Prince Avalanche

source: Prince Avalanche

For those willing to try something different, you may find some value in this independent film. I thought the movie offered some quirky dialogue, characters, and situations, in its own quiet way. Set in 1988, in the wooded areas of central Texas, near Garland, and not long after the devastating forest fires of the previous year in that section of the state. It's pretty much a two character film with Paul Rudd, making a change from the over-the-top lewd and crude of the Apatow-like movies, playing Alvin, who has left a serious relationship with a woman named Madison to "find himself" in the solitude of his new job in the forest. They still communicate by letter and he sends her money, as well as studying German language tapes so they can eventually re-unite and travel to Germany. Alvin is the head of a two person stripe-crew (painting yellow lines along the roads of Texas) and has recently hired Madison's brother Lance as his assistant. Lance is portrayed by the talented actor Emile Hirsch, and is quite different personality wise from Alvin. He doesn't take the job very seriously, doesn't even like the outdoors, and is always horny. I thought both Rudd and Hirsch performed quite well in their roles. Not everything works here, and sometimes the dialogue between the two seems flat and awkward. However, there's also lots that does work here and the rapport between them, even when they're bickering and arguing can be quite enjoyable. The late actor Lance Legault also adds some good comic relief in his role of a grizzled truck driver traveling the roads that Alvin and Lance are working. One thing I particularly liked in the movie was the atmospherics and solitude allowed by the versatile director and writer David Gordon Green (Snow Angels, Pineapple Express) to just leisurely unravel at its own pace. It's unusual in today's film. It's not for everyone, but for those with the patience there can be definite rewards here.

Contains spoiler: How in the world did this awful movie get good reviews? I kept waiting for it to go somewhere, but it never did. I wasn't looking for an "action" movie but this one almost put me to sleep. I regret wasting my time with this loser. Terrible acting as well. The most "action" was when the two boring characters (state of Texas employees) got drunk and threw thousands of dollars worth of state-owned equipment into a creek. This not only polluted the creek, but there was shown absolutely no consequences for their vandalism. During this drunken episode, instead of painting yellow stripes (their job) they painted yellow undulating lines all over the road and an outline of the "kid's" body as he lay in the road. This was never shown again, like it never happened. Ridiculous also was that the "kid" of the two got a 49-year-old woman pregnant. Get real!

It's 1988 and wildfires have ravaged the Texas countryside. Alvin (Paul Rudd) took a job to paint the lines on the road to get away from the world. He takes his girlfriend's slacker brother Lance (Emile Hirsch) along for the job. Alvin doesn't see much in the sex obsessed Lance, and Lance is chaffing at the isolation. This is a very small indie with basically the two main actors in most of the scenes. These are two good actors with a lot of sex talk, relationship struggle, and an aimless story. There are a couple of chuckles and a few interesting scenes. However they are too few and far between. It doesn't have the energy of a road movie or the poignancy of a relationship story. The last third turns up the heat, but it quickly becomes silly. I think there is a good half-movie here. The rest of this doesn't have enough energy. It's very subdue.

If two dudes quarrel in the woods ... do they make a sound? Director David Gordon Green has graciously stepped back from making underachieving R-rated comedies to give us what could end up amounting to an underachieving R-rated comedy, but in truth offers a good deal more. Based on a story by Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurosson, "Prince Avalanche" follows two men doing road repair work in the wildfire-ravaged Texas wilderness in the summer of 1988. Alvin (Paul Rudd) has hired his girlfriend's brother, Lance (Emile Hirsch) to work alongside him hammering in reflector posts and painting traffic lines. The two are archetypal opposites: Alvin the focused, organized and wiser character and Lance the immature, unskilled free- wheeler. Their naturally tenuous relationship goes through ups and downs and unsurprisingly, the two find common ground in their opposite approaches and perspectives. The David Gordon Green who directs this film recalls the one who made "All the Real Girls" and "Snow Angels," not the one appeared to steal his name and made "Pineapple Express," "Your Highness" and "The Sitter." One could argue it's a middle ground offering between Green's two extremes because of the film's comic angle, but the pace and style has more Terrence Malick influence than anything else and the humor isn't written in so much as it emerges organically from the back-and-forth of the performances. With a combination of nature establishing shots, the camera zooming down a road and a stirring soundtrack from Austin-based post-rockers Explosions in the Sky (a nice local touch), "Avalanche" exudes indie-ness. It's quirky, comically exaggerated, poignantly human and Green tells it in a logical but atypical narrative structure. The film is a voice-over narrator away from being so independent it wouldn't be independent anymore. Half of "Prince Avalanche" focuses on setting a reflective tone through visuals, while the other half examines these characters through their dialogue with one another. Much of the script consists of conversations that simultaneously reveal their utter simplicity as well as their true humanity. The story ultimately mediates on notions of loneliness and our need for companionship in both platonic and non-platonic forms. Rudd and Hirsch make all the comedy click, though Green has a way of framing certain shots that bring out the humor in seemingly ordinary situations. Both actors are on top of their game -- few can strike a balance between comedy and honesty like Rudd and "Avalanche" is an ideal showcase for that talent. Hirsch, meanwhile, continues to offer up evidence why he's grossly underrated. "Prince Avalanche" tries to find that sweet spot between comedy and relationship drama, and though it strikes a few resonant chords emotionally speaking, it's not nearly as fulfilling or powerful as Green's poetic imagery suggests that it desires to be. It has a bit too much fun reveling in its weirdness and goofy, innocent man-child characters, but on the flip side, how many films with goofy, innocent man-child characters even manage to achieve this level of thoughtfulness? ~Steven C Thanks for reading! Visit moviemusereviews.com for more

