There is no message in Playground—not a single one, whatsoever. The store is closed, so the boys move on; and the film’s most cold-blooded touch, for anyone who knows the Bulger case, is the way that this fifth section abruptly ends with a glimpse of a small boy in a play area. A thrilling fable of five vastly separate inner-city lives who struggle against their limitations in an interlocking tale assembled by a dark orchestrator Prior to its premiere, the film won 'Best Narrative Feature Film' at the San Diego Film Awards. While certain themes that are less taboo in cinema than they once were, we still often feel uncomfortable seeing them depicted as drama, even if it’s for our edification and moral sensitization. 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 organizers did not want a neighborhood playground; rather they wanted a community playground for people throughout the town. Szymek, being a punk-ass loser, brings along his stupid friend Czarek, where, after poor Gabrysia is ridiculed for asking Szymek on a date, the two boys taunt the living hell out her; sexually abusing and harassing her, as well. There was none. The reason why Eve has arrived here with Addie (and the dog Alfie) is never really completely explained. 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 in 1993. 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 Devil's Playground looks at life in an Australian Catholic seminary college in the early nineteen fifties, of the kind writer-director Fred Schepisi had once attended as a student. Her first novel, With My Lazy Eye, won her the Sunday Independent Best Irish Newcomer of the Year Award. The action depicted in the final section feels inexorable, and makes for intensely unpleasant watching. Julia Kelly was born in 1969, studied English, Sociology and Journalism in Dublin, and escaped to London for the mad, bad years of life. 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. Nothing in these children’s world is done from any innocent altruism, as we see when the older girl tells Szymek that he has no choice but to do what Gabrysia says and meet him after school: if not, she says, “Your naked butt will go online.”. But I’ve never witnessed such an abrupt collective exit as happened during Playground—and it seemed very much as if this was not just a panicked gut response but, consciously or unconsciously, a mass protest. In my view, it’s not a goal that he persuasively achieves. According to Hootsuite, 70% of YouTube’s views come from the recommended videos that pop up as a … Ronald McDonald Playground Slaughter turned McDonald's innocent clown mascot into a horrifying serial killer for a gory short film. 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. 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. 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 The fragmented overlapping episodes and the abrupt cuts, nudging us to make connections between disparate parts, all echo the approach Haneke developed in 71 Fragments for a Chronology of Chance (1994) and Code Unknown (2000). Apparently, during a screening of Playground, people in the audience removed themselves from the theatre after watching the long-winded ending. There are many variations; most forms have no teams, scores, or equipment. The … The Playground is a thrilling adaptation of ancient folklore depicted through a modern fable of five vastly separate inner-city lives. It was officially released on Friday, October 13, 2017 on iTunes. 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). Usually when a person is tagged, the tagger says, "Tag, you're 'it'! Seemingly pumped up on their bullying of Gabrysia, Szymek and Czarek walk cold-eyed in slow motion, like movie gangsters, as various adults stand motionless watching them in impotent horror, seen from the boys’ POV; the sequence’s final shot shows the boys from above, walking through a field of frozen adults, as if the film’s realism has suddenly taken on an edge of nightmare. At the risk of spoiling the film, should you ever get to see it—and it’s absolutely not a question of spoiling anyone’s pleasure, because Playground is in no way intended to be pleasurable—I’ll explain why. 1,155 likes. She now lives in Bray, County Wicklow with her partner and their little girl. It was just a time-waster, pushing the running-time longer than it had to be, and possibly scarring Actress Swistun for life. Released on March 25, 1991, the song reached #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, #4 on the R&B chart, and #36 on the Dance chart. 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. Now the film gets impressionistic, Kowalski dropping the cold, detached observational style largely used till now. I guess Kowalski wanted to show that these two twerps were mean, and… capable of murder? 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. The rest of the film, however, deals with different material, and one suspects that Kowalski is trying to explain, or at least make us understand, how two young boys—Playground’s killers are at least 12, two years older than the culprits in the Bulger case—could be driven to murder. 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. The … A fixed playground, featuring a ramp, several slides, swings with rubber seats, and soft mulch on the ground, is what the elementary-aged children use … 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. But I’ve never quite seen a reaction like the one that greeted the Polish film Playground, which showed in competition this week at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Gabrysia isn’t the fascistic bully we might lazily assume on seeing her implacable expression: rather, she turns out to be a victim. Point made—and none too subtly. Another question arises!