The Timber

Though it does not always offer a coherent narrative, I guess it works as what it is--a Western. The stars offer good performances within the narrow range the story allows. The story has some unexpected thrills and has an unhinged quality. It's beautifully filmed. Having spent some time in the Yukon when I was young, I was surprised to find out it was filmed in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. In the end, there is nothing too remarkable, and the plot has too many loose ends that I suspect are the result of working with some capable actors in bit parts, wanting to do more with them. I feel like it could have been improved with some thought and care and that it would have been worthwhile.

This ~73 minute movie (not counting the opening and closing credits) has a fair few scenes and characters that seem irrelevant to the plot and the characters are all very simple and have basically no internal conflicts. They throw in coincidences, mysticism and events to simply pad the running time. The core plot of the movie is a banker trying to get two brothers off their land by tricking them into paying their debt/mortgage by collecting a bounty when it's just a ruse to evict them unfairly because the land is valuable. That plot takes up maybe 10 minutes. The movie gets bogged down heavily in unnecessary side plots and issues, all of which are amazing coincidences and none of which seem important to the plot. There's a father no-one seems to care about positively or negatively that they just kill at the end, a soldier who burns some screen time doing very little and then dies, possibly- psychic dreams, a cannibal wild man and random attackers all seem inconsequential. The only consequence of all that stuff is they seem to be trying to deliver the deep message of the film: random people you don't know are bastards. It's all in these convoluted coincidence driven scenes that I think are meant to be kismet to teach this one brother that really obscure lesson.

In many ways I found this similar Christopher Smith's "Black Death". A good setting but a confusing finished film (and not in a positive Kafkaesque sense!). This may have been driven by a limited budget, but poor editing is also a likely factor. Realism was lacking with little/no explanation for the behaviour of key characters. Everyone seems hostile to the two brothers, but without due reason. The enemies were just "baddies" (all straight up mad or bad with no depth of character) making the whole film unbelievable. The edit (not aided by the dream sequences) made it feel like a set of 10 minute clips stuck together. I like a good western... but this is one to skip over.

In the dead of winter, somewhere in the Northwest 2-brothers, Wyatt (James Ransone) and Samuel (Josh Peck) go bounty hunting for someone who has killed many people. Bringing in this killer will help them save their ranch which is about to go into foreclosure. The killer is their father whom they haven't seen since they were little boys. The clear winners in here are the cinematography and photography. Kudos. If you did nothing else and turned the sound off and just watched the scenery including some really beautiful horses you would be ahead of the game. The story is simple enough, but having 2-people trudge along in hip-high snow tired me out too. I was exhausted. Why were they walking? Well, they lost their cart and their horses. One brother asks Col Rupert Thomas (Mark Caven) their guide and hired gun, "What is the Timber?" The reply was, "it's eventful." Look at The Timber as the BADLANDS. See? So they journey on and things happen and they meet some mountain men who are bent on killing them maybe for the meat as cannibalization was not unheard of in those times in those very harsh winters. Meanwhile the women and a baby left at home are having to deal with the Bank's henchmen who are about to evict them and reclaim land for the bank. Oh, oh! Did the bankers trick the brothers into leaving? You decide. Sometimes in the beginning when the brothers talked to each other, it was difficult to understand what they were saying as they came down with the mumbles. That got better later on. I thought Samuel's name was Daniel because when Wyatt goes looking for him later on in some huge cave, he kept calling out what sounded like: Daniel? Daniel? Daniel? Well that is what it sounded like. Okay, I will get my ears checked. Pretty sure it was…….. Daniel. Pretty sure........... I don't recall the music (Ears again?), and it was the scenery that kept me going. There are some scenes that were tough to watch during the fighting and tortures. I had the FF button at the ready. Make sure you do too. Over all this is a movie you can pass on and miss nothing. But if you like to see a lot of snow all the time, and like watching people lumber along in it, this is for you. Oh, the fighting was done mostly with knives. Hey, they had guns why didn't they use them? No one knows. This was a western, but it wasn't that good a one. It is watchable though. (5/10) Violence: Yes. Sex: No. Nudity: No. Language: Yes, but not too much.

