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Locke
Drama / English / 2013
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Locke is a lot like the movie, Buried.
And considering how much I hated Buried, that's easily the worst thing I can say about this movie.
Both movies are an exercise in minimalism to the extreme where the central character is confined to a small space and the majority of drama unfolds through the exchange of phone calls.
However where Buried was a pointless, meaningless, stupid attempt to stuff Ryan Reynolds in a box, spit in his face, take a **** on his porch, and have sex on his casket over the course of an hour and a half, Locke takes an equal amount of time to make me care.
Locke
Drama / English / 2013
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Sexy Celebrity's Metalheads Song Tournament:
Omnizoa's EDM Song Tournament:
wildboy's WHAT IS YOUR BEST MIND BOGGLING MOVIE??:
Well now just look at what you've done! You've forced my hand Derek!
I HAVE to watch your favorite movie!
I HAVE NO CHOICE!</foreshadowing>
Originally Posted by Omnizoa
Ironically, of everybody's original lists, I think I liked Derek's best.
Originally Posted by CiCi
I think we have similar tastes Sexy, because it's quite often us two voting for one song, and Omni & Derek voting for the other one
Originally Posted by Omnizoa
I've seen all of these, but the only one I really liked was The Butterfly Effect.
Originally Posted by Derek Vinyard
my favorite of them all Glad you like it
I HAVE to watch your favorite movie!
I HAVE NO CHOICE!</foreshadowing>
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"D'you know in fact, I would like to take a ****ing shovel and dig you up out of the ****ing ground and make you watch me tonight. I would pull open your eyes and kick the mud and worms and shit out of your ****ing ears just for the duration of this journey. Because it's me driving. Me. Not you. And unlike you I will drive straight to the place where I should be. And I'll be there to take care of my... take care of my ****up."
Locke is a lot like the movie, Buried.
And considering how much I hated Buried, that's easily the worst thing I can say about this movie.
Both movies are an exercise in minimalism to the extreme where the central character is confined to a small space and the majority of drama unfolds through the exchange of phone calls.
However where Buried was a pointless, meaningless, stupid attempt to stuff Ryan Reynolds in a box, spit in his face, take a **** on his porch, and have sex on his casket over the course of an hour and a half, Locke takes an equal amount of time to make me care.
Locke is a nice guy. Even though we barely venture outside his car and never see him speak to anybody face to face, our impression of him is built not just on the sneaky exposition that holds him up as a hard worker at his job, but largely on how he interacts with people over the phone.
He's pleasant, he's calm, and he has every reason not to be.
He bails on the advent of the biggest job of his career to go attend the birth of a baby of a woman he had a one-night fling with. During his drive to the hospital he tries his best to break the news to his employer and wife, Katrina, while also attempting to maintain the peace amidst Bethan, the mother-to-be, and his co-worker, Donal, who he leaves the majority of his work.
Far less important than what actually happens in the movie is why anything happens in the movie. And why anything happens in the movie is simply that Locke is a brutally honest guy.
Say what you will about his "cheating" in the first place, this movie is his counter-argument. The point is he's trying to do the right thing. Even when he gets fired from his job, he still tries to keep the cement project on track. Even when his wife 'kicks him out', he never falters in his barely calm demeanor. Sure he freaks, and it's thanks to Tom Hardy's performance that I buy that any of this actually affects him despite the facade of a rational mediator, but it's never in response to people he's talking with. They freak out on him, and he just takes it all on the chin.
Why is he doing this? Because he doesn't want to be like his dad.
I CAN RELATE TO THAT DAMMIT.
He regularly rants at his dad who he pretends is in the backseat and through that, despite initially sounding like fairly transparent exposition, really best serves, more than any other dialog, to cement (no pun intended) Locke as a righteous character.
It's all out of guilt, not out of love for the other woman, he tells her this repeatedly, and I appreciate an absence of white lies for once. JUST BE HONEST! Reality hurts, sure, but it's better than deceit!
