, there’s nothing that ages as quickly as a film about youth culture, May’s “block-rocking beats” being staler than “Hep cat daddy-o” by December. Kerrigan wrote it when he was 23, living the life, and it has the urgency of despatches from the front line. ![]() The paper was rushing on its own euphoria but there is an undeniable freshness to the film. We’re talking about ecstasy, this being 1999, and the film was so of the moment that the UK newspaper The Guardian called it “the last great film of the nineties”. A pill-popping tale of a mad weekend among McJobbers in Cardiff, Wales, it’s a film unashamed, delighted in fact, to bring us drug-taking as it is experienced by those who do it most – from Friday night euphoria to Sunday comedown – as fun, an escape, a lark. Human Traffic made a hell of a feature debut for its writer and director Justin Kerrigan at the back end of the 20 th century. ![]()
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