Ryan Gosling - The Slaughter Rule: Chutney!

-Bianca- · 05-06-2006, 05:56 AM

I was going through my PB account this morning and I found the banner I had made for this thread before... and then I couldn't find this thread (must have forgot to create a new one during the downing of FF).

So, yeah, here's the new SR post.

**heaven85** · 05-06-2006, 12:34 PM

Great banner. I forgot about this one. Yeah for you finding it.

-Bianca- · 05-07-2006, 10:46 AM

Quote:

Bitterroot and Ponderosa Pine
by Donald Levit

In their screenplay for The Slaughter Rule, directors Andrew and Alex Smith return to their Montana roots, a place that's hard and hardscrabble, honky-tonk cowboy and cold -- even indoors in winter -- and lonely. But as though Nature’s compensation, there is the high Big Sky, blue, or golden with sunset clouds, shadowing a horizon of buttes that recede and ring immense tablelands, "poems of geology."

As in Norman Maclean’s summertime A River Runs Through It, also about fathers and sons, the land is a strong presence. Its ungodly backdrop dwarfs protagonists and forces people back into themselves -- and either to drink or to the warmth of rough limited contact with a very few others. Both films are beautiful in their stark ways, though some viewers might fail to respond to the deliberate pacing that fits the muted emotions of such isolated, stoic people.

Whereas Redford’s vision of the seventy-year-old academic’s first novella uses cold-river fly fishing as a metaphor for life lessons, the brothers Smith turn instead to rural six-man football. Here, however, the sport is not the overdone Vince Lombardi inspiration trumpeted in an obnoxious Any Given Sunday or the predictable Disney feel-good of Remember the Titans. Rather, football is in its way incidental, for the present film really concerns love and trust, maturing into acceptance and responsibility. "It is impossible to live in this world without being committed," as Coach Gid (David Morse) puts it.

Raised by his sad, boyfriend-hopping mother (Kelly Lynch), Roy (Ryan Gosling) barely knows the father who long ago told him that hard men don’t break: "I didn’t know Mr. Chutney at all well," says Roy at the funeral; "I’m his son." His Blackfoot Indian best friend, Tracy Two Dogs (Eddy Spears), only saw his own father at football games, until he went for cigarettes and never came back; and coach Gideon was left in an orphanage by his loose-living mother. The camaraderie of football -- the overused "bonding" -- and its pure actions of hitting and being hit, should provide release and relief, but things are not so simple.

On the day Blue Springs High School cuts JV football and he is not listed for the Bison varsity, Roy learns that his father has died, possibly a suicide. Gideon Ferguson, who sells late-night newspapers and cares for drunk diabetic Floyd "Studebaker" (David Cale), solicits Roy to quarterback his barnstorming Renegades, and Tracy comes along, into the bargain. Between coach and player there develops a friendship in which the boy holds back a large part of himself, for open rumor brands the older man a sexual "prevert" -- Matthew Shepard’s murder occurred just one state south -- and there are stories of another youngster, in another place, who died. As Roy hesitates, he also begins a second relationship, with Skyla (Clea Duvall), a slightly older barmaid. Unsure of himself, he does things by halves, and the yearning girl buys a bus ticket to leave, for she "thought you were someone else [and doesn’t] like who you’re growing into."

There are no answers to everything -- will the future include Skyla? -- as both emotional and debilitating physical suffering must be borne. Only when Roy is able to act by committing himself to others, do we understand his growth and the significance of the opening sequence of a pleading-eyed deer, caught on barbed wire and dying. The adolescent becomes a man, perhaps a man like his father Nelson, but that is really only another beginning, for the world is not kind and what will come is wisely not spelled out. Like headlights on cars passing other cars and sparse farms on Heartland highways, the lamps that are human souls have crossed, and they may meet again, or they may not.

This movie, with its dialogue so real some is lost and must be inferred and its feel for lost little people and county-western towns, recalls The Last Picture Show. It reminds us of essential problems that confront everyone, whether in great cities or out there in the sticks. Perhaps its guiding insight is the alternative Texas name for the misleading title -- to ease pain, when one team is ahead by too much, the football game ends -- and that is the "Mercy Rule."

(Released by Cowboy Entertainment and rated "R" for language and sexual content.)

http://www.reeltalkreviews.com/brows...=review&id=371

**heaven85** · 05-07-2006, 07:23 PM

Great review. Thanks for posting it.

