Charlie Countryman
This was the official website for the 2013 magical thriller Charlie Countryman.
Content is from the site's archived pages and other sources.
Rating: R (for some brutal violence, language throughout, sexuality/nudity, and drug use)
Genre: Action & Adventure, Comedy
Directed By: Fredrik Bond
Written By: Matt Drake
In Theaters: Nov 15, 2013 limited
On Disc/Streaming: Jan 21, 2014
Runtime: 108 minutes
Studio: Millennium Entertainment
Charlie Countryman - Official Trailer (2013) Shia LaBeouf
Cast/Crew
Shia Labeouf
Shia has quickly become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actors. His natural talent and raw energy have secured his place as one of Hollywood’s leading men.
Most recently, Shia was seen in John Hillcoat’s crime drama, Lawless, alongside Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska. Set in Depression-era Virginia, the film tells the story of a bootlegging gang and debuted to a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival.
Up next, Shia will be seen in Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep, a thriller about a former Weather Underground activist who goes on the run from a journalist who has discovered his identity. The film co-stars an award-winning ensemble cast that includes Robert Redford, Julie Christie, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon and Chris Cooper. It premiered to rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival and will be released in April 2013. He also stars in The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman, opposite Evan Rachel Wood and Melissa Leo. The film will premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and focuses on Charlie’s romantic exploits with a girl who was previously claimed by a mob boss with a penchant for violence and a gang at his disposal. He recently wrapped production on Nymphomaniac, a drama directed by Lars von Triers which follows the story of a woman’s sexual history.
LaBeouf starred in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which marked his third and final turn as the enterprising and heroic Sam Witwicky. From the original Transformers released in 2007 (which earned over $700 million around the world in theatrical release and became the highest grossing DVD of the year) to the second installment in 2009, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, (which garnered global receipts upwards of $836 million,) Sam continued to find himself in the middle of a life and death struggle between warring robot legions on earth.
Additional film credits include Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps opposite Michael Douglas, the fourth installment of Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones” series, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, alongside Harrison Ford, D.J. Caruso’s Eagle Eye, the Anthony Minghella-scripted segment of New York I Love You, a romantic anthology, the popular thriller Disturbia, the Oscar® nominated animated film Surf’s Up, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, which won “Best Ensemble Cast” at the Sundance Film Festival, Emilio Estevez’s acclaimed drama Bobby, The Greatest Game Ever Played, I, Robot, Constantine, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, HBO’s “Project Greenlight” featuring The Battle of Shaker Heights produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and in 2003 he made his feature film debut in the comedy Holes, based on the best-selling book by Louis Sacher.
In 2007, Shia was named the “Star of Tomorrow” by the ShoWest convention of the National Association of Theater Owners, and in February 2008 he was awarded the BAFTA Orange Rising Star Award, which was voted for by the British general public. In addition, he was nominated for four Teen Choice Awards for Transformers, winning the Breakout Male Award, the Teen Choice Award for Movie Actor in a Horror/Thriller for his performance in Disturbia; as well as a Scream Award. In 2004, he was nominated for the Young Artists Award for “Leading Young Actor in a Feature Film” and the “Breakthrough Male Performance” at the MTV Movie Awards for his performance in Holes.
On television, LeBeouf garnered much praise from critics everywhere for his portrayal of “Louis Stevens” on the Disney Channel’s original series Even Stevens. In 2003, he earned a Daytime Emmy award for “Outstanding Performer in a Children’s Series” for his work on the highly rated family show.
LaBeouf currently resides in California.
