Free Radicals (2003)

Sadly Over-hyped

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

This Austrian movie has reached Sweden recently. It's the "Short Cuts" concept again, but that form seems to inspire script writers and directors to great achievements.This is about the post consuming area. The phase when everybody seems to accept the society they are living in without protest. But typical for that area is the frustration which finds it way otherwise.Because everybody is unhappy here. Whatever their goals are, friendship, love, a dead mother, everything is a disappointment. Nothing can be reached. And the point is that nothing is their own fault. The people are not blamed and that's hopeful and maybe a prediction of what is to follow after the consumerism era is over.

Böse Zellen is by far the best Austrian movie released in 2003! Barbara Albert definitely is a very talented young director who manages to entertain, teach and portray our society in a really touching movie (without being pathetic!). The actors are doing a good job (especially Ursula Strauss and Kathrin Resetarits). Go see it!!!

Parallel stories about various people in recovering process from a car accident are interwoven into one picture. The director has craftsmanship to incorporate different styles of genre films, such as horror, coming-of-age, and arthouse-erotica. The influence from several European melodrama giants, namely Fassbinder and Almodovar, also permeates on the screen. The rare feeling, which only occurs when I witness the moment of a new talent's emergence, caught me while I was watching this film at New York Film Festival 2003.The screenplay is questionable; the plane crash at the beginning is barely related to the rest of the whole film. The director's explanation in Q&A session at the Festival, that the crash indicates chaos, irony and unpredictability of life in the relation to the entire story, doesn't convince me enough. Also, a bundle of absolutely separate stories, which don't interact with each other, may look dated in the future, though it is admittedly faddish at this moment.Several choices of music, such as Take On Me and San Francisco, are so personal that the director's feeling may not be conveyed to the audience.Overall, this is an unpolished but young and energetic film, which shows the director's promising future.

Barbara Albert's Altman-by-way-of-Austria was the least impressive movie I saw at the festival. Following the life of a woman named Manu, the only survivor of a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico, Free Radicals branches off into the troubled lives of her satellites, her friends who fight off loneliness with the same fervor that she does. Their circumstances are no less tragic to them; one overweight woman is so despondent in her loneliness that she throws herself in front of a train (and survives, ridiculously). Another fights with an older, crippled lover who beats her if she comes in late. Manu's daughter dances briefly and sweetly with a guitarist who plays `San Francisco' for her in a subway station. The idea here is that we are all interconnected, but the movie plays this with embarrassing sentimentality. It has its moments-I love the scene where members of a church choir sing along with `Nights in White Satin' in a darkened pub-but overall, Free Radicals feels juvenile.