Joe

I forced myself to finish this movie based on the great performance by Tye Sheridan but the movie seemed disjointed. Almost as if the gems to make sense of this movie ended up on the cutting room floor. I actually had to turn off the movie and come back 3 days later to finish it. Overall it was very disappointing and i felt lost through the movie. I gather that the overall message of the movie are anger, poverty and alcoholism; however it felt like being on a ride on one of those rubber balls you buy in the vending machine at the supermarket that just bounces from one wall to another until it runs out of steam and falls to the ground without ever really made it anywhere.

This movie, apart from going nowhere, fails on so many levels that it is almost as if the movie was meant as a comedy not a drama. Cages performance is nothing short of terrible and fails to convince or add any real depth to the character, his rivals in the film i.e. the police and the scar faced man not only lack any true malice, but the backstory is never given enough light and Cage simply ends up looking like an idiot that reacts to almost every situation he is faced with in an irrational manner (even for a man with a hair trigger temper). He just looks like a lunatic half the time and as such you simply cant relate to what hes doing. For me the movie spends too much time taking slow arty shots of meaningless scenes and far too little time fleshing out the characters. A misdirected film and another lunatic performance for cage to add to his mantle alongside wicker man. Even making it to the end of the movie without hitting the off button is a struggle.

This has been a very long time since Nicolas Cage gave us a good feature ; since LORD OF WAR and, some years before: LEAVING LAS VEGAS. Besides these two features, he only made garbage stuff. He deserves much better that these craps he was involved in. I still can't explain why he made such choices, it can't be only for the dol. Anyway this film is exactly what I expected from him. He should have made this sort of character since many years now. Why has he waited so long? We Watch here a deep study of the rural countryside of the deep America. Great performances help to enhance this amazing story of a friendship between an ex con and a Young man in his teens. Some poignant sequences for a dark tale, whilst not being depressing. A true gem.

I rented this recently, we watched about an hour of it and with the senseless violence, swearing, and meaningless sex, had to turn it off. We are both adults, but this was pure garbage, without a plot. If you find one, good luck. I do not have a lot more to say so disregard these last few words. I need 10 lines of text here, so here goes, Have you ever reviewed a movie with one word, like AWESOME, or SUCKED ? That should be allowed, simple enough, instead of a spoiler, just tell it like it is. Was it a boring piece of junk, or were you on the edge of your seat the whole 4 hours or whatever? I like a good variety, but really not sure about some of the films like Joe, or August: Osage County. Sure people are dysfunctional, but much of this does not need to be filmed.

Three minutes into this film, the director had already made about a half dozen poor choices. The script is beyond bad. If there was any real drama in this murky, pretentious, clichéd morass of cinematic incompetence it was trying to decide which was worse as you watched, the directing or the God-awful script (one sign of a really bad script is that you can guess exactly what the actors are going to say...as Imdid 100% of the time in this film). Joe shows up at a whorehouse. Joe encounters a barking dog. Joe goes and gets a dog to kill this dog...which did nothing but bark at him a little. Very soon afterward, Joe orders one of the girls to "Blow me." But Joe is "good people." And if you just want to watch this train wreck for Nicholas Cage's supposed amazing performance, don't bother. He could not come remotely close to redeeming this steaming pile of crap.

Joe (2013) Where our children turn when their parents let them down is one of the most troubling areas for fact and fiction both. Nicolas Cage's checkered career doesn't diminish his strong, heartfelt performance here as Joe, leading a group of workers in the deep woods of some Deep South state doing illegal tree killing. But that's just backdrop, because a teenager, Gary, comes along looking for work, seemingly just from some patch of these rural woods or one of the little backwards towns nearby. Joe has issues with violence and alcohol, but he's a truly good person deep down below all the conflicts and bad judgments, and he learns that Gary has an abusive father and troubled family. And he gradually gets involved. As this intersection grows, we learn more about Joe's world in the town, about some other guys who have it out for him, and about his sense of honor. It's that kind of world where government of all kinds, including the police, is considered unnecessary to the point of being bad, and instead people have a kind of independence that is sometimes admirable and sometimes pure belligerence. That's the part of the movie I liked much more than I expected, and was what I took away above all—the portrayal of a kind of life and a kind of people, told with an odd kind of honesty that works. It doesn't just reside there, however. The plot becomes highly dramatic, even sensational, as some of the shifty characters get motivated to get really violent. There is even a point when it gets so hairy for Joe he does something unthinkable until now—he calls the cops. You'll see, it's an odd turning point. So this vengeance and violence make the plot have teeth, I suppose, and it's fine, but I actually sense another movie that didn't get made here that was toned down two steps and had all these elements and yet kept the focus on the real grit. And there's Gary, who is a pretty decent kid somehow (his father is about as bad as fathers can get, but his mom had some influence, I guess). We can finally see how a kid can escape a family horror and move on, while growing up and becoming a decent person, maybe another Joe, which oddly enough the world needs. It's worth watching just for all these things. Give it twenty minutes to develop, and it'll click.

Nicolas Cage more famed for fast moving action packed films shows he can do slow pace too, and this film has the pace of a tortoise on bromide. Slow, boring and with a non-existent plot. You watch the film hoping that something happens, but you have to wait until the end of the film to discover nothing happens, unfortunately the film is nearly two hours long. Set in the deep south of America, a young boy with a violent alcoholic father befriends Cage to work clearing land by poisoning trees. Working with a group of pointless characters whose dialogue never contributes anything to the plot. The film is like a meaningless collections of scenes from a bad soap opera which have been put together in what the makers of the film probably hoped would be a powerful and thought provoking movie, yet ends up in being one of the most boring films of all time. The main thing on my mind while watching Joe was a sense of annoyance at paying £4.99 to watch it on Sky box office. If I hadn't have paid for it, I would never have sat through until the end, and in retrospect, I wish I hadn't … a waste of 117 minutes of my life.