-Bianca- · 05-09-2006, 08:05 PM

Quote:

Directors: Alex Smith & Andrew Smith, 116 min)

The story opens on a bleak Montana winter day with Roy (Ryan Gosling) saying, "My father told me if I was hard enough, I wouldn't break - he lied." Roy is trying to prove he's hard enough, dealing with the fact that his father just died and he loses the one outlet he has for releasing his anger and frustration - he gets cut from the high school football team. So when Coach Gideon Ferguson (David Morse) offers him a chance to play on his 6-man football team as the quarterback, he jumps at the opportunity. He best friend, Tracy Two Dogs (Eddie Spears), joins him on the Renegades squad and they start winning.

Coach Gideon has a secret past - a boy once died playing on his team, and he's into the "kind of love two men have for each other when their teammates", but won't admit it to anyone (not even himself) that he's gay. Roy sees through his façade, and wants to be his friend, desperately needs a father figure (actually any adult guidance, his stewardess mom (Kelly Lynch) is gone for weeks at a time), but doesn't quite know how to deal with some of the attention he gets from Gideon - it seems to come with strings attached. When Roy meets Skyla (Clea Duvall) and they start to get involved, this threatens the delicate balance between Roy and Gideon and things fall apart - for everybody. His dad really was wrong...

The "slaughter rule" refers to the mercy calling of a football game if one team gets more than 45 points behind. But there is no mercy rule in life.

Sex, alcohol, and the brutality of football - it may seem like a "guy" movie. But the relationship struggles make this accessible to all audiences. It's a little disturbing how the women are treated in this movie - they are all beaten, loved badly, or discarded. The subplot with the diabetic Floyd "Studebaker" (David Cale) is less well refined, but does give Gideon an opportunity to show his compassionate side.

Filmed on location in Montana in sub-zero conditions (love that everybody watches the football games from the comfort of their cars) - it gives the movie a reality that it needs and beautiful backgrounds and sunsets to contrast with the harshness and violence of the real world. You've got to feel sorry for the homecoming queens outside in their spaghetti-strap dresses.

Ryan Gosling turns in another terrific performance as the young man struggling to find himself - he has such a haunted look about him. Keep your eye on this guy - he's got the looks and the talent to be a star. David Morse does a great job as well as the seasoned veteran of many football battles who still is looking for his own identity. It's so sad when he admits he's never been kissed.

http://www.themoviechicks.com/taos20...ghterrule.html

**heaven85** · 05-10-2006, 11:45 PM

Thanks for that. A nice Ryan mention

-Bianca- · 05-11-2006, 11:21 AM

Quote:

THE SLAUGHTER RULE

by Merle Bertrand
(2002-03-10)
2002, Un-rated, 112 minutes

In order for a boy to become a man in many primitive tribes, he must first pass through an initiation ceremony or become a warrior. One American substitute for these brutal rites of passage is high school football. It's the best such path that seems to be available for Roy (Ryan Gosling). Which means that it's a doubly crippling blow when, shortly after the suspected suicide of his estranged father, a local football hero, Roy gets cut from his high school football team.
Enter Gideon (David Morse). A shabby, nearly itinerant newspaper salesman by day, aspiring country crooner by night, Gideon is also a once and hopefully future football coach still living down a mysterious tragedy from years ago. To Gideon's eyes, Roy is a "gamer"; a driven natural athlete with a golden arm whom Gideon desperately needs to quarterback his barnstorming six-man football squad, the Renegades. He eventually wears Roy down despite the latter's suspicions about his new coach's past and, not incidentally, his sexual orientation.

The best thing about "The Slaughter Rule," the feature-length debut from twin brother directors Alex and Andrew Smith, is that the film refuses to succumb to the temptation of a glorious Hollywood feel-good happy ending. There's no miraculous "Renegades rally from thirty points down in the last two minutes to win" nonsense here. The next best thing about the film is how well it captures not only the speed and savageness of six-man football, but the rural, rugged and hard scrabble Montana terrain in which it's played as well.

Unfortunately, although "The Slaughter Rule" manages to avoid the syrupy sentimentality of, say, "Hoosiers," it doesn't quite know how to find its own way. Subplots come and go, winding up either only partially resolved or simply dropped altogether. The brothers Smith, for instance, introduce Roy's requisite romantic interest in the form of the comely bartender Skyla (Clea Duvall), only to allow that subplot to wither with no sense that Roy's learned a thing from it. Similarly, the unfortunately cliched scenes showing Roy's ex-high school teammates as typical jock jerks again add nothing to Roy's evolution except show us that he knows how to get his nose broken in a fight. Even the football sequences, although grittily portraying six-man's fluidity and violence fairly well, don't have any rhythm or sense of continuity. We never get to know Roy's teammates, save for a few cursory scenes with his best friend, which further takes away from any emotional connection we might have with anything to do with the Renegades or their games.