TOMATOMETER CRITICS 28% | AUDIENCE 45%
CRITIC REVIEWS
November 25, 2013
Bruce Diones New Yorker Top Critic
This preposterous mashup of magical realism and romantic thriller is a fever dream of a movie, directed without a net by Fredrik Bond. Shia LaBeouf stars as a grieving son whose dead mother tells him to go to Bucharest (for no apparent reason). Once there, he falls in love with a punky concert cellist (Evan Rachel Wood) and uncovers some dirty doings by her thug of a husband (a mad Mads Mikkelsen). The script, by Matt Drake, is an overstuffed disaster—a clichéd stranger-in-a-strange-land scenario filled with drugs and violence—but the evocative and memorable images (the cinematographer is Roman Vasyanov) provide a tawdry high. LaBeouf, who throws himself wholeheartedly into every role regardless of its worth, is a fearless and fascinating actor, and his sincerity holds the entire sleazy mess together.
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November 15, 2013 | Rating: 1/4
- Glenn Kenny RogerEbert.com Top Critic
Every now and then, one comes across an indie film that's so showily awful, so drenched in bathos and cliché, and yet features such a uniformly sharp cast that you have to wonder: "What is it with actors?" Or, if one already knows what it is with actors, "Did this material actually look good on paper?"
The heavy-sigh-inducing "Charlie Countryman" is just such a motion picture. It's a thoroughly queasy pastiche of magic-realism/coming-of-age/romantic-thriller/bloody-Chiclets nonsense (and when I say "nonsense" I am substituting a much stronger word). It starts on a note familiar to anyone familiar with Sundance Film Festival entries in the ten years that followed "Reservoir Dogs." A young man, his face beaten to a pulp, is hanging from a rope tied to his leg and attached to a crane hoist at the other end; he dangles above a body of water as men with guns observe him from dry land. We hear the report of a shot fired, and into the water he falls, and…
It's just a dream, or is it a portent? Out of the bathtub pops Charlie, coming to, face intact, roused by dad Vincent D'Onofrio to visit the hospital to see his mom, Melissa Leo, taken off life support. Charlie not only has vivid dreams, he seems to have a sixth sense, as dead mom then visits him in the hospital corridor to tell him to "Go to Bucharest." And yes, "are you sure she didn't mean Budapest?" does become a running "joke" in the movie. After a brief pause to bother an ex-girlfriend played by Aubrey Plaza, there's Charlie on a plane.
How he comes to meet non-manic somewhat-damaged pixie almost-literal Dream Girl Gabi is a scenario that would not be enhanced by synopsizing. But meet her he does. She's played by Evan Rachel Wood (who's fine, despite the fact that there are maybe a hundred actual Romanian actresses who would have been fine too), and she's all punky and dour of countenance, and she plays the cello. Charlie, of course, falls for her like several years' worth of output from a brick fantasy. Skeptical Gabi warns him off: "Perhaps you have some sort of fantasy about sad woman from distant land who plays the cello." Perhaps a smart producer might have informed writer Matt Drake and director Fredrik Bond that self-consciously pointing out the hoariest commonplaces in your dumb hipster romantic fantasy doesn't automatically absolve you from them.
And Gabi has a husband, who's a Very Bad Man With Poor Social Skills (Mads Mikkelsen, who need only glower a lot to achieve full Mikkelsen effect), and Charlie gets kicked over to a youth hostel (a really grungily utopian youth hostel, I gotta admit) where he kicks it with Harry Potter vet Rupert Grint, here playing a wannabe porn performer (that's ONE way to distance yourself from the franchise). Later, in a great "what are the odds" "twist," Charlie and friends get in trouble at a strip club run by a former associate of Mikkelsen's character (Til Schweiger, completely wasted), and the plot, as they say, thickens. And what does the constantly reappearing salesman for those janitorial supplies have to do with the story? Is he supposed to be funny, or insightful? Or is he an inside joke that no one viewing this film will get?
