DVD reviews: Sometimes a Great Notion | Timecrimes | Cold Prey Boxset

Published on Thursday 30 April 2009 14:46

Sometimes a Great Notion (Optimum, £15.65) Timecrimes (Optimum, £15.65) Cold Prey Boxset (Momentum, £17.60)

JUST AS THE KEN KESEY NOVEL Sometimes a Great Notion could never emerge from the shadow cast by its predecessor, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, its 1971 film version, directed by and starring Paul Newman, was largely forgotten about after the film version of Cuckoo's Nest won five Oscars in 1976.

Actually, it was forgotten about long before that. The kind of film that would now be dismissed as an actor's vanity project, Sometimes a Great Notion didn't exactly set the world alight when Newman cashed in on his Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid box-office clout to bring to the screen this tale of a stubborn, Oregon-based logging family who refuse to kow-tow to pressure from the local community to stop working in the midst of union-imposed strike that is crippling the local economy.

So, basically, it's a film that wants us to empathise, not with blue-collar workers facing a tough time in an economic downturn, but with the scabs making their struggle harder. I've not read the book, but it seems that Newman might have missed the point of the story a little, seeing the plight of his character, Hank Stamper, as a simple celebration of individual freedom, rather than a complex exploration of how such dogged individualism can sometimes run contrary to what's best for the rest of us.

From a modern perspective, there are certainly some interesting ideas in the film. The story revolves around the return of Hank's younger step-brother, Leland (Michael Sarrazin), a long-haired wanderer who disapproves of Hank's and their father's live-to-work ethic (their dad is played with typical wry grouchiness by Henry Fonda), but inter-generational conflict takes a backseat to numerous scenes of Newman felling trees, as do the more interesting feminist subtexts hinted at by Lee Remick's under-written presence as Hank's dissatisfied wife. In the end Sometimes a Great Notion feels like the decision to make it was anything but.

Far better is the low-budget Spanish thriller Timecrimes, which proves there's still mileage in time travel when it comes to genre films, even if we know that everything that happens is going to prove significant, thus making it a little too easy to stay ahead of the action. That's certainly the case here, as we watch a man stumble into a time machine that zaps him 90 minutes back into the past allowing him to investigate who the masked maniac is that chased him into the time machine in the first place. Still, its structure is tight enough and its execution slick enough to make for some diverting, brain-melting fun.

There's more slick, European genre fun in the Cold Prey Boxset, a pair of Norwegian slasher films in which lots of good-looking teens get butchered by a maniac. OK, apart from part one revolving around snowboarders being chased through the snow by a psycho, this isn't exactly original (part two takes place in a hospital where the sole survivor from the first film is taken). But it's all competently made, delivers decent shocks and makes good use of its wintry locales. Indeed, there's such an obvious visual advantage of setting a horror film in the snow it's a wonder it hasn't been done more often.