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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 361798" data-attributes="member: 23">Last night's film was... 13 Minutes (2021) <img src="https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FblIxDbJIMSg%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=e7622d41e9693addf51b7b0d313817d9b9fca0498f360c1315507957594589c5&ipo=images" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 866px" /> The disaster genre is one for which I have a fairly low tolerance. I have to be in the right mood to watch one. This one lured me in when I hovered over the thumbnail and it opened with thunder and lightning in an atmospheric sky. Fortunately, this is my kind of disaster flick, because there's barely any disaster in it. This film's all about the characters' soapy dramas. Very much like Five Corners, we visit various characters in turn and witness their unrelated lives with little in common but that they all have "issues" and seem to live in a permanent state of crisis and high drama. There's the pregnant teen whose married babydaddy wants her to have an abortion. The gay son afraid of coming out to fundamentalist Christian farmers while taking out his insecurities on his lover - who also happens to be an employee. There is the illegal immigrant couple on the verge of buying a home after saving for a long time.... the list goes on. We probably get about 78 minutes of introspective drama and another 8 or so of carnage. I can understand this would have disappointed genre fans, but for me this made the film more accessible and interesting than if the ratios had been reversed and we got 78 minutes of CGI cars and cows flying noisily through the air (I watched Twister back in 1997 but remember nothing about it other than all of us falling about laughing whenever someone called out  "debris", the American pronunciation of which conjured up images of an invasion of French cheese). While it does feel a rather "made for TV", the performances are mostly excellent. Thora Birch was a standout (oh my. The annoying little girl from Hocus Pocus now on the verge of potentially becoming a grandmother. How did that happen?). Anne Heche, too, gave a wonderful part as the cold hearted woman judging everyone else while hypocritically espousing  Christian values. There are two incredibly ugly moments that made her unforgettable: Early in the film the pregnant girl comes to the clinic where she works, ostensibly to discuss abortion, but Heche's character gives her a scan, forces her to look at the foetus and starts verbally hammering her to keep the baby. Her reaction upon learning of her son's homosexuality is colder still. While not the most profound film-watching experience, I found this an entertaining enough film. It's a little corny in places and your mileage may vary when it comes to the soapy dramas, but the performances sold me on this one. Rather like Five Corners, this could have been an episode of an ongoing series (as someone currently heavily immersed in Crossroads, another drama with a motel at its centre seems entirely feasible to me), and I'd have been up for revisiting many of these. At risk of spoiling the entire film,[ISPOILER] pretty much everyone gets away very lightly, [/ISPOILER]which is a little anticlimactic. But the emotional consequences of the non-disaster "stories" are what hang in the air. While arcs come to an end, there's also a sense that much is still unresolved which I found refreshing. [MEDIA=youtube]YiEFZLRyRQo[/MEDIA] </blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?