Will Lyman

Facebook

Twitter

Google+

StumbleUpon

Fark

Comment

Follow Will Lyman

Will Lyman

Will Lyman Quick Links

Film RSS

What Doesn't Kill You Review

By Chris Barsanti

A recovery film being touted as a crime thriller, What Doesn't Kill You suffers from the problem of most recovery stories in that it essentially has no final act. With the average character study this isn't really an issue, but for a film that starts off with an armored car robbery going badly awry (narration over a freeze-frame of a robber desperately blasting away tells us: "Never do armored cars"), the lack of satisfying denouement seriously damages what is otherwise a perfectly solid drama.

The movie is billed as the true-life story of the film's director/co-writer Brian Goodman, a South Boston guy who spent a few years in jail before getting his break in Ted Demme's Monument Ave. and showing up in several projects by Rod Lurie (a producer on this film). Being that Goodman made a career in Hollywood as the kind of square-jawed tough who got mowed down by the G-Men in the final reel of an old Republic serial, it's fitting that his first project as filmmaker would be this scrappy piece about his pre-Hollywood life as a second-string Southie hoodlum.

Continue reading: What Doesn't Kill You Review

Floating Review

By Christopher Null

Excellent

It might be wandering, it might be inconsistent, and it might have questionable editing (that's putting it mildly), but dammit I enjoyed Floating. This dark coming-of-age story has a lower-class underachiever (Norman Reedus) dealing with a crippled widower father (Will Lyman), stoner friends, and the new rich kid across from the lake where they all live, with Reedus's Van trying to make sense of his future during another wasted summer after highschool. The title isn't just a reference to Van's swimming ability, it's a metaphor for his life, and the movie doesn't take the easy way out in helping him out of his rut. Very interesting if you're a patient viewer.