Playground is much more clear-cut: we can only recoil in horror. It’s an excess of rationalization that feels like overkill but that tells us little. It also lacks precisely what made Östlund’s film so uncomfortable—the fact that we could never entirely be sure whether we were intended to identify with Play’s victims, or its bullies, or whether we could only adopt the position of adult bystanders unable, or unwilling, to intervene. Prior to its premiere, the film won 'Best Narrative Feature Film' at the San Diego Film Awards. The West Side playground, bounded by Ninth and 10th Avenues and 45th and 46th Streets, will be named Curtis Park in honor of members of the family of Mrs. Cary's late husband, Melbert. Whether or not we can always say exactly why, it can feel grossly intrusive or otherwise improper to reconstruct real episodes of sexual violence or of genocide; in the case of depictions of the Holocaust, it takes a pitilessly audacious film such as Son of Saul to rethink the question. Enter now a movie titled Playground, aka Plac Zabaw, that comes from the mind of Polish Writer/Director Bartosz M. Kowalski (The Red Spider 2006, A Dream in the Making 2012). In the lead-up to the final killing, Kowalski lays on some ominous atmospheric music, presaging the distant train sounds in the climactic sequence; this feels superfluous and deeply manipulative. I’ve seen walkouts at festivals before, for all kinds of different reasons—boredom, bemusement, incomprehension—and they’re usually pretty much the same. But what troubles me most about the final scene is the very fact that it’s done with the absolute distanciation we think of as Haneke-esque. The facts of the Bulger murder pretty much correspond to what we see in Playground, and Kowalski’s occasional use of CCTV footage seems to underline the allusion. When the boys terrorise Gabrysia, the handheld camera used throughout the film gets hyper-animated; there are fast cuts, drawing us into the horror of the event, as experienced by the girl, or perhaps the thrill of it, as felt by the boys. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices I thought of Ulrich Seidl because the Gabrysia sequence reminded me of the Austrian filmmaker’s acidic satirical stance in his fictions. The action depicted in the final section feels inexorable, and makes for intensely unpleasant watching. Unless, that is, we protest by getting up and leaving, refusing to be complicit. It’s understandable that people might want to leave a film rather than sit and feel their sensibilities assaulted: a colleague of mine quite reasonably decided to skip out on most of Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, feeling that the use of the fire extinguisher in the opening sequence was as much as he needed to see. In my view, it’s not a goal that he persuasively achieves. on The film’s final image is a two-shot of the boy murderers sitting side by side, blank-faced, numbed, looking not so much shattered by what they’ve done as just vaguely wiped out. Ronald McDonald Playground Slaughter Turned The Mascot Into A Slasher. The film isn’t nearly as overtly sophisticated as Playground, and its moral perspective is more conventional: punishment at last comes for one of the boys involved. It is hard to be objective here without the feeling of morality overcoming the senses of the body, or feeling the pain of loss for the family who had suffered at the hands of two kids. An older girl gives her a brisk lesson on how to chat up a boy; she’s not Gabrysia’s friend, however, but has been paid for her help. We can barely see his face at this distance, but we can tell that he’s being dragged along forcibly. Although, to be fair, with a great cast, some wonderful camerawork, and strong direction from Kowalski, CrypticRock gives Playground 2 out of 5 stars. One thing which “Playground” has in common with a considerable number of other films at San Sebastian is a portrait of a huge chasm between authority and the young. Directed by William Fruet. Released on VOD on December 8, 2017 through Uncork’d Entertainment, Playground re-tells, and reminds many who have suffered, the real-life death of a three-year-old child at the hands of two young school boys back … Playground starts off strongly, introducing three characters as they ready for their last day of school before Summer Vacation starts. Not Rated | 2h 31min | Thriller | 13 October 2017 (USA) 1:01 | Trailer. There is never a notion that these two are going to kill a kid, but Kowalski seemed to have thought there was—somewhere in his script. In one lengthy scene, a group of teenage boys brutalize a drunken boy in a park at night. Serious and ambitious though its aspirations are, Playground leaves us feeling much the same—and none the wiser. September 26, 2016. Kowalski’s film, however, is not entirely “objective,” if you can call Haneke’s approach that; at times, he brings something more impressionistic to bear. She now lives in Bray, County Wicklow with her partner and their little girl. It officially premiered on October 12, 2017 at the Reading Cinemas Town Square in Clairemont, California. The film's plot revolves around a woman who believes that she lost her son in a plane crash 14 months earlier, only to wake up one morning and be told that she never had a son. ". Math video teaches students how to find the area of a trapezoid. Look what we have to deal with now, it seems to say: increasingly brutal video games, social media, revenge porn, the rise of the profit motive, the oversexualization of children. As Szymek and Czarek go about their day, they arrive at a mall, where they walk away with an unattended three-year-old child, taking this kid to a railroad track where they brutally kill him. A thrilling fable of five vastly separate inner-city lives who struggle against their limitations in an interlocking tale assembled by a dark orchestrator It is the theme for the film A League of Their Own, which starred Madonna, and portrayed a fictionalized account of the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.Madonna was asked to record a song for the film… This is done all in one take, the camera many, many feet away, and one quick time-lapse fade where the real child becomes either CGI, or a mechanized doll. Playground has its moments of greatness—wonderful cinematography; amazing set-designs; awesome actors, throughout—but as the movie progresses, it makes one to wonder what the point ever was of the first 70 minutes. 