The Timber is a very good film about western drama-adventure life of two brothers. This an intense experience with exciting-heartbreaking moments. Based on powerful choices and regrettable decisions. Actors James Ransone, Elisa Lasowski, Mark Caven really know how to represent their character developments around the nature of this film. The director did a very excellent job! The story was awesome too. A great example of how life is not black and white. As far as films that were overlooked for the best films are concerned, this one tops the list. Brilliantly written, extremely well-acted, and incredibly raw and true, this film is a work of brilliance in the art of film. I love this movie. :)

Though the two brothers are on their way to kill their father they don't seem to suffer any angst over their task. The banker's reason for wanting them out of the way-to claim the oil on their farm-seems to be an afterthought that provides some sense to the plot. The gunslinger who accompanies them proves both ineffective and pointless. The father could be any of three people and an explosion that provides the brothers an opportunity to escape some uncertain but horrible fate is more serendipity than explicable. The story seems to be about nature and the wilderness which belittles the conflict between petty humans, though ultimately it seems as if nature is about to reward the morally superior humans, though there doesn't seem to be anything morally superior about them. All they did was mouth platitudes that their antagonists didn't mouth. I'm glad this film wasn't any longer.

I can only give it a 5 out of 10 for the silly preparation ideas of traveling into deep snow areas of the Yukon. Didn't see much eating and too much drinking for cold winter travel. also for ... The flashbacks or forward hallucination scenes are confusing at best. .... This movie really lacks character building. They try to resolve this shortcoming in the last 10 min. not very successfully though. Nice looking young people if that's your thing. Also, there are some nice winter mountain scenes. Still, it was not my cup of tea. well I see a problem with layout of this review not letting a reasonable spacing of ideas and forcing me to ramble on to create 10 lines that just sort of mush into each other ... Now I know why I don't bother checking the reviews in this site ... I was really just trying to rate a movie that at this time has no rating ... and ... I am only giving it a 5 or 2½ stars depending on your format.

This film took me by surprise. I expected a standard shoot-em-up with no deeper plots or motives as seems to be the norm these days. However The Timber is an exciting, dramatic, and thoughtful adventure movie. By the end you care deeply about these two brothers and their survival. Added to this are two female supporting characters who were very well written, and actually get into the action as well, unlike the majority of films where the women are portrayed as weak, helpless things who can do nothing but wait at home until the danger has passed. How refreshing this was! This is a thinking man's (woman's) adventure movie. Other viewers can move along to the plentiful shallow action films.

Frustratingly incomprehensible. Meh. I don't know why young directors like long, pretentious pauses between phrases in the dialogue. Even more puzzling is why actors of the cell phone & video generation mumble & slur their lines inaudibly with affected Brando- like breathiness. Why is it de rigueur these days to shoot quick unexpected of camera cut sequences of puzzling esoteric views that resemble a Georgia O'Keeffe landscape? After 30 minutes of this kind of desultory visual rambling, one grows catatonic relative to what trickiness will come next...the eyes widen and pinwheel...the mind numbs & wanders off... But it's all damn irritating for those of us who actually expected a good tale, well-told. (All these sophomoric devices seemingly serve to cover up the lack of a good script and the absence of a worthwhile story.) This soporific "western" resembles a film school project more than a work meant for human consumption. Presumptuously pretentious, "The Timber" fails at almost every level that I've come to expect of film, except the yawn quotient.

This movie was pretty interesting and well-shot in some very scenic, snow-covered mountain locations; however, some of the scenes were a little too vague and unclear as to what actually happened. Perhaps the director wanted to "challenge" the audience in an artistic manner...or maybe the producer told the director to cut the time of the film by about thirty minutes; whatever the reason, the end result was a lot of scenes that didn't really make sense. There was a scene in a cave where it looked like someone got killed...but I'm not really sure who or why. There were several scenes that stopped just before the action started, only to show the aftermath later on, leaving the viewer to piece together what had happened. Overall, I still liked the film; it had a talented cast and an interesting plot.