Director David Gordon Green is known for Pineapple Express (2008), All the Real Girls (2003) and George Washington (2000) and makes it his practice to cast his movie extras from locals in the area in which he is shooting his films. In Austin, Texas he found a street person - Gary Poulter - who plays a significant role in this film, Two months after the film was completed Pouter was found dead on the streets of Austin. That sets a tone for the film - very dark, little in the way of redemptive force, but an opportunity for Nicholas Cage and Tye Sheridan to prove their acting chops. Joe Ransom (Nicholas Cage) drops the bottles as quickly as he burned his life. Joe is perhaps irresponsible, but is no less a hard worker. He manages a work team of black men who admire him in a forest where his task is to poison trees so that an outside contractor and come in and rid the woods of bad trees and plant good ones (there is a fine line of parallel to the story here). Joe encounters Gary (Tye Sheridan), a boy of 15 years, and his father, Wade aka G-Daawg (Gary Poulter), an alcoholic good-for-nothing. For Gary, all is not lost; there is still time for him to seek the right path, to escape from the control of damaging his father yet still support his mute sister and pathetic helpless mother. Joe struggles with his past as an ex-con, his alcoholism, his dependency on female sex workers, and attempting of manage his short-fused anger that gets him into trouble all too frequently. Joe takes on Gary, gives him work, lets him use his truck, and in general protects Gary from harm. A town bully/creep Willie-Russell (Ronnie Gene Blevins) has endured abuse from Joe and is stalking him and eventually Gary and G-Dwaag in a revenge twist. How Joe deals with coping with redemption or ruin plays out in the final scenes of this film. The film is unrelentingly dark, both in camera action and in storyline. The only thing that keeps is afloat is the sensitivity of the bilaterally desperately needy relationship between Cage and Sheridan - and they make us care about them.

"You pretend to be asleep, but I know you'd cry if I said the wrong thing." Joe is a powerful and emotional drama that despite being slow grips you thanks to an intense realism and some excellent performances. Many have compared this to last year's MUD perhaps because teenager Tye Sheridan is in both films and they happen to take place in southern America dealing with some trashy characters. I really felt this film was more similar to Jennifer Lawrence's Winter's Bone in mood and tone, since MUD had an underlying romantic theme which this film lacks and you have two young characters that have to face great obstacles in order to sustain their families. With his performance in Joe, Tye Sheridan, has acquired quite an impressive resume despite his young age adding this performance to his work in MUD and The Tree of Life. As the title suggests however, the film benefits from a great lead performance from Cage who plays Joe, a man with a troubled past who gets a chance at redemption when he meets this young kid and becomes a sort of role model for him. This is one of Nicolas Cage's top 5 performances and a return to form for the actor that I grew up loving in the 90's. Perhaps my favorite performance in the film comes from newcomer, Gary Poulter, who plays the abusive alcoholic father. I can't think of a more horrifying villain than the character he portrays in Joe. Director, David Gordon Green, has also had a return to form after his disappointing turns in the comedies The Sitter and Your Highness. He is a very versatile director who received a lot of critical acclaim from his early small indies, George Washington and All the Real Girls, and then he also had success with his first stoner comedy, Pineapple Express. You would never imagine Joe was directed by the same person considering this is such a dark emotional drama. Joe takes place in the wild South lands of Mississippi where we meet Joe Ransom (Nicolas Cage), an ex-con and heavy drinker who is trying to lay low working as a lumberjack. His life takes a turn when he meets a young 15 year old named Gary (Tye Sheridan) who comes to him looking for a job. Gary is the oldest son of a homeless family who suffers abuse from his alcoholic father, Wade (Gary Poulter). Wade spends all the money in booze and beats Gary on a regular basis. Joe's protective instincts come to play when he takes a liking for Joe who he tries to help. Despite having a lot of friends in the small local town, Joe also has made some enemies due to his heavy drinking and constant trouble with the law, and despite how much he tries to restrain himself from hurting others, seeing Gary being constantly abused awakens his anger towards his abusive father. The characters in this film have a lot of depth and the realism with which they are portrayed by the actors is shocking at times. Sheridan gives a similar performance as that of Lawrence in Winter's Bone, Nicolas Cage is outstanding as well in his restrained role, and Poulter is so terrifying that he makes everyone's father look like a saint. The film has a haunting atmosphere and the drama is so rich that it is hard to remain emotionally detached to the story. It is a powerful and honest drama, one of the best from 2014. It's one of those rare emotional character studies that doesn't feel manipulative and never hits a false note. Cage reminds us why he was such a success in the past and I'm glad to see him back in form after a terrible batch of films.

David Gordon Green, who's versatile career has swung from the sublime ('Snow Angels' & 'Undertow) to the completely absurd ('Pineapple Express' & 'Your Highness'), has swung back once again with this adaptation of Larry Brown's bleak novel, 'Joe'. The thriller follows the lives of country drifters surviving on the fringes of modern America's mid-west. The title character, played by Nicolas Cage, is a man with a troubled past and a short temper that has found a respectable - if teetering - balance in life. When he hires a young drifter, played by Tye Sheridan ('The Tree of Life' / 'Mud') as a day-laborer and tries to take the boy under his wing, that balance begins to tip when the boy's vagabond father becomes jealous of his income and his friendship with Joe. This is a film about fighting against your own nature and, though his more serious roles are often overshadowed by his over-the-top gonzo-ness, this is, by far, Cage's most subtle success to date. Don't worry though, he still gives the camera 'crazy-eyes' at least once.