And this element seems prevalent throughout the movie, especially when he struggles to reconcile his wife who goes HARDCORE MONOGAMY SYNDROME.
I HATE Monogamy Syndrome, and for the first time ever, I feel like something I'm watching agrees with me. This movie could easily be presented as Locke's punishment for his indiscretions, but it comes across far more clearly as a tragedy. Locke's a noble character, and his intentions are nothing but for the best, and yet despite his plain efforts to articulate himself and make things right, he drives heedlessly into an assault of
gimme a minute
Wow, that was surreal. I don't think I've ever broken up AFTER watching a movie before.
...well, I guess you could say this movie hits kinda close to home for me.
****! This totally threw off my groove! COMEDY! Let's get some COMEDY in here!
He's pleasant, he's calm, and he has every reason not to be.
He bails on the advent of the biggest job of his career to go attend the birth of a baby of a woman he had a one-night fling with. During his drive to the hospital he tries his best to break the news to his employer and wife, Katrina, while also attempting to maintain the peace amidst Bethan, the mother-to-be, and his co-worker, Donal, who he leaves the majority of his work.
Far less important than what actually happens in the movie is why anything happens in the movie. And why anything happens in the movie is simply that Locke is a brutally honest guy.
Say what you will about his "cheating" in the first place, this movie is his counter-argument. The point is he's trying to do the right thing. Even when he gets fired from his job, he still tries to keep the cement project on track. Even when his wife 'kicks him out', he never falters in his barely calm demeanor. Sure he freaks, and it's thanks to Tom Hardy's performance that I buy that any of this actually affects him despite the facade of a rational mediator, but it's never in response to people he's talking with. They freak out on him, and he just takes it all on the chin.
Why is he doing this? Because he doesn't want to be like his dad.
I CAN RELATE TO THAT DAMMIT.
He regularly rants at his dad who he pretends is in the backseat and through that, despite initially sounding like fairly transparent exposition, really best serves, more than any other dialog, to cement (no pun intended) Locke as a righteous character.
It's all out of guilt, not out of love for the other woman, he tells her this repeatedly, and I appreciate an absence of white lies for once. JUST BE HONEST! Reality hurts, sure, but it's better than deceit!
And this element seems prevalent throughout the movie, especially when he struggles to reconcile his wife who goes HARDCORE MONOGAMY SYNDROME.
I HATE Monogamy Syndrome, and for the first time ever, I feel like something I'm watching agrees with me. This movie could easily be presented as Locke's punishment for his indiscretions, but it comes across far more clearly as a tragedy. Locke's a noble character, and his intentions are nothing but for the best, and yet despite his plain efforts to articulate himself and make things right, he drives heedlessly into an assault of
gimme a minute
...well, I guess you could say this movie hits kinda close to home for me.
****! This totally threw off my groove! COMEDY! Let's get some COMEDY in here!
Alright, let's just tally up all the strikes I can possibly think of against this movie.
Ummmm...
1.) Hot Dogs.
2.) Also, they totally mismarketed this movie as a thriller.
Thanks, The Telegraph. Locke's a thriller the same way Buried's a "masterclass in invention and surprise."
The minimalist setting in Buried helped to impose a degree of claustrophobia which does nothing for this movie other than make me bored with the same imagery (besides, if I wanted claustrophobia, I'd watch Crawl or Die).
What else...?
3.) I don't think we got any resolution on the cement pouring. That cement **** was way important dood, like seriously, did it work out? Did I miss a line? I think Locke just stopped taking Donal's calls.
4.) What was the purpose of the game he was missing out on? I get that it ties him to his children in some way, but the last call we get regarding it doesn't seem to emphasize anything that isn't already apparent. Besides, it's a lot of dialog involving players I don't know about playing a sport I don't care about on a TV I never see.
5.) The music could have been a bit stronger. It's largely absent throughout the movie and I would have appreciated it during certain... "scenes". Maybe they left it out because
6.) People on the phone are difficult to discern past a combination of low volume, audio filtering, and accents. I got the vast majority of what was said at least.
