Anodyne
Monday, October 10, 2005
 

To David Cronenberg's A History of Violence.

I had been expecting a fast paced hardboiled crime film, something along the lines of Reservoir Dogs. History actually turned out to be a metaphysical black comedy employing motifs derived from hardboiled film to striking effect. Cronenberg is a much better director than I remembered; many of his shots reminded me of pictures by Philip-Lorca DiCorcia and William Eggleston, and at some point I quit watching the film as a film and started thinking of it more as a succession of moving art photographs. A peculiar way to watch a movie, but one that worked for me. And Viggo Mortensen deserves an Academy award for the way his accent and body language shift almost imperceptibly between family man "Tom" and psychopathic hitman "Joey."
- posted by cjb @ 12:50 PM


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