Loggerheads Review

Things We Lose Along The Way

Loggerheads

Score: 9,5

Lately I haven’t had any time for anything and I have barely watched movies. That’s why I haven’t posted here for a long time. School is driving me crazy and consuming all my time and my sleep hours. I hope I have some time to go to the movies this weekend and have more things to talk about here. I had some free time recently and I watched this one that I always wanted to I see and now I had the chance. This kind of independent films always reminds me like uncompromised cinema is better. They are far away from the obvious clichés from money-seekers.

The cast has some known faces too like Kip Pardue that did The Rules of Attraction, Thirteen, and did a small role in another independent movie I love called Imaginary Heroes. There’s Bonnie Hunt, famous for her TV work and also for films like Beethoven, Jumanji, Jerry Maguire and The Green Mile. Chris Sarandon, Susan Sarandon’s first husband, from A Dog Day Afternoon, and Tess Harper, who has been severely punished twice in her life: She was part of Ishtar, that terrible Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty movie, and she was married to Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men.

Well, the movie shows three different stories that happen in different times, just like The Hours, but they’re not so distant from each other in time. Bonnie is a car rental agency attendant who lives with her mother, quit her job and tries to find her son, that she was forced to give to adoption when she was 17. Kip is a homeless drifter obsessed with loggerhead turtles (that’s where its title comes from) who meets George, a motel owner who offers him a place to stay. Tess is a preacher’s wife torn between doing what her husband, or God, wants her to do and following her heart.

This is a 2005 film from director/writer Tim Kirkman, that I never heard about before but IMDB told me that this is his last picture and is based in a true story. The movie premiered in the Sundance Festival winning the public choice award and several other prizes in other festival throughout the world. It was shot in 2004 in Wilmington, NC, the same place Dawson’s Creek used to be shot. Almost everyone who knows me know that I love Dawson’s Creek. At least I did 10 years ago.

It’s such a shame that movies like this don’t get their deserved recognition in the major award ceremonies, with very few exceptions, and have no room in movie theaters. In the meantime we have transformers, mutants, witches and hobbits, GI joes, interplanetary trips, guns, blood and unintelligent comedies occupying these spaces all year long. The ones who enjoy all I listed above will definitely not enjoy this picture once they have completely different timings. And there are no explosions. Just dialogues, expressions, looks and feelings.