EEEEEEGGGGGHHHHH......
I can't think of anything else offhand. That's the problem with minimalism, there's only so much you can criticize.
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome]
*I was gonna give it a 4/5 when I started typing this, but I think it's only fair to give full marks to anything that engages me emotionally like this.
REWATCH UPDATE 5/22/2022:
Locke is one of the rare few movies I've not only given a 5 out of 5, but it is one of the even rarer movies where I gave it that score after a blind viewing, and it is one of the rarest of possible movies to make me cry. Only three other movies can attest to that; Ink, Titanic, and believe it or not, Bicentennial Man.
All three of these movies, however, during at least one scene dwell heavily on the theme of "loss over time", which is, honestly, probably my biggest weak spot when it comes to any story.
...
I'm going to have to take a moment because for whatever reason as I type this, I'm having a moment again.
...
It is very strange that during the movie, or even during the credits, I don't feel these emotions, but only once I've completely closed out of the window, loaded up this page and begun typing what I feel and why I'm feeling it does it really hit me. Again.
And for a good moment there I was genuinely convinced this movie hadn't got me again, ****.
Ummmm...
1.) Hot Dogs.
2.) Also, they totally mismarketed this movie as a thriller.
Thanks, The Telegraph. Locke's a thriller the same way Buried's a "masterclass in invention and surprise."
The minimalist setting in Buried helped to impose a degree of claustrophobia which does nothing for this movie other than make me bored with the same imagery (besides, if I wanted claustrophobia, I'd watch Crawl or Die).
What else...?
3.) I don't think we got any resolution on the cement pouring. That cement **** was way important dood, like seriously, did it work out? Did I miss a line? I think Locke just stopped taking Donal's calls.
4.) What was the purpose of the game he was missing out on? I get that it ties him to his children in some way, but the last call we get regarding it doesn't seem to emphasize anything that isn't already apparent. Besides, it's a lot of dialog involving players I don't know about playing a sport I don't care about on a TV I never see.
5.) The music could have been a bit stronger. It's largely absent throughout the movie and I would have appreciated it during certain... "scenes". Maybe they left it out because
6.) People on the phone are difficult to discern past a combination of low volume, audio filtering, and accents. I got the vast majority of what was said at least.
EEEEEEGGGGGHHHHH......
I can't think of anything else offhand. That's the problem with minimalism, there's only so much you can criticize.
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome]
*I was gonna give it a 4/5 when I started typing this, but I think it's only fair to give full marks to anything that engages me emotionally like this.
REWATCH UPDATE 5/22/2022:
Locke is one of the rare few movies I've not only given a 5 out of 5, but it is one of the even rarer movies where I gave it that score after a blind viewing, and it is one of the rarest of possible movies to make me cry. Only three other movies can attest to that; Ink, Titanic, and believe it or not, Bicentennial Man.
All three of these movies, however, during at least one scene dwell heavily on the theme of "loss over time", which is, honestly, probably my biggest weak spot when it comes to any story.
...
I'm going to have to take a moment because for whatever reason as I type this, I'm having a moment again.
...
It is very strange that during the movie, or even during the credits, I don't feel these emotions, but only once I've completely closed out of the window, loaded up this page and begun typing what I feel and why I'm feeling it does it really hit me. Again.
And for a good moment there I was genuinely convinced this movie hadn't got me again, ****.
What I was going to say was that Locke doesn't really have that theme going for it. Instead I think this movie really just hits me for personal reasons.
Like, I can't relate to marriage, I can't relate to a construction job, I can't relate to wanting to come home to sausages, and I can't relate to giving a single **** about any kind of sport at all...
But Locke's character hits home. He's brutally honest "to a fault", and he tries so hard to break bad news gently, but you can tell he's probably spent a good deal of his life being walked over.