You hate to give a low review but this just drags on with lame bromance discussions. So far 45 minutes in and it keeps getting worse. The high scores for this flick must be from friends and families. Long boring nature shots and frying of squirrel are the exciting parts. Sun drags to the horizon in sunset...guy walks into stream in swim trunks and boots, sits n water. Closeup of eyeball with hair dangling. Man paints shoes traffic line yellow. Guy gets dear John letter from sister of other man working with him. I' m surprised they didn't share Maxie pads! They get drunk and dump their working tools in the reveine. They want you to leave 10 line. That's five ones longer than the story. Smart boys sleep in tent with kerosene lamp burning, in a closed tent and don't even wake up with a headache.

I took this DVD out from my library so I can at least say I didn't waste any money on it's purchase(other than my taxes). Two men in the Texas back country get jobs painting stripes on a road. That's about as exciting as it gets. What we're told on the cover is that two men of very different backgrounds and sensibilities bond in this job. What I saw were two fairly unlikable guys who share some misery with each other. There's no journey of self-discovery, no real humor other than a strange drunken truck driver that appears a few times during the film. The only bonding I could see was done with a large helping of alcohol along with a pointless destruction of a large portion of their equipment (yet it all gets packed neatly back in the jeep at the end??). Just a lot of empty, meandering dialogue as you would expect from two people with nothing in common. I was really hoping that at least someone would say a few witty things but it just drifts off to nothing, leaving us stranded as viewers in the wilderness.

While I'm not aware of the source material (or their existed one before the script evolved), this very much feels like a play. Or at least could be a play. Which is neither a bad or a good thing in itself. But the movie lacks something, which Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch can not compensate for: Essence. It's neither overly smart nor is it philosophical to an extent where you have to think about life or other things. That in itself is not a crime either. But it makes watching two men in woods talking not something most people will care about. Or would want to watch. Of course there is a story, but even that is predictable. And the "differences" between the two characters are not worth mentioning. Still while the actors cannot save the day as I said, they make it at least bearable (no pun intended)

Whenever I see a film so sparsely populated with cinematic oomph as this utterly unnecessary film, I often wonder what it must have looked like on paper. Because, between the shots of back roads, leaves and the odd insect, this bland and boring two-hander sports some of the most colourless dialogue you'll hear outside of a talking clock. Those expecting another comedic character from the normally-reliable Paul Rudd will be severely disappointed because his role here as the mildly neurotic road worker is as bland as a sheet of glass. While defenders of the film will no doubt point up the fact that its about two normal guys doing a boring job, I rather think its lack of charm may have been due to a poor translation of the Swedish original, 'Either Way', by the writer, Sigursson. Either way, it's a flop. Minus points for the annoying hipster soundtrack.

"You tried kill yourself by jumping off a 12 foot cliff?" (Lance to Alvin) I'm a sucker for minimalism and absurdism, the kind Samuel Beckett and Jerry Seinfeld make their own: terse dialogue about nothing that somehow elicits humor and becomes something deeper with thoughts about life, loss, and hope. Writer-director David Gordon Green has crafted a simple bromatic morality tale of two guys painting road lines in 1988 after a forest fire near Austin, Texas. The purged, scorched landscape of the ravaged but beautiful Bastrop State Park serves as metaphor for the men/boys' cleansing journey marching toward a renewed life. One critic calls it "broken people in a broken forest." The larger concerns of the film, which is episodic with love and loss overlaying the quotidian activities of painting road lines, are manifold: In Alvin's (Paul Rudd) case, how can he keep his lover, Madison, when he is absent and really has little to offer? In Lance's (EmileHirsch) life, how can he mature enough to deal with the heartbreak his sister is causing Alvin by breaking up with him. Alvin and Lance's conversation lightly brushes the issue of their relationship with women, but in simple lives, this issue is grand and well accounted for by Green's spare dialogue: "Can we enjoy the silence?" As in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, where the characters are trying "to hold the terrible silence at bay," nothing like God or illumination is arriving, just an old man (Lance LeGault) driving a truck with some moonshine and pithy life advice. As the road lines and the drink proliferate, issues for the three men emerge having to do with their relationships with women. The ingenious part is to make what the truck driver says and does echo the very heart of the conflicts with the two line painters. So Prince Avalanche (a title Green admits makes little sense but could reflect the absurdist atmosphere, wherein they are lords of chaos at best) is also about nothing because nothing is happening while life-defining relationships are lying underneath. As with Hemingway, the spare story asks you to consider if the bell is tolling for just these three loners, or is it tolling for you, too? You don't need to be a Prince who causes Avalanches to see that the issues of love and women do amount to a hill of beans for each little male life. Simplicity trumps complexity once again.