As you might have inferred by now, I found all of this pretty insufferable. And Shia LaBeouf, in the title role, only made it all worse. Over the years LaBeouf has transmogrified from an appealing teen performer (I really enjoyed him in 2003's "Holes") into a too-efficient delivery system for overamped Michael Bay smarm. His compensating attempts at indie cred, or something like it, seem less convincing every time out, and his performance here is particularly lame. He reminds me here of Chuck Jones' obnoxious cartoon character Charlie Dog, who aggressively seeks an owner by pointing out his own "soulful brown eyes," which he then widens to disarming-in-the-wrong-way effect. The rest of the cast does, I think, more sincere work, but again, as they do, you can't help but wonder why. Because this is bad stuff, from stem to stern.
Other Reviews
The most tiresome person in the history of cinema … Shia LaBeouf in The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman. Photograph: Allstar/Millennium
Peter Bradshaw
Thursday 30 October 2014 21.00 GMT
Shia LaBeouf continues his relentless campaign to prove himself the most tiresome person in the history of cinema, or showbusiness, or the universe. He stars in this fantastically narcissistic and uninteresting drama set in Romania; the location may well have afforded all sorts of tax advantages to its investors and producers, but the film offers very little for the rest of us. LaBeouf plays the annoyingly surnamed Charlie Countryman, a guy who is deeply upset at the death of his mum (a sugary cameo phoned in by Melissa Leo).
She appears to him in a kind of vision, telling him to change his life and go to … Bucharest, of all the crazy, tax-efficient places. There, Charlie falls in love with beautiful, vulnerable cellist Gabi, played with an appalling foreign accent by Evan Rachel Wood. He protects her against an abusive estranged husband apparently called Nigel – Nigel? – played by super-scary foreign person Mads Mikkelsen. There is finally an aerial shot of a dead body, perhaps intended to recall the famous news image of Nicolae Ceausescu’s corpse. This is a movie with a chalk-outline around it.
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More Background on CharlieCountryman-movie.com
In the world of cinema, film websites serve as a crucial extension of a movie's presence, offering fans and viewers deeper insights into its production, cast, and themes. Charlie Countryman, a 2013 thriller directed by Fredrik Bond and starring Shia LaBeouf, is no exception. Its official website, CharlieCountryman-movie.com, provided a centralized platform for fans and media outlets alike to access information about the film. This website’s content, while modest in size, encapsulated the film’s narrative, critical reception, and promotional efforts.
The Film's Journey
Before exploring the website’s role, it’s essential to understand the broader context of Charlie Countryman. Released on November 15, 2013, this film blends action, romance, and magical realism in a narrative that defies convention. The protagonist, Charlie (Shia LaBeouf), is guided by visions of his deceased mother to Bucharest, where he falls in love with a woman named Gabi (Evan Rachel Wood). Gabi’s past, however, is complicated by a dangerous gangster, Nigel, played by Mads Mikkelsen, pulling Charlie into a violent and emotionally intense drama.
Despite its star-studded cast, the film was met with mixed reviews. Critics had polarizing views, with some praising its aesthetic and emotional intensity, while others derided it for its confusing narrative and lack of focus. The official website aimed to navigate these critiques, serving as a hub where fans could access trailers, cast bios, and promotional materials.
Website Structure and Offerings
Typical film websites around 2013 followed a consistent pattern. Such sites would include the following sections:
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Home Page: The main landing page for CharlieCountryman-movie.com featured the movie poster or an image of Shia LaBeouf’s character. A video trailer would have been readily accessible to draw in viewers.
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Cast and Crew: This section typically highlights the film's notable stars, including Shia LaBeouf, Evan Rachel Wood, and Mads Mikkelsen. Descriptions of their previous work, as well as their roles in Charlie Countryman, would have been detailed. Supporting actors such as Rupert Grint also had a significant draw for audiences, particularly Harry Potter fans.
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Press and Media: Press releases, articles, interviews, and other media coverage have been aggregated in this section. During the film’s release, promotional interviews and events were a key part of engaging with the media, and film sites often hosted links or summaries of such appearances.
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Synopsis: A detailed breakdown of the film’s story would provide context for potential viewers. Given that Charlie Countryman intertwines romantic themes with magical realism and crime, this section might have explained the film's surreal nature, helping viewers to understand its narrative structure.