The one motivation that he doesn't tell anyone is his personal hatred for his dad. He desperately wants to show him up in his own mind, even though he's dead, and there's no one to compare them but himself. He loathes that he was ever genetically related to him and it hangs like a shadow over his head; the threat that he could be a failure by the same standard he judged his father.
He wants to be a good person, unlike the bad person his dad was, so upon learning that he royally ****ed up, he stomps the breaks as hard as he can to put it right. But that jeopardizes his job. And it jeopardizes his family. And so, still trying to prove a point to himself, he tries as hard as he can not to abandon his family or his job in addition to the girl he's trying not to abandon.
The point I'm getting at is that Locke suffers for doing what he thinks is the morally right thing to do, which more often than not is a conflict not often explored in movies. There's good guys versus bad guys, tragic deaths of heroes and all that, but in this case Locke's biggest enemy is his himself, we're watching him wrestle with the consequences of choices he made, and he's aware these are consequences for the choices he made, and he hates himself for that. It's very humanizing and relatable.
OVERALL, stepping back a moment, and once again attempting to assess this movie objectively; engaging though it is, this movie is very not visually stimulating. It's a lot of panning from one corner of the car to the next, a lot of superimposed traffic shots, a lot of out-of-focus street lights. This would be a terrible watch if the narrative didn't pull me in. The music also isn't terribly strong though it is appropriately present and absent where it feels it ought to be.
Part of the appeal for a movie like this, for me at least, is seeing the character break down over time, I like that kind of psychological torture (I'm a sick ****). But we never really see him snap and instead the movie ends sort of anti-climatically with the news that the baby was born... and that he'll keep driving. Appropriate, but this is conveyed less by what feels like an organic climax to the movie and instead by a swelling score and sudden and unusual increase in out-of-the-car shots.
Part of the difficulty for the sort of character's development is also the fact that he's trying to play it cool, that he's looking for a "practical way forward", but chips in the facade don't really appear so clearly as you might hope. The first big reveal of the movie is simply learning that he cheated on his wife months ago and they're giving birth, the second big reveal is that he's going to her out of spite for his dead dad.
The scenes in which he curses out his dad in the rearview mirror serve both to realistically establish his motivations, but also to exposit on his background, that certain things have happened to him and he's been carrying that pain for his entire life.
I think these scenes are enlightening, but the third time it happens I'm having a little bit of a harder time buying it. We've now seen him shift back and forth between calm and professional Locke to "I want to dig you out of the ****ing ground and make you listen" enough times that it just feels a bit weird to once again hear him launch into third round of swearing at the backseat.
Finally, unlike the above movies I mention (excepting Bicentennial Man which I haven't seen in FOREVER), it's pretty difficult to say I "enjoyed" watching this movie. I consider it a good movie in terms of accomplishing what it set out to do, and evoking the feelings it was supposed to evoke, ****, it's got me to cry twice now, so it's clearly working. BUT, it's not quite the experience I normally appreciate.
In Ink there's the music, there's the aesthetic, there are the themes, there's even brief humor, the dynamic between characters in interesting, and it successfully tugs on my heartstrings multiple times thoughout it's length. Titanic is a bit different; I'm not so sold on the romantic aspect of the movie, but I'm sympathetic enough to the characters, and I'm able to put myself in the movie to live through the ship sinking vicariously, and it's an exciting and horrifying experience.
Locke doesn't really have any of that, it's really just a picture into the isolated torment of one guy and his detached conversations through the phone in his car. Movie's not really exciting, it's not fun, it's not pleasant to look at, it's not intellectually stimulating like a drama like 12 Angry Men might be... It's just kind of there, and my emotional experience is more of a Fridge Logic moment, than a direct feeling the movie is impressing on me.
Still, I have difficulty not rating this well, but I will be docking my score.
Final Verdict: [Very Good]
Like, I can't relate to marriage, I can't relate to a construction job, I can't relate to wanting to come home to sausages, and I can't relate to giving a single **** about any kind of sport at all...
