Sling Blade

This review was originally written as part of my USA Road Trip series for French Toast Sunday.

Karl Childers (Billy Bob Thornton) was sent to a correctional facility at the age of twelve. He grew up living in a shed out the back of his parents’ property, sleeping in a hole in the ground he’d dug himself and being picked on by pretty much everyone, especially his father and a local boy named Jesse Dixon. One day, Karl saw Dixon apparently trying to rape his mother, and killed Dixon with a sling blade but, when his mother seems distressed and angry, Karl kills her too, and is thus locked up. Some years later, Karl has grown up and served his time, and is due for release into the world. The only problem is, he doesn’t know anyone willing to take him in. His doctor sets him up with a minimum wage job and limited accommodation, but can Karl make it on the outside, and does he even want to?
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Movie-wise, this has not been a productive week. It seems every time I sat down to write up a review (at time of writing I still have 6 pending, some from a few weeks back now) another big trailer would come up, one that I’d want to cover in my Trailer Breakdown feature over at French Toast Sunday, and the problem with stuff about trailers is if you don’t do it quickly, you may as well not do it. As such, I didn’t get a whole lot of reviewing done this week, and I won’t make any promises about doing it all this week because that’s how I end up breaking promises. Anyway, trailers. There were a whole bunch of awesome ones for films I previously wasn’t looking forward to, but am now at least a little excited about the crazy directions they seem to be taking. I’ve linked to the breakdowns below. We also finished out season 4 of Game of Thrones, and will hopefully be catching up with the first two episodes of season 5 this week. Now that’s out of the way for the most part, I should be able to get back to watching more movies. Here’s what I watched this week:

Amour (2012) Continue reading →