The film is on more solid, if queasy ground when it comes to Gideon. Morse's portrayal vacillates unnervingly between the coach as a compassionate man trying to instill the hard-earned wisdom he's learned while rebuilding his own shattered life on the one hand, and a creepy old NAMBLA member on the other.

Such complexity, of course, is what the evolution from childhood to adulthood -- male or female -- is all about. By film's end, there is a hint that Roy may at last be on his way. It's just that even after watching "The Slaughter Rule," we're not exactly sure how he got there.

http://www.filmthreat.com/index.php?...eviews&Id=2725

**heaven85** · 05-11-2006, 08:20 PM

Yeah!!! Another review!!!!

-Bianca- · 05-13-2006, 09:43 PM

Quote:

"The Slaughter Rule" is an overwrought drama about a small-town football coach with a tortured attraction to high school boys. The movie has a sympathy for the coach's pain, which makes sense. But it also has the typical independent-movie reluctance to pass judgment, which renders it more squeamish than honest. The picture has no trouble admitting that small towns can be cruel and conformist, but it has a hard time facing up to the notion that grown men should keep their hands off boys.

So there's something off about "The Slaughter Rule" to begin with, a poetic spirit and a delicacy that seems inappropriate and faintly ridiculous. Add a slow pace and a screenplay that's constructed as a series of earnest confrontations, and the result is something that would have seemed impossible: A movie that takes sex, pederasty, young love and football and renders them all boring.

In the midst of this wreckage, set on the Montana plains where everyone seems to be miserable, is one salvageable element, the performance of David Morse as the coach. He's both a sweet fellow and the last guy a boy wants to see in the shower. But "The Slaughter Rule" would have been better with Morse not as a coach but as a Catholic priest -- at least then the sympathetic treatment would have taken some guts.

As young Roy, the quarterback who becomes the object of the coach's fascination, Ryan Gosling gives a one-note performance, in which he keeps overworking the two worry wrinkles between his eyebrows. It's a mannerism he needs to get rid of, just as George Clooney got rid of his impulse to keep nodding his head.

Writer-directors Andrew and Alex Smith go for emotional truth, but what they come up with is often silly. For example, there's a scene in which Roy's girlfriend (Clea DuVall) breaks up with him because he has the temerity to ask her to close the door when she uses the bathroom. Apparently, this is meant to suggest that Roy has intimacy issues.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...07/DD40036.DTL

Ouch.

**heaven85** · 05-14-2006, 09:54 PM

That wasn't a great review at all.

Fugu · 07-10-2006, 05:23 AM

help,

someone can help me to find the script for " The Slaughter Rule" ???
please

-Bianca- · 07-10-2006, 08:00 PM

I don't think there is one.

I know where to find Stay's, TNB's, and The Believer's though if you want them...

**heaven85** · 07-10-2006, 11:18 PM

Bianca - let me know. That would be nice to have.

-Bianca- · 09-12-2006, 08:39 PM

Quote:

Friday Night High/Lowlights
By Jeff Haws | Tuesday, September 12, 2006, 06:05 PM

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Looking at the previews for “Friday Night Lights,” the fall’s new TV series based on the 2004 movie, we started to wonder what a list of the 10 best high school football movies ever would look like. Was the series’ namesake the best ever? Which ones might push it for the top spot? Or the most common question we got: “Are there 10?” As your resident movie guru and high schools football writer, I was asked to give my take on which films score a touchdown and which ones barely make it onto the field. Along the way, I’ll answer the most important question: “Yes, there are 10.”

Top 10 All-Time High School Football Movies

[..]

7. The Slaughter Rule (2002): This recent independent film was an impressive writing/directing debut for Andrew and Alex Smith. David Morse and Ryan Gosling are excellent as a high schooler (Gosling) who finds solace in six-man football after the death of his dad, and the coach who he becomes close to (Morse).

Friday Night High/Lowlights | Prep Zone | ajc.com

**heaven85** · 09-13-2006, 07:55 PM

Yay!! In the top 10.


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