It turns out that Kathryn Bigelow is not the only director who has appeared at this year’s autumn festivals to prove how skilled they are on muscular, adrenalized filmmaking. Three days after Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” premiered at the Venice Film Festival and re-examined her mastery of tight and urgent stories, Paul Greengrass came to the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday for the World Premiere of “The Lost Bus”, a Headlong Bite of the frightening actual Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Aptly Lost. Fellips ”and Tree Jason Bure Bure.
The film, located in the middle of Camp Fire 2018, the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, is the latest post in a trend that started with Greengrass’ first film, 1989’s “revived”, and continued through “Bloody Sunday”, “United 93”, “Green Zone”, “Captain” and “22 July,” 22 July, Virtue villages of virtue covers.
Greengrass is far from a one-trick pony-July 22 “was remarkably gripping and provocative, although much of it took place in a courtroom-but the best moments of” The Lost Bus “are largely those who take advantage of his skill when arranging large-scale measures. In this case, that action is a bus ride through a literal hell on earth, as a scruffy school bus driver collaborates with a teacher in the class school to HERDA a group of children through the burning inferno who consumed the city of Paradise, California in November 2018.
In this way, the story came from Lizzie Johnson’s Nonfiction book “Paradise: One Town’s struggle to survive an American wildfire”, such as Jamie Lee Curtis and Jason Blum brought to the Greengrass with the idea that the personal story of these two people and the bus would be the way to an investigation of the conflict.
There’s Plenty of Backstory Before, Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) and Teacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera) set off, Most of It Involving Kevin’s Strained Relationship With His Sullen and Angry Teenage Son Shaun (Played By McConugon Feelings about Returning to Paradise, The Town Where He Grew Up, in the Aftermath of a Divorce and the Death of His Father.
But it is clear from the moment that the film opens with the camera turning over electric power lines that sneak through the wooded mountains in northern California that the heart of the “lost bus” is in motion and speed. From the beginning, Pal Ulvik Rokseth’s camera is restless; It flies over the head, pushes up against the windows in the bus that Kevin runs and sometimes dips into the bus, but there is an energy that surrounds activity as everyday as letting go of the children or gas up the bus.
The driver, it seems that his turn and unable to communicate with the son who blames him for the move to this little town so that Kevin can take care of his weak mother, who has been a widow since her husband dead four months earlier. McConaughey looks good from the beginning, but he has a sick dog named Elvis and he plays Chris Stapleton’s “Broken Halos” on his radio, so we know he is a good guy.
There is a certain nuance for how this story is designed (and also a bit to be obvious advance shadows, as when son screams, “I f-ing hate you, I wish you were dead”)-but we are mainly waiting for the camera to return to these power lines, which will spark and break in the high winds and start a series of small fires early.
It is when the propulsion that has long been a brand with Greengrass brands: the scattered fires start to collapse within the first half hour of the film, and from there it is only a question of how long the director can keep the audience submerged in this deadly burning, with a bus load of young children there to remind us of how high the efforts are.
There are times when the fiery landscape is astonishing and occasions when it screams CG, but few directors can pick up a movie and keep it on a fever pitch that green grass can. Everything is in motion: cars, buses, people running and especially the flames; It is as visceral and breathless as a Bourne movie – if nowhere close to so much fun, because it really happened and because, as the fire manager says at a news conference, it continues: “Every year the fires get bigger and there are more of them. We are fucking fools.”
(Anyone who came to Toronto from Los Angeles would undoubtedly think back to January and agree.)
The film follows two stories at once: Kevin and Mary take the children through an increasingly spotless Hellscape, and even the efforts from the fire brigade to do something, whatever, to contain the fire – or, fails, to it, to save the people captured.
But the main story is the bus with McConaghey and Ferrera, which spends most of its time suffocated in smoke and darkness but still manages to find some moving notes in their characters, at least in the few moments to breathe when the frenetic pace slows down and James Newton Howard’s Bold Music traces.
Camp Fire has already been the subject of a number of worthy documentaries, including two called “Fire in Paradise” (one on Netflix and one on the front line) together with Ron Howard’s “Rebuilding Paradise” and Lucy Walker’s “Bring Your Own Brigade.” But while “The Lost Bus” does not feel as at the right time as the previous films in nonfiction, it finds a new way into the story and gives a master filmmaker a sober way to showcase their formidable skills.
Apple Original Films releases “The Lost Bus” in theaters on September 19 and on Apple TV+ on October 3.
