{"id":3858,"date":"2009-08-05T14:40:09","date_gmt":"2009-08-05T19:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=3858"},"modified":"2009-08-28T18:40:38","modified_gmt":"2009-08-28T23:40:38","slug":"fissure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=3858","title":{"rendered":"Fissure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"vlcsnap-2009-08-05-13h40m12s35\"<\/a>When a movie disorients you for 2\/3 of its running time, making you feel like you can follow it, but never quite get a handle on it, without ever getting too<\/em> confused, the eventual explanation is almost always going to be a let down. This is often a consequence of being ambitious, and carrying out those ambitions with financial strings, making sure that the general audience doesn\u2019t pass along the message that your movie is too<\/em> challenging. The middlebrow needs their grounding, and the concession they expect is a series of clich\u00e9s eliminating either what original or mysterious approach you\u2019ve brought to the project. But when you\u2019ve made an independent movie, low budget, shot on video, unlikely to receive theatrical distribution, why would a filmmaker sell out to the expectations of the masses, if the masses are never going to see his film?<\/p>\n

\"vlcsnap-2009-08-05-13h41m48s235\"<\/a>Russ Pond\u2019s Fissure<\/em>, an alternate realities sci-fi cop-thriller is one of those movies with no recognizable stars, no money on the screen, and no debt to anyone, so the film\u2019s biggest<\/em> mystery is why the third act is so generic and obvious. Working from the idea that a Michael Chiklis\u2019 looking cop,* Paul Grunning, suffers from one of the two options for depressed cops in movies, that of the distant-marriage-dead-kid syndrome (the other option is the major alcoholic going through a divorce), Nicholas Turner\u2019s script doesn\u2019t come up with anything fresh for the first fifteen minutes. But we give the movie a little buffer, it\u2019s spare looking and the music is trying hard to amp up the tension, even if we don\u2019t know why. The golden-hued flashbacks detailing the child\u2019s death don\u2019t interfere too much; their inclusion is quite clearly to set up the final scenes. A better choice might have been to just use the flashbacks to explain Grunning\u2019s state of mind without using it as a plot gimmick, but Turner\u2019s script just ties up any possible loose end with pat emotional and convenient explanations.<\/p>\n

\"vlcsnap-2009-08-05-13h40m56s226\"<\/a>Fissure<\/em>\u2019s frustrating pandering causes the mind to drift, you might think about the laundry or maybe how your car needs a new coat of paint. I flashed back to a totally forgettable and unmemorable thriller from last year, Untraceable<\/em>, as the house where Diane Lane\u2019s character lives seems to be the exact same location as Detective Grunning spends the majority of Fissure<\/em> at. He was initially called in to investigate a possible intruder, but every time he enters a different room, he goes through some sort of time warp, so characters who were either dead or possibly committing murders are oblivious and are often freaked out by his presence, especially as it appears he\u2019s shown up before<\/em> he got the call from his captain.<\/p>\n

\"vlcsnap-2009-08-05-13h41m42s168\"<\/a>As a variation on the deliberately alienating low-tech sci-fi hit thriller from 2004, Primer<\/em>, Fissure<\/em> keeps its uncontrolled time travel rules as long as it can, but when it breaks them, the excuse is not to find its way out of a story jam, but rather to suck-up to an audience that would never sit through the movie in the first place and in the most syrupy, maudlin way possible. The scientific explanation we are given suggests that Grunning cannot<\/em> change future events, that he\u2019s a self-aware witness to the inevitable (like a visible ghost), and piecing together the familial drama he\u2019s investigating is fruitless, an intriguing idea for us and no doubt frustrating for him, so there\u2019s no reason for Fissure<\/em> to eek out a standard conclusion. The fact that, other than Grunning (played by James MacDonald, most of the time well, but occasionally over-the-top), the other characters in Fissure<\/em> are unpleasant and stiff, fits with the fractured time frame and the notion that they are going through the motions like emotionless robots, means that a disassociated downbeat ending would have been tonally correct. In its current form, Fissure<\/em> plays as if Fight Club <\/em>had <\/em>ended with Ed Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter smiling adoringly at each other while having a Christmas dinner in front of the fire, with Jingle Bells<\/em> playing on the soundtrack. Come to think of it, that would\u2019ve been actually darker and more ironic than what they actually used.<\/p>\n

* If Fissure<\/em> were a big budget movie, it might have been pitched as Vic Mackey goes to Donnie<\/em> Darko<\/em>land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When a movie disorients you for 2\/3 of its running time, making you feel like you can follow it, but never quite get a handle on it, without ever getting too confused, the eventual explanation is almost always going to be a let down. This is often a consequence of being ambitious, and carrying out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,14],"tags":[1476,5188,1931,1546,2146,2352,2805,5041,1862,5033,2333,313,2562,245,1107,556,5037,716,5044,5003,4111,1625,5031,5043,5045,1013,5035,4600,3839,5038,5034,5040,5189,2563,1075,5036,5042,5039,1316,5046,3158,3336,5032,3641],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3858"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}