Watched: Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

So I picked this movie to watch last night because I have recently decided that I woud like to watch all of Tilda Swinton's movies. I started on this one because, well, I like Francis Bacon's paintings, so why not? I remembered seeing one of his paintings at the MoMA a few years back, which I broke the rules to photograph (oh yeah, I'm bad to the bone, did you know that?). It's very haunting I think, not unlike Love is the Devil. Although the movie gets a little boring in some parts, and I could stare at this all day.

Now I did try to do this earlier, watching all of an actor's films, with Clint Eastwood's body of work. The problem that I ran into of course, is that Eastwood only really plays about three different people: an outlaw, a cop, or a caricature of one or both. All of his characters have something to do with these elements: he's either fighting the man, he is the man, or he is some nudge-nudge wink-wink version of one or both of those. It got kind of boring. Also, he gets decreasingly hot after the '80s. Thus ended the love affair, although he'll always be Blondie/Joe to me!

Anyway. Love is the Devil. Interesting movie, sort of abstract, in some ways reminded me of that film Dahmer that came out a while back, the one that starred pre-Hurt Locker Jeremy Renner, in that it's a deeply introspective character study. There is a lot of dream sequence, contemplative voiceover, symbolically posed tableaus. It's a story about one man's disintegration when faced with love, especially when the nature of that love is... complicated. Tilda shows up as a total kook, some pot-bellied, mangled-tooth local at Bacon's bar where he spends most of his time getting drunk and saying mean, clever things to his friends. But really, this woman is a true chamelon.
Awesome. And she's not afraid to get ugly. Because she is FUG in this movie. Those eyebrows! I'm not even showing you the teeth. You should thank me for that.

Less awful? Young, fucking ridiculously hot Daniel Craig, who plays Bacon's lover, George Dyer. There's actually a bathtub scene in which Craig shows it ALL and which I did not take a picture of mostly because I feel a little weird about putting nudity on here, you know, lest the rents ever stumble upon it but... man. He looks good. And he's in a state of undress for most of the movie, as he should be with those arms.

The director, John Maybury, also did The Jacket which I kind of liked and think got a bad rap because people were expecting Adrien Brody to do like, The Pianist 2: Electric Boogaloo, as well as The Edge of Love. He seems to like Tilda and Keira, and I in turn like him for liking them.
What I also like: his use of fish-eye and blurring effect for the barroom scenes, which I think goes a long way in creating the heady, lazy, dingy atmosphere that Bacon loved. A lot of these scenes were done normally, but sometimes he would transition from somewhere else to the bar with this kind of shot, and it kind of looks like you're watching the crowd through a glass of booze or something. I like it. I remember watching a documentary on Bacon in one of Al Nigrin's classes, which Wikipedia tells me was called The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, in which he visits the bar and the camera crew follows him. It had a feel very similar to the picture above.

So yeah. Liked this. Excited to see what else Tilda's got up her sleeve.