—what was the point of this? Inspired by Leo Fitz's work on Phil Coulson's Prosthetic Hand, Holden Radcliffe reactivated the Life-Model Decoy Program and created Aida, his android assistant. Serious and ambitious though its aspirations are, Playground leaves us feeling much the same—and none the wiser. 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. Perhaps because it feels so derivative of Play—although we can’t know if Kowalski has seen that film—Playground doesn’t, for me, have anything of the same bite. NBA star Malik Beasley's estranged wife Montana Yao hit the playground with their son Makai Joseph at South Pointe Park in Miami Beach on Saturday. 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. All of her memories are intact, but with no physical evidence that contradicts the claims of her husband and her psychiatrist, and she sets out in search for solid evidence of her son's existence. It’s an excess of rationalization that feels like overkill but that tells us little. 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. 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. For some strange reason, Kowalski has the audacity to make it seem there may be a school shooting of some sort, or that something of horror is about to occur during a school assembly. 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. Unless, that is, we protest by getting up and leaving, refusing to be complicit. Tag (Also called it, tig, tiggy, tips, tick, or chasey) is a playground game involving two or more players' chasing other players in an attempt to "tag" and mark them out of play, usually by touching with a hand. “You Become Hostage to Their Worldview”: The Murky World of Moderation on Clubhouse, a Playground for the Elite The invite-only app, which has … 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. Their performances are what keeps the viewer glued to the screen. CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: Refreshers and Flying Saucers, Opal Fruits, Space Dust and Toffos - the shelves of my school's tuck shop were heaped with sweets, all at a penny each. 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. While taking notes on Playground, I scribbled down the names Haneke and Seidl, and then that of Swedish director Ruben Östlund. The following section shows the kids at school, and we see what’s been making Gabrysia so tense: she has a crush on Szymek. There is a plus-side: Playground is beautifully shot, and the actors are exquisitely trained, especially being this as a first movie for all three actors. The scene made me wince more than any recent screen violence I can remember; it’s not because we see anything in precise detail, since we’re so far off, but we know what’s being done—and worse, we know whom it’s being done to, and by whom. Jonathan Romney It asks us to watch, or to shut our eyes; it doesn’t make us ask questions, at least not in the culminating sequence itself. 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. Well, how far would someone go to make a movie about a real-life incident that was as horrific then as it is today? The film offers some determining causes that are timeless constants—parental distance, uncomprehending adult disapproval, poverty, excessive responsibility at a young age—but it also throws in elements that are effectively new, as if in a deliberate updating of the Bulger story. The Playground ( 2017) The Playground. With Ray Bradbury, William Shatner, Keith Dutson, Kate Trotter. On this episode of the Decoder podcast, host Nilay Patel speaks with Shelli Taylor, the CEO of Alamo Drafthouse. YouTube is quickly becoming the most unsafe place for your children to be. If Playground fails to convince, it’s partly because it largely seems such a textbook emulation of the Haneke approach. Judging from what I’ve gleaned from the film’s Spanish press kit, and comments elsewhere, the story appears to be based on the case of James Bulger, the 2-year-old from Merseyside, England, who was killed by two older boys in February 1993. 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. I thought of Ulrich Seidl because the Gabrysia sequence reminded me of the Austrian filmmaker’s acidic satirical stance in his fictions. An Art film? 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. What starts as rigorous detachment becomes a different sort of cruelty: in a way that’s not intended cynically, but that finally feels cynical, detachment becomes merely an effect, just as the CGI that went into making this scene realistic is a hyper-sophisticated effect, a display of expertise applied to the abject. Maybe this reaction of ire is what Kowalski begged from his audience. From here on, if you remember the facts, you dread what’s coming. 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. Help us in support to keep the magazine going strong for years to come with a small donation. While trying to save Fitz and Phil Coulson from Hell, Radcliffe had a glimpse of the infinite knowledge contained in the Darkhold and became obsessed with the idea of getting the book for himself since that moment. The detachment ostensibly asks us to bear witness; but what we end up witnessing is only the sophistication of the filmmaking. The playground element, of course, is a clear reference to the infamous playground scene in T2 when Sarah Connor watches families get incinerated by the Skynet-caused nuclear holocaust. 