CONTRIBUTING REVIEW

Hey folks,

Below you'll find another contributing review from comedy&chaos. Seems like he's always getting into something, this week it turned out to be vikings (maybe one of these days I'll convince comedy&chaos to get to a theater but until then...). I've also updated the STAR RATING graphic, hopefully now its more clear that the scale is four. ENJOY!



SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

by comedy&chaos

The rumble of the train sets the theater to a modified shake that you hardly realize because you are transfixed on what you’re apart of, witnessing, the trek north through the woods, the endless North American woods, and it’s not 2009 but 1007 AD and heck if you know about trains. You know about pillaging, you know about death, you know about survival. You are a Viking and the heck with anyone else. And metal music is so deafeningly loud that the train could just be the reverberating bass line.

SEVERED WAYS was the medicine needed this past Saturday. Work, work and work, combined with the ever present, always close to pushing you over the edge NEW YORK CITY and an Irish Whiskey hangover to boot, and there wasn’t a good chance you’d make good on the promise to watch a SCOTLAND vs. IRELAND rugby match with a friend at high noon.

Peel your eyelids off your pillowed misery, turn on the old computer, check out the usual internet trash and meander over to your good friends at THE WORLDS BEST EVER DOT COM. Movie trailer: SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. Hit the play button. Maniacal metal, brutality, fire, nature, battle, all done in huge gaping wide shots that make you immediately understand 1007AD isn’t far off. And after yet another week like this past one, it is exactly what you need.

SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA rocked. Literally. ANDREW W.K. demented signature pushes the movie through the roof. You’re no metal head, but you rocked out to METALLICA’S ‘ONE’ more than a few times in your teenage years. You still love huge guitars and ballsy bass lines built just for ramping energy, and a drummer who found his beats at the gates of hell. Come on, who doesn’t.

And the beauty of the metal doesn’t end there. It is woven into the story. The Blond Hero is the 18-year-old head banger you’d find at any one of those shows. He’s angry, so angry he can’t see straight. He loves being a Viking. He’s a killer and it’s his calling. His Heathen God has made him a chosen one, a Norsemen, a Viking and he must enact ODIN’S will. And while the storyline is beautiful and it is subtitled from Greenlandic (there’s maybe a 300 word count in the entire 2+hour feature), the Metal gives it the smile it needs, the subtle wink that invites the viewer in to this beautifully shot, mesmerizing film.

Story line: Simple as can be. Vikings make land in North America and begin trading with the Natives. An argument over a stolen ax leads to a battle, and the Norse high tail it out of there, leaving behind corpses and, mistakenly, two of their own still very much alive. The movie begins on the men’s discovery that they have been abandoned, and then you are into the forest to witness the brutality of Mother Nature and man’s ancient techniques of survival as the two men trek north in hopes of catching up with the ship.

The film is beautiful, it must be a treated HD picture because some of the shots are two minutes in length. What STONE has done in creating these amazingly long shots and even longer scenes is two things: portray in truth how man survived, i.e., how many trees needed to be felled on a daily basis, how dinner was caught and killed, etc., and the absolute aloneness that must have been felt. Nature provided the only sound track. A nights’ entertainment was firelight and fish or meat caught that day. There was no television, stereo, movies, iPhones connecting you to the rest of mankind…you get the point. You know that line of thought. But it’s a treat to witness it.