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I saw this new Cronenberg today having read Boy Racer in debate about it on the review thread of another board -- and I felt for him, because his antagonists' criteria were all about whether you see Viggo's bum.
However, I didn't like the film quite as much as most reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes, who credit it almost at 90% across the board, and more than once praise it as a masterpiece.
In the flicks itself, my experience was of mindwander during certain sections... longeurs, talky passages, sagging scenes. With hindsight and the benefit of those reviews, I agree with the critic who suggested the problem is Cronenberg's perception of, and representation of, "normal life".
SPOILERZ . . . . A key example is Tom Stall's son being the class wimp. When he strips off in gym, the guy is built. He's cute. He's smart. He's funny. This isn't Napoleon Dynamite. Yet he's bullied because the other guys are like clothing-catalog models, and he's just relatively good-looking.
Tom's home life before it all kicks off just feels borderline Pleasantville or Truman Show, too 1950s to be true. The Dakota-moppet is almost Stepford-robotic. The married couple's sex-treat is Grease or American Graffiti-era fantasies of a drive-in with a cheerleader. They're all about the homemade pie, the damn fine coffee. Instead of goodbye, they say see you in church Sunday. Even the high-school hierarchies, really, are like something from the 80s at latest.
When it kicks in with the violence, everything's hunkydory: rapid, brutal, the kind of choreographed action people sometimes call balletic, which is maybe accurate in that ballet hurts. One review came up with the nice image that when a bullet hits in this movie, the victim gets teleported to Planet Cronenberg, where he's mutilated and mutated, then boom-tubed back to the set with an effects-shop of horrorshow latex and make-up warping his face. That stuff's all good. That feels right.
It's the parts when things are meant to be right that feel wrong.
quote:Originally posted by kovacs: A key example is Tom Stall's son being the class wimp. When he strips off in gym, the guy is built. He's cute. He's smart. He's funny. This isn't Napoleon Dynamite. Yet he's bullied because the other guys are like clothing-catalog models, and he's just relatively good-looking.
...albeit clothing catalogue models who look infeasibly like Paul Rudd. I don't know, I rather like that he was basically quite like the rest of them -it meant that when he put the guy who'd been picking on him in a coma (or maybe just hospital) it wasn't heroic, just a fair fight -and whilst it was immensely satisfying I thought that played quite nicely into the way violence was portrayed in the film. At least in the sense that whilst it might not represent a solution it can, quite frequently, be i. satisfying.
Has anyone here read the comic? If so how faithful an adaptation was it? I'm wondering specifically how the comic ended, whether the resolution was ambiguous there as well...
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I wondered about the comic, too. I read that it was in the same series as Road to Perdition, which I didn't enjoy very much as a film.
quote:I rather like that he was basically quite like the rest of them -it meant that when he put the guy who'd been picking on him in a coma (or maybe just hospital) it wasn't heroic, just a fair fight
I thought that sequence worked well in keeping with what I understood to be one of the film's main aims -- making us question the way we experience and enjoy screen violence. One review reported that audiences always cheered during that fight. I didn't actually whoop in the half-empty theater, but inside I was all ho-yeah, kill that bastard, just like I was during the scenes where Tom unleashed and kicked ass. Whereas during the scenes where a "bad guy" threatened violence, we clench up with forboding and dread. To its credit, the film did make me aware of the way I was applauding some really graphic and fairly gratuitous beatings, just because one of the people I'd classified as "hero" was doling them out.
But prior to the son snapping and suddenly being a mean streetfighter, I don't think we'd had any sense that he was capable of it. He was muscular, but that doesn't mean he had those moves in him. He backed down, gibbered and slumped when the jock tried to rile him. He didn't seem the type.
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I thought the casting of Mortensen was important here, not because he's an underrated actor, but because of his physique: he's not overly tall or muscly, but does have a kind of latent power in that wiry lean body. And the fact that he's naturally softly spoken and quite unassuming means when the violence erupts it's more dangerous or notable somehow. I thought the casting of the son was also good, because they'd managed to get a teenager who was in that gawkly phase. He looked like he might grow up tall, but at the moment he's all lanky angles and awkwardness- probably why he wasn't good at sport and disliked it. I agree that the bullying angle wasn't obvious, but I'm wondering if there's an element of US high school interaction that as UK viewers we wouldn't be familiar with- I think that the jock culture in schools over there is far stronger than any equivalent here. Hence a quiet geek doing unexpectedly well in PE would be enough to pique the Head Jock. Perhaps some of our American colleagues could verify this.
I also thought the cheesy perfection of their pre-violence homelife was kinda the point, I mean it's bordering on the ridiculous how simperingly ideal every aspect of their small town life is- down to the local sheriff who everybody calls by his first name, who is so protective of "the nice folks" of the town. I read it as an extension of the opening scenes of Blue Velvet, with perhaps the suggestion that what Stall had tried to create for himself was unrealistic.
-------------------- What I object to is the colour of some of these wheelie bins and where they are left, in some areas outside all week in the front garden. Posts: 4941
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Am I the only one who thought it was a really sad moment when the son wigged out and beat up the two jocks? I really felt like he'd demeaned himself by doing that - it wasn't anywhere near as satisfying as when he just talked himself out of the fight, dissipating the tension with his body language and staying one step ahead of the jock intellectually - even making his cronies laugh at him. The guy's all talk. We hear he's been riling Jack all year, but he's never actually done anything about it. So the beating Jack hands out actually positions Jack as more of a bully than the people that were bugging him.
Although there is a stretch of plausibility that he could lay waste to them so efficiently, he doesn't really do anything that spectacular. He kicks one of them in the gonads, then slams the other one into the lockers and kicks him while he's down and smashes his jaw (or nose, maybe). Anyway, I think the reason behind this is because the scene demonstrates that the reason resorting violence is a Bad Thing is not because you might get your ass kicked, but that even if you wind up without a scratch on you, you end up debasing yourself.
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: Anyway, I think the reason behind this is because the scene demonstrates that the reason resorting violence is a Bad Thing is not because you might get your ass kicked, but that even if you wind up without a scratch on you, you end up debasing yourself.
Even though I did enjoy that scene, that's probably true; and that ties in nicely with (what I interpreted as) his fear of turning out like his father, even before he knew Tom's 'real' history. I don't think that was ever explicitly stated, so I might just be making it up, but there did seem to be some sort of fear in their interactions that didn't seem to be entirely as a result of Jack's fear of the 'mob dad' -particularly the way the two characters relate to each other when the son had just shot Fogarty.
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