One of my favorites of the latter-day David Cronenberg films (post-Existenz, I don't know why I make that distinction but it feels right to me), although really it's a tie with A History of Violence which I also love a lot. Basically Cronenberg + Viggo Mortensen + punch kick gun fight stuff + weirdly tense atmospherics + random dashes of humor = GOLD. I haven't seen Cosmopolis and frankly, from what I read of the story it's kind of down on my list. And A Dangerous Method, which I'll write about later on for Fassbender February, is very nuanced and acting but honestly gets a little boring at times.
Why do I love it? I just think the pacing, the writing and the cinematography are all really great and interesting. But unlike A Dangerous Method, which is also really interesting, this is also really entertaining. There's some slightly unreal or heightened and yet still sort of grounded about Cronenberg's stuff that sort of reminds of Lynch's stuff. That same sense of "this-is-both-possible-and-not-possible". I mean obviously the stranger elements of Lynch's stuff is probably not feasible but I mean more the way that the characters interact with each other and the world around them. The writing in this film is so quotable, just a lot of really great lines and a lot of really great character notes so that you totally understand each of them very well.
Naomi Watts is great, also. I mean we all know Viggo is great and we all know Vincent Cassel is great. But Naomi, I just always love what she does. Even in the Painted Veil which I actually broke my sockets while watching due to excessive eye-rolling, I still loved what she did.
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