Review of the film Take Shelter

            There are an infinite number of ways for devastation to strike. We are bombarded with the ideas and images of them from all angles—books, movies, television and print news—and it becomes difficult to discern what is true and what is made up in others' imaginations. The line between the two is so often unclear. When the question of what is real and what is imagined becomes blurred in one single mind, then that person and those around him begin to question his sanity.

            In Take Shelter, Michael Shannon plays a young family man, Curtis, who questions the visions of devastation that plague his nights. He dreams of a catastrophic and toxic storm that provokes insidious behavior in people and animals. Behind his small Ohio ranch house, he begins to build out and heavily fortify the tiny underground storm shelter. His wife, played by Jessica Chastain, is increasingly distressed as his erratic actions and speech intensify. His hearing-impaired daughter needs a costly operation that they cannot afford without his health insurance from his manual labor job, but his continued employment is questionable. The tenuous hold he has on reality seems to be slipping. And he and his wife are aware that Curtis's mother was diagnosed with severe schizophrenia when she was his present age. Curtis cannot determine if what he is dreaming of is from true premonition or psychosis.

            Director Jeff Nichols has made a quietly terrifying film. The story moves slowly, building tension as Curtis vacillates between his belief in and his suspicion of the terrifying visions' accuracy. And Shannon's performance is mesmerizing in its sincerity as he is assaulted with the growing realization that an apocalyptic storm or a severe mental illness have the same devastating ability to tear his family a part.

            

Review of the film The Grey

            There are experiences that leave a person unable or unfit for the world as most of us live in it. If these encounters are survived, the survivor is never the person that he or she was before—now unable to step rightly back into the life once led.

            In The Grey, Liam Neeson stars as a man pit against a pack of wolves like none other ever recorded in the existence of man. These wolves are as big as small horses and ruthless hunters of full-grown male humans. They travel long distances and over great obstacles unexplained. These creatures can blend in with the dark and attack from out of nowhere. They are the baddest wolves that have ever lived.

            The later-in-life action star Neeson plays someone we've seen living on the screen before—the dark and lethal man of past mysteries that the actor been racking up lately in tawdry thrillers like Taken and Unknown.  These two elements, the wolves and the loner, together make up what one would expect is a by the numbers adventure thriller. And to some degree it is, but in this adventure thriller there are also some moments of intense emotion that feel as if they could be real.

            In this story, a ragtag handful of men are stranded in the foreboding Alaskan wilderness by a violent plane crash. They are pursued by the aforementioned numberless pack of wolves as they attempt to survive and find help. When it comes right down to the survival aspects of the story, there are some elements and images that many fear—the ice cold wind and snow that form a blinding, stinging blizzard, the dark creatures that may hunt us in the night, the horror of being pinned underwater just out of reach of the surface—and here they are illustrated before you on the screen. Their nature may be rendered in a heightened manner by the magic of big movie production, but they are the some of what each of us dreams of, the nightmares that plague and pull at our imaginations.