5 VIDEOS | 145 IMAGES. Plenty of people, however, stayed for what little remained of the film—including a very angry woman who kept shouting “¡Lamentable!” after the lights came up. A certain scene, at the end of Bartosz M. Kowalski’s drama, caused a sudden horrified mass surge as people leapt from their seats and made for the doors. Now the film gets impressionistic, Kowalski dropping the cold, detached observational style largely used till now. There’s a gradual trickle of exits, sometimes speeding up as a film goes on, because one departure encourages the waverers until, there being safety in numbers, it’s only the truly courageous, committed, or simply inert who choose to stick around. The detachment ostensibly asks us to bear witness; but what we end up witnessing is only the sophistication of the filmmaking. As the boys stop near a railway line, we see the child struggle to get away, and we hear his whimpers, deep in the mix; the subtlety of the sound design itself makes it all more painful, so acutely unsettling is the distant sound of the boy’s suffering, and the detachment it enforces on us as observers. How YouTube has become the Pedophile’s Playground. The first, “Gabrysia,” shows a 12-year-old girl (Michalina Swistun) in her parents’ glacially marbled, coldly luxurious upper-middle-class home, getting ready for school and experimentally putting on lipstick with solemn determination. Later in the same scene—shot in a single extended take—a further intensification of the already horrific action caused a second wave to jump up and go. The Playground is a 2017 American thriller film directed by Edreace Purmul. There are plenty of troubling issues in Playground that will no doubt fuel further discussions of the film. They look at a video-game store, advertising something called Flames of War (there is in fact a board game of that name, but presumably that’s not what’s represented here). We follow Szymek to school, in a sequence overlapping with the previous episode; everything happens in the course of a single day, the last of the school year. In the story, Charles Underhill is a widower who will do anything to protect his young son Jim from the horrors of the playground a playground which he and the boy pass by daily and the tumult of which, the activity, brings back to Charles the anguish There are many variations; most forms have no teams, scores, or equipment. Jesús allows us to understand young male violence; Playground, conversely, coldly presents violence to us in a way that doesn’t get us very far. The real question is why anyone would want to re-enact such a thing, period. The Playground is a thrilling adaptation of ancient folklore depicted through a modern fable of five vastly separate inner-city lives. By Katherine Harrington, Contributing Writer. Playground is about children’s cruelty to children, and specifically about the violence witnessed in the long penultimate shot, in which two teenagers batter a young boy to death. What’s more, we feel we’re captive witnesses watching it all from at a distance, placed in the position of forensic observers of an atrocity we have no power to stop. To that end, after kidnapping Melinda May and connected her to the Framework, he and Aida successfully used a LMD of May, which was late… Point made—and none too subtly. Jonathan Romney The … Glaring intently at the camera, Gabrysia has a hard, serious face, and an intensity that initially comes across as menacing; together with her tightly buttoned white school garb, this makes us fear the worst about her nature. There was none. Maybe this reaction of ire is what Kowalski begged from his audience. Well, how far would someone go to make a movie about a real-life incident that was as horrific then as it is today? Actually the journey of most of the characters to this place in Bray is never fully explained. For shame. The elegant multi-texturing of the sound mix, giving us the boy’s cries at a distance, makes them all the more distressing. Her first novel, With My Lazy Eye, won her the Sunday Independent Best Irish Newcomer of the Year Award. We know that Kowalski is not glamorizing, or even dramatizing, which he seems to do in the scene of Gabrysia’s ordeal; in the murder scene, he’s de-dramatizing, simply insisting that we look. Although, this is not the case; for as the story keeps going, Gabrysia announces to her crush—Szymek!—how she feels, doing so in a dilapidated building known as The Ruins. Section three introduces Czarek (Przemek Balinski), a handsome blond lad first seen staring blandly at a crying baby in a cot; we then see him put upon by his mother and older brother. Apparently, during a screening of Playground, people in the audience removed themselves from the theatre after watching the long-winded ending. YouTube is quickly becoming the most unsafe place for your children to be. Yet this very detachment that in theory should make the final scene so rigorously demystificatory makes it all the more unpalatable: Kowalski shows at a distance, seemingly without dramatic rhetoric, and yet the dramatic rhetoric is there, only subtly hidden. The problem is not that Playground doesn’t explain—it’s not obliged to—but that it over-explains, offers too many possible causes for the boys’ violence, most of them of a highly conventional kind. <span data-mce-type=”bookmark” style=”display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span> © Copyright Cryptic Rock 2020 – All Rights Reserved – User Login Website Design by Anthony Idi. A caring father, deeply traumatized by the constant bullying he suffered as a child at the local playground, is forced by his sister to face his demons and take his little boy to the same playground. By The penultimate shot is a slow burner. This could be said for anyone who had to endure such an atrocious on-screen exploitation of a parents’ nightmare. The boys—inevitably, it seems, in a film about troubled youth—then visit a shopping mall, the same one that we’ve glimpsed briefly in CCTV shots at the start. The Playground. 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