You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Eastern Promises' category.
I had a hard time explaining what I thought of Eastern Promises. Then I went back to watch the review from Ebert and Roeper and they summed it up perfectly as a “weirdly formulaic genre piece.” There’s a lot of great stuff here, including the performances by Viggo Mortensen and Armin Mueller-Stahl and some stylish scenes of graphic violence, all trapped in a very straight-forward Russian mob genre flick.
Read the rest of this entry »
Much as it pains me to admit it, I agree with Jared on this one. I was a big fan of the last Cronenberg/Mortensen outing A History of Violence, but this one was lacking. As Jared stated, I don’t think it was a question of bad acting or directing, the screenplay was too weak to allow anyone to shine. There were a couple of good scenes that were like bright lights in an otherwise dismal night, but these were too few to be able to make me highly recommend the movie.
Yeah, the title of this post is a When In Rome reference. You wanna make something of it?
I forgot this movie pretty much as soon as I finished watching it. I’m writing this recap a few weeks after watching the movie, and I think I can vividly remember maybe five scenes. One, of course, is the bathroom fight scene. Which is notable not just for the extent of the nudity, but for the dichotomy of badassitude and sensitivity it bring to the table. I would not be surprised in the least if they filmed the scene first and then hired a scriptwriter to make up a story around it. Or at least sold the backers based on the scene. It will, without a doubt, be one of my favorite movie scenes of the year. Read the rest of this entry »
Recent Comments