I now live
near a Fry's Electronics. But it's ok, I
don't like having money anyways.
On to the
review(s)!
I've been
doing some catching up on good
movies and I wanted to share two of them with you. On Monday, I watched my newly-owned BluRay of
Zero Dark Thirty and yesterday I had
time to view my Netflix copy of Shame. Two completely different films that are
similar in that they both unfold with painstakingly slow efficiency.
Zero Dark Thirty is about the hunt for
Osama Bin Laden, but it is much more than that.
By taking the route of following one CIA agent, Maya (Jessica Chastain)
from 2001 until the raid on Bin Laden's compound in 2012, it charts a very
difficult and oftentimes uncomfortable course.
This movie is not just about how we found America's most wanted
terrorist, it also highlights how we have changed and adapted to danger over
the last decade.
Throughout
the film, Maya is forced to come to terms with the very harsh tactics that
America was willing to use to get confessions and information from known and
suspected terrorists. In fact, much of
the beginning of the film highlights our torture techniques to the point that
if you aren't squirming uncomfortably in your seats, you're probably former CIA
Black Ops. We follow Maya from one lead to another, one country to another,
always with world events occurring in the background. Occasionally those world events happen in the
foreground, surprising both the characters and the audience with their
devastation and ferocity.
Of course, we
all know how the film ends. But the last
30 minutes, in which we actually witness a fictionalized account of the raid on
Bin Laden's compound, is so amazingly captivating that I found myself unwilling
to blink for long stretches of time.
Director
Kathryn Bigelow is now my favorite go-to director for honest, gritty, realistic
takes on the trials and tribulations of war.
Shame, meanwhile, is all about Brandon
(Michael Fassbender). Although for some
damn reason I kept hearing it as Random and I thought that would be a pretty
cool name. Brandon is a sex addict. We know this, because the entire film is
basically dedicated to reminding the audience of this fact whenever possible. His days are perfectly routine, and his every
action seems predicated on the knowledge that he will be able to free up enough
time to masturbate, have sex, or pay for a hooker.
His routine
is interrupted, however, when his little sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) shows up
and begs to crash on his couch. Now that
he no longer has the freedom to do what he wants, when he wants, he starts to
lose control.
Where Zero Dark Thirty was a slow film that
eventually built up to a tense, fantastic last 30-or-so minutes, Shame is a slow film that eventually
builds up to a climactic final 3 minutes.
And by climactic, I mean that something happens that doesn't take 15
minutes of slow, lingering camera-work to digest.
Shame is not a bad movie at all, but it
is a patience-tester. If you want your
plot spoon fed to you, or if you don't like movies where you actually have to
pay attention to the characters to see their emotions rather than have them
tell you what they're thinking, you're going to have a bad time with this one.
Also, it's
NC-17 due to gratuitous early shots of Lil' Fassbender and lots of interspersed
female nudity. The entire film is about a sex addict, after all.
At least I
can now say that I've seen Michael Fassbender urinate, so there's something.
No comments:
Post a Comment