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Critical Reception: One of the primary purposes of the website was to promote the film despite its mixed reception. With an audience rating of 45% and a critics' rating of 28% on platforms like Rotten Tomatoes, as reported by various sources, the site could emphasize positive reviews to balance public perception.
Critical Reception and Audience Feedback
Critical reception to Charlie Countryman varied significantly, with notable film critics expressing frustration with its narrative, while some audiences appreciated its raw emotional core. According to one review by Bruce Diones of The New Yorker, the film was seen as a “fever dream” due to its unpredictable plot structure and whimsical elements. However, Diones also acknowledged the “evocative and memorable images” created by cinematographer Roman Vasyanov. Meanwhile, Glenn Kenny of RogerEbert.com was far more critical, describing it as a "showily awful" indie film that failed to connect with its audience.
The press section of CharlieCountryman-movie.com focused on promoting favorable reviews to entice viewers. While critics lambasted the film for its perceived disjointedness, some segments of the audience enjoyed its quirky, offbeat style and its dedication to following Charlie’s deeply emotional journey. It is likely that the website leaned into the film’s unique style, encouraging viewers to appreciate the film’s visual storytelling and Shia LaBeouf’s intense performance.
Cultural and Social Significance
Though Charlie Countryman wasn’t a box office hit, it did contribute to the cultural landscape of early 2010s indie cinema. This was a time when films were increasingly blending genres, and Charlie Countryman encapsulated this trend by combining romance, magical realism, and gritty violence. The website played an integral role in engaging a niche audience that appreciated films with unconventional narratives.
Indie films during this period often attracted younger, more adventurous viewers who frequented film festivals like Sundance, where Charlie Countryman premiered. The website was pivotal in keeping this audience engaged post-release, offering updates, promotional content, and perhaps even access to exclusive interviews or behind-the-scenes footage. Additionally, the film’s stars—Shia LaBeouf, in particular—brought in fans eager to see his work outside of the mainstream blockbusters that had made him famous.
Press and Media Coverage
Media coverage of Charlie Countryman was dominated by discussions of Shia LaBeouf’s unpredictable career choices at the time. Transitioning from blockbusters like Transformers to more niche films, LaBeouf’s involvement in Charlie Countryman was part of his efforts to solidify himself as a serious actor capable of complex, layered performances. Websites covering the film's release often commented on his career trajectory, questioning whether this indie film was a step in the right direction.
Meanwhile, Evan Rachel Wood’s portrayal of Gabi, the melancholic cellist, was generally well-received, with some critics noting her ability to breathe life into an otherwise underdeveloped character. The film's international setting in Bucharest also garnered attention, with some journalists exploring how the choice of location impacted the film's aesthetic.
Audience Engagement and Known For
CharlieCountryman-movie.com served as a direct line to the film’s target audience. Visitors to the site have been greeted with striking visuals, promotional trailers, and information about the film’s availability on streaming platforms and DVDs post-theatrical release. With a runtime of 108 minutes, the film wasn’t particularly long, but its complex blend of genres and plotlines meant that audiences needed context to fully appreciate its ambition.
One way the website engaged its audience was through social media integration. During the early 2010s, social media was rapidly becoming a crucial promotional tool for films, and CharlieCountryman-movie.com used platforms like Facebook and Twitter to foster discussions, encourage sharing of content, and create a community around the film.
Charlie Countryman remains an intriguing example of early 2010s indie filmmaking, defined by its genre-blending narrative and strong performances from its cast. The website CharlieCountryman-movie.com would have been a key element in promoting the film, offering fans and curious viewers a way to engage with its content. Despite the film’s critical reception, the website maintained a loyal fan base and contributed to the broader discussion of LaBeouf’s career and the indie film movement during that period. By examining the website and its surrounding context, it becomes clear how essential digital platforms have become in shaping the way we experience and remember films.
