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Blog by Don Kennedy

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The Road

The Road is a “road picture” featuring two guys heading to the beach in hopes of catching a break from daily stress and frigid weather. This however is a “road picture” that does not feature beer bongs and sophomoric sexual encounters. A man (Viggo Mortensen) and his boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are refugees from a cataclysmic inferno of unknown origin that has rendered the earth a cold, sterile wasteland. En route to the sea and then hopefully south their focus is like that of today’s homeless – food and footwear but with the added stresses of other survivors who have banded together as rag tag groups of cannibals. Sleep for the father is haunted by dreams of life before the anarchy and of the pastoral beauty he shared with his long gone fragile wife (Charlize Theron) who could no longer take the despair of their post apocalyptic existence. The boy has no such dreams having been born into this stark world. Both wonder if they’ll ever be able to interact again with some of the “good guys” since the line that separates good and bad gets ever blurrier. Also featured but nearly unrecognizable are Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce and Vancouver's Molly Parker in this masterfully told but minimally entertaining film that seems out of place. Usually this type of cinema gets made in booming economic times and not when the world is plunged into the economic equivalent of a nuclear winter. Maybe this is the first tangible sign that the global recession is really ebbing.

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