Mood:
a-okTopic: Entertaining Insights
We're comin' around to 'Oscar season' in the film industry which means (in a nutshell) that all the ultra-violent pics coming out for the rest of the year are gonna be drenched with artistic 'worthiness'.
Whatever.
In any event, my personal verdict's in on Eastern Promises: I've gotta go with four-stars, actually.
This is the second pic combining Viggo Mortensen and director David Cronenberg, and I must say that some tension is evident in the production...
Seriously, though, I gotta say that Cronenberg's approach in these pictures (the first of which was, naturally, A History of Violence) is friggin' brutal to the point of sickening. I believe that Cronenberg's film-techniques are something of a product of the success of 2004's Passion of the Christ, which raised the bar for violence in American cinema (something that would otherwise be hard-core torture porn was made almost completely justified by the unreproachable religious subjectmatter; less spiritually-inclined splatterfests that followed were ushered in simply because the floodgates were opened).
But let me say that I greatly admire Gibson's 'Passion', and while it may have provided Hollywood with a questionable legacy of allowing insane gore to dominate the screen even more than before it was a bridge that would've been crossed anyway. A film like 'The Passion' merely accelerated this process (Unfortunately, I predict this trend will contine to its logical conclusion, too...)
...I think that's the second time I've referenced that movie. Huh...
Anyway, Cronenberg's a veteran of the B-movie horror scene, where he first made his mark, and these days he's seen fit to splatter a few Stephen King-grade horror scenes into stories that are otherwise Oscar-calibur.
Well, not quite. If he did that then his movies would suck, and they don't. Eastern Promises takes a serious 'no flinch' approach to its gore. There are three bloody scenes (four, if you count a frozen corpse... and five if you count a fainting pregnant minor slipping and falling over her own 'bloody show'...) and these scenes are, indeed, incidental and instrumental to the drama surrounding them.
Yeah: guys having their throats slit with straight-razors is bloody stuff, and downright horrifying, but is showing the act from start to finish without stylizing it or cutting away really that vulgar?
Yes, it is. And that's kinda the point of the film. One of them, anyway. If you don't accept this as a valid part of the film's message then it's not going to work for you (and, conversely, if you're a young teenage boy who gets-off on as much carnage and gore as possible, you'd be even less happy with the other 97-percent of the film that lacks said atrocities).
Roger Ebert's review alludes to the fact that the bathhouse fighting scene will set a new standard in the field of movie fights. He's probably right. I don't normally squirm in my seat during a movie, especially if I'm so engrossed in the flick as to be in that transient state of out-of-body bliss that is the weakening of the fourth wall. But during this scene I was snapped around like a rubber band: one minute entranced by the dramatic turns of the story, soaking up the characters' nebulous facial expressions, and the next I'm literally clutching at body parts in sudden, nearly psychosomatic pain and terror.
From granite-like mental immersion to terrified panic in under ten seconds?
And to still have the desire to 'wade back into the pool' afterwards?
Yeah, that's a good film alright.