But Locke's character hits home. He's brutally honest "to a fault", and he tries so hard to break bad news gently, but you can tell he's probably spent a good deal of his life being walked over.
The one motivation that he doesn't tell anyone is his personal hatred for his dad. He desperately wants to show him up in his own mind, even though he's dead, and there's no one to compare them but himself. He loathes that he was ever genetically related to him and it hangs like a shadow over his head; the threat that he could be a failure by the same standard he judged his father.
He wants to be a good person, unlike the bad person his dad was, so upon learning that he royally ****ed up, he stomps the breaks as hard as he can to put it right. But that jeopardizes his job. And it jeopardizes his family. And so, still trying to prove a point to himself, he tries as hard as he can not to abandon his family or his job in addition to the girl he's trying not to abandon.
The point I'm getting at is that Locke suffers for doing what he thinks is the morally right thing to do, which more often than not is a conflict not often explored in movies. There's good guys versus bad guys, tragic deaths of heroes and all that, but in this case Locke's biggest enemy is his himself, we're watching him wrestle with the consequences of choices he made, and he's aware these are consequences for the choices he made, and he hates himself for that. It's very humanizing and relatable.
OVERALL, stepping back a moment, and once again attempting to assess this movie objectively; engaging though it is, this movie is very not visually stimulating. It's a lot of panning from one corner of the car to the next, a lot of superimposed traffic shots, a lot of out-of-focus street lights. This would be a terrible watch if the narrative didn't pull me in. The music also isn't terribly strong though it is appropriately present and absent where it feels it ought to be.
Part of the appeal for a movie like this, for me at least, is seeing the character break down over time, I like that kind of psychological torture (I'm a sick ****). But we never really see him snap and instead the movie ends sort of anti-climatically with the news that the baby was born... and that he'll keep driving. Appropriate, but this is conveyed less by what feels like an organic climax to the movie and instead by a swelling score and sudden and unusual increase in out-of-the-car shots.
Part of the difficulty for the sort of character's development is also the fact that he's trying to play it cool, that he's looking for a "practical way forward", but chips in the facade don't really appear so clearly as you might hope. The first big reveal of the movie is simply learning that he cheated on his wife months ago and they're giving birth, the second big reveal is that he's going to her out of spite for his dead dad.
The scenes in which he curses out his dad in the rearview mirror serve both to realistically establish his motivations, but also to exposit on his background, that certain things have happened to him and he's been carrying that pain for his entire life.
I think these scenes are enlightening, but the third time it happens I'm having a little bit of a harder time buying it. We've now seen him shift back and forth between calm and professional Locke to "I want to dig you out of the ****ing ground and make you listen" enough times that it just feels a bit weird to once again hear him launch into third round of swearing at the backseat.
Finally, unlike the above movies I mention (excepting Bicentennial Man which I haven't seen in FOREVER), it's pretty difficult to say I "enjoyed" watching this movie. I consider it a good movie in terms of accomplishing what it set out to do, and evoking the feelings it was supposed to evoke, ****, it's got me to cry twice now, so it's clearly working. BUT, it's not quite the experience I normally appreciate.
In Ink there's the music, there's the aesthetic, there are the themes, there's even brief humor, the dynamic between characters in interesting, and it successfully tugs on my heartstrings multiple times thoughout it's length. Titanic is a bit different; I'm not so sold on the romantic aspect of the movie, but I'm sympathetic enough to the characters, and I'm able to put myself in the movie to live through the ship sinking vicariously, and it's an exciting and horrifying experience.
Locke doesn't really have any of that, it's really just a picture into the isolated torment of one guy and his detached conversations through the phone in his car. Movie's not really exciting, it's not fun, it's not pleasant to look at, it's not intellectually stimulating like a drama like 12 Angry Men might be... It's just kind of there, and my emotional experience is more of a Fridge Logic moment, than a direct feeling the movie is impressing on me.
Still, I have difficulty not rating this well, but I will be docking my score.
Final Verdict: [Very Good]