EASTERN PROMISES
EASTERN PROMISES
August 14 2010, DVD, home living room, from Netflix
And now we come to the not-as-good one, and the disappointment is only dulled by how long it's been since I watched A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. I expected much the same thing, but it's not at all (and displays Viggo's range, though we have now firmly established that he can put foot to ass). And this movie, while more complex on the surface, suffers from the problem of being quite slow-moving, almost boring, with only a few extremely vicious (and gory) setpieces. It's weird; it almost doesn't feel like a David Cronenberg film except in those moments, but then I remember M BUTTERFLY and I have to shake my head. Like M BUTTERFLY, EASTERN PROMISES is gorgeous to look at (Peter Suschitzky on cinematography on both), filled with fascinating characters and complex history, a melancholy sense of longing, and have scripts that just... aren't all that. It's as if he has to occasionally take a break from the usual psychosexual mayhem and just make a nice, mellow art movie.
This is not to say that EASTERN PROMISES is bad, and really it only suffers by comparison. Russian mafia gangsters in London; a dead, pregnant prostitute found by the oddly boring and passive Naomi Watts (seriously; it's like she's on valium to keep from screaming, but on valium nonetheless), who saves the baby's life and then endeavors to find the baby's family, meanwhile resisting falling in love with the bouncing boo boo - and also resisting falling in love with the nicest of the gangsters (our man Viggo) and trying not to get fucking killed by the Vory v Zakone. The head of the local neighborhood Vory is played by Armin Mueller-Stahl, who gave me uncomfortable flashbacks to his role in SHINE (but they were apt), and he's got a loose-cannon crazypants son played by the divine Vincent Cassel. And there's some other annoying side characters, some of them played by notables Sinead Cusack and Jerzy Skolimowski, but like I said, they're annoying. They are there just to put additional psychological pressure on Watts's character, and they aren't needed.
This movie is, however, justifiably famous for the bathhouse smackdown, featuring a very naked, very tattooed Viggo knocking hellfire out of some dudes, and getting the shit kicked out of him himself. That's a fine example of Cronenbergism - a kind of cringing body horror, watching a super-skinny naked man getting thrown around a tiled room, stabbed, punched, and getting up to hand out more beatdown tickets. It just looks like it hurts. It's awesome, and one of the best fight scenes I've ever seen. The movie's worth it just for that, but dude, it comes rather late in the movie, and I was starting to get annoyed. Unfortunate.
August 14 2010, DVD, home living room, from Netflix
And now we come to the not-as-good one, and the disappointment is only dulled by how long it's been since I watched A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. I expected much the same thing, but it's not at all (and displays Viggo's range, though we have now firmly established that he can put foot to ass). And this movie, while more complex on the surface, suffers from the problem of being quite slow-moving, almost boring, with only a few extremely vicious (and gory) setpieces. It's weird; it almost doesn't feel like a David Cronenberg film except in those moments, but then I remember M BUTTERFLY and I have to shake my head. Like M BUTTERFLY, EASTERN PROMISES is gorgeous to look at (Peter Suschitzky on cinematography on both), filled with fascinating characters and complex history, a melancholy sense of longing, and have scripts that just... aren't all that. It's as if he has to occasionally take a break from the usual psychosexual mayhem and just make a nice, mellow art movie.
This is not to say that EASTERN PROMISES is bad, and really it only suffers by comparison. Russian mafia gangsters in London; a dead, pregnant prostitute found by the oddly boring and passive Naomi Watts (seriously; it's like she's on valium to keep from screaming, but on valium nonetheless), who saves the baby's life and then endeavors to find the baby's family, meanwhile resisting falling in love with the bouncing boo boo - and also resisting falling in love with the nicest of the gangsters (our man Viggo) and trying not to get fucking killed by the Vory v Zakone. The head of the local neighborhood Vory is played by Armin Mueller-Stahl, who gave me uncomfortable flashbacks to his role in SHINE (but they were apt), and he's got a loose-cannon crazypants son played by the divine Vincent Cassel. And there's some other annoying side characters, some of them played by notables Sinead Cusack and Jerzy Skolimowski, but like I said, they're annoying. They are there just to put additional psychological pressure on Watts's character, and they aren't needed.
This movie is, however, justifiably famous for the bathhouse smackdown, featuring a very naked, very tattooed Viggo knocking hellfire out of some dudes, and getting the shit kicked out of him himself. That's a fine example of Cronenbergism - a kind of cringing body horror, watching a super-skinny naked man getting thrown around a tiled room, stabbed, punched, and getting up to hand out more beatdown tickets. It just looks like it hurts. It's awesome, and one of the best fight scenes I've ever seen. The movie's worth it just for that, but dude, it comes rather late in the movie, and I was starting to get annoyed. Unfortunate.