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. Kowalski’s film may or may not be directly based on the Bulger story; in his director’s statement, he simply refers to a case he had read about, although the press notes include clippings relating to an episode in Norway and a later case in the UK. We can barely see his face at this distance, but we can tell that he’s being dragged along forcibly. The Playground was created as a base for the Strategic Scientific Reserve in 1949. Not Rated | 2h 31min | Thriller | 13 October 2017 (USA) 1:01 | Trailer. In the next section (“Ruins”), Szymek accordingly shows up for the assignation on a secluded piece of wasteland; Gabrysia has come armed with a condom. Still, it makes us understand their actions, and it’s only afterward that the full horror of what they’ve done fully dawns on us—just as it dawns on the film’s antihero in a bleak comedown. In one lengthy scene, a group of teenage boys brutalize a drunken boy in a park at night. The penultimate shot is a slow burner. But Kowalski is misleading us. "Playground" is a single by Another Bad Creation, from the album Coolin' at the Playground Ya Know! The film comes in six numbered, titled sequences. Kowalski is a great Director; this is a fact, and it shows as Playground runs through its minutes from the atmosphere in which he evokes, utilizing gorgeous scenery and lush backdrops to help tell a dark and dreary story. Then, the following two chapters are dedicated to the murdering pieces of trash: Szymek (Nicolas Przygoda: Panic Attack 2017) and Czarek (Przemyslaw Balinski: debut). However, the feeling of being stuck in this mucilage-state will make one wish to rip out his or her own eyes from the sockets at how insensitively gruesome and stupidly-long Kowalski decided to end the film. However, the demons return as well. For whatever reason—so much in Playground is left tantalizingly unstated—Czarek shaves his hair off with electric clippers, in a long single take done for real. Like the in-depth, diverse coverage of Cryptic Rock? Although, to be fair, with a great cast, some wonderful camerawork, and strong direction from Kowalski, CrypticRock gives Playground 2 out of 5 stars. Dan, Mike Ryan and David Samson discuss the movie theater industry, Tampa Bay Rays, concert films, the CFB Playoffs and much more. 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. ". Movie Info On the last day of school, a 12-year-old girl sets up a secret meeting with a boy. It is fair to say that they are on a journey together to a better place. 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… Then, as they walk through the woods, filmed from a distance in wide shot, the child is clearly not so happy. The Playground. Playground starts off strongly, introducing three characters as they ready for their last day of school before Summer Vacation starts. The real question is why anyone would want to re-enact such a thing, period. Learn more about your ad choices. Ending Explained is a recurring series in which we explore the finales, secrets, and themes of interesting movies and shows, both new and old. 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. The interesting thing is Playground would have been better had it been a Documentary—a genre for which Kowalski is better known, such as 2015’s Unstoppables, and 2012’s A Dream In The Making. 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. Jonathan Romney is a contributing editor to Film Comment and writes its Film of the Week column. 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). What Kowalski is displaying, ultimately, is nothing more than his own cold audacity. Throughout the movie, Devil’s Playground, we are introduced to some of the lifestyles and guidelines that are instilled in the Amish community. This may be for the sheer pleasure of the director—in this case: Kowalski, who thinks that showing the audience this on-screen brutality is actually a form of art while getting a nasty reaction from the audience. But her beloved has Czarek in tow, and the boys abuse and humiliate the girl—with the aid of their camera phones, of course—before seemingly getting bored and leaving. 5 VIDEOS | 145 IMAGES. The intimate talk quickly spins out of control, leading to an unexpected ending. 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 … The next section, “Szymek,” introduces us to a boy (Nicolas Przygoda) living on a drab estate, acting as carer to his father, a wheelchair user—and showing him tender, cautious compassion until suddenly, shockingly, he and his dad come to blows. Math video teaches students how to find the area of a trapezoid. on This could be said for anyone who had to endure such an atrocious on-screen exploitation of a parents’ nightmare. 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. 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. 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. The boy, lured away by Szymek and Czarek—although we don’t see how—is seen happily toddling along with them, swinging in the air as he holds their hands. Kowalski asks a lot of his young nonprofessional actors, and you have to hand it to them—they rise to the occasion intrepidly. Of mice and men: Ruben Östlund continues his exploration of our most basic instincts. <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. One is the very fact of asking children or teenagers to enact scenes of extreme violence: you hate to imagine how this drama felt to Kowalski’s young nonprofessional cast, although the end credit for a psychologist suggests the ramifications were thought through very responsibly. Many of the elements that trouble me about Playground are stylistic: Kowalski shows intense command of his material, but his repertoire of effects feels over-familiar. Rise to the occasion intrepidly of Swedish director Ruben Östlund characters to this place Bray... 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