CUTTING MOMENTS MOVIE

CUTTING MOMENTS MOVIE

So, yeah, this movie is not a laff riot, and its four minutes of intense violence are pretty hard to watch. In this and his other shorts, Buck knows that the family fucks you up and tends to disintegrate over time, but he also knows how strong those familial connections are and how they determine who we are and what we do. The wife unsuccessfully attempts to reignite some affection and passion into the marriage, but has to resort to unconventional means when her traditional attempts are ignored. There are some hints of sexual abuse from the father to his son, and mention of a lawyer's phone call about the possible removal of the son from the home. The young boy (Jared Barsky) also seems hollowed out, lost in himself, unable to connect with either parent.

The husband and father (Gary Betsworth) is a hollowed-out husk, detached to the point of non-existence, monotone and empty.

The wife and mother (Nicca Ray, daughter of director Nicholas Ray and dancer/choreographer Betty Utey, and credited here as Nica Ray) is like a mistreated family pet nervous, hesitant, careful, and wounded, she is afraid of her husband and son while desperately anxious for love and affection from them. He watches them, subtly controlling their environment but allowing them freedom and space to live within it.Ĭutting Moments tells a bare bones story about a small family in Long Island. These compositions are not heavy-handed or exaggeratedly stylized past the point of ordinary human experience. A man on a couch watching baseball on a television becomes an embodiment of depression, alienation, and detachment. Window blinds become ominous alien beings claustrophobically controlling physical space. Buck has a natural filmmaker's talent for shot composition, framing his actors and their possessions within both their domestic and landscape settings in ways that make the ordinary cinematic and special. Buck avoids needless exposition and lets his detailed images and their juxtapositions tell the story. Buck's film is carefully composed, structured, and arranged, and its gradual movement into violence is mostly earned and presented in the same detached, careful style as the rest of the short. Ignoring all that shit and concentrating on what Douglas Buck is doing renders that kind of hyperbole irrelevant. The most disgusting thing this side of a Long John Silver's menu. The sickest movie since The Care Bears Movie. The most shocking film in the history of the world. Despite its pompous subtitle ( A Trilogy of America), it's a strong, unique, and subtle work (other than four or five minutes of pretty intense violence). I want to write about the whole shebang, but instead I'll just urge you to rent it.

Plus, Larry Fessenden's in the last section, and I love that dude. The shorts also comment on and complement each other, turning three shorts made in different years into one cohesive piece. I wish Rue Morgue had included the entire Family Portraits triptych in addition to Cutting Moments because it shows a filmmaker growing in complexity, confidence, ambition, and narrative and visual skill and toning down the immaturity and need to shock. Cutting Moments is disturbing and contains some extreme, unflinching violence, but the film's tone is quiet, reserved, and distanced and is far from the freakout gorefest promised by many of the promotional materials.

This promotional gimmick invites viewers to disagree and turns the film into a carnival sideshow. Even more damaging, these covers have blurbs promising that Cutting Moments will be the most shocking/sickest/most disturbing film you will ever see. In addition to having nothing to do with the film, these covers look more like straight-to-video schlock or advertisements for small town haunted houses staffed by Jaycees, Lions Club, or Moose Lodge members. Some feature grinning, maniacal goofballs (who aren't even in the film) holding drills, chainsaws, and bloody knives. Note: Cutting Moments is available on DVD with two other Douglas Buck short films, Home and Prologue, under the title Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America.Ī quick Internet search for Cutting Moments reveals several bootleg and foreign region DVD covers and posters that, aside from the official Family Portraits cover, do the film a disservice.

Cutting moments