Anyone know this guy Jim Cummings? I wasn't really aware of him but yesterday we watched a film called The Wolf of Snow Hollow... thought of you
@catalog cos you were talking about Fargo in the tv and a lot of reviews compared this to an episode of Fargo but with werewolves (interesting that people now say "an episode of Fargo" rather than "that film Fargo" - although not having seen the tv show I can't say if that's because the tv one has superseded the film, or just that they are different enough to make a distinction and so people compared it to the show cos that's what it is more like).
Anyway yeah, the thing is, this guy Jim Cummings wrote the film and directed it and stars as a recovering alcoholic cop with serious anger management issues in some snow bound nowheresville in Utah - struggling with balancing the above problems with parenthood of a teenage girl and an ex-wife who hates him. And then women start being killed by a huge wolf-like creature every full moon. It's a fun film that is quite unusual in the way it is filmed - often events filmed out of order, or it will cut back and forth repeatedly between events clearly happening at different times, or sometimes scenes are filmed out of earshot so you have to sort of surmise what is happening (normally an argument to be fair) - which can make it confusing. Reminds a little of Twin Peaks too I guess with a bunch of small town cops completely out of their depth when confronted by the supernatural, with the result that they argue a lot. Slightly derivative I'd say, it would probably fit into this genre
https://dissensus.com/index.php?threads/15618/ but we enjoyed it.
And we read that this same guy had done a previous film which seemed to have garnered a load of positive reviews and fans. It's called Thunder Road and it began life as a short of the same name, later re-worked into a feature length film (as with the Babadook and also Curfew/Before I Disappear). Again Cummings wrote, directed and starred, again he plays an angry, divorced cop struggling to deal with a bitch ex-wife and a young daughter.... but this film has a lot more to it really. It's far less of a comedy than the wolf one, and definitely less of a horror - although it's a lot more horrible. In fact I found some of it pretty hard to watch... the first scene (which I think made up the entirety of the short) is the main guy delivering the eulogy for his mother at her funeral, it's a mixture of pain and humour as he keeps crying, picking himself up, failing to dance to her favourite song (Thunder Road of course) and effectively having a total breakdown in front of the horrified/cruelly laughing congregation. And mostly it's downhill from there.
Owen Gleiberman of
Variety wrote "This is one of the first dramas to dig deep into America's heartland crisis — the crush of the spirit that has emerged from a collapsing job market and drug addiction and the underlying loss of faith. In
Thunder Road, Cummings creates an indelible character who is all tangled up in that disaster, but with a stubbornness that turns into something like valor, he wriggles free of it. He saves himself by becoming a human being. It's a relief to stop laughing at him, only to realize that you may want to cry for him."
Dunno if I'd agree it's one of the first, but it did feel like a different approach to those before somehow... So yeah, a much deeper, more intense... basically, a better film than its follow up. But I much preferred The Wolf of Snow Hollow, philistine that I am.