I’ll admit this isn’t the best film I’ve ever seen, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone below me has made it out to seem.

The whole beginning and it’s over the top family values is to show how Tom has assimilated into what he thinks is family life, which since he doesn’t understand what a real one is like, he is overly nice and over the top, because he doesn’t know any better. It’s also clear that he has mental issues, since he tried to get rid of his “bad half” even though it ended up catching up to him when his picture was on the news and his true self was forced out. And the whole fight scene with his son and how he defends his dad’s life is perhaps illustrating a theory that this kind of behavior is passed down through family members and even though the boy didn’t realize his dad was a murderer, he already had it in him to be one too.

And lastly, I think Tom’s fighting skills are extremely realistic to his character, since that’s what he did for a long time before he became “normal.” I’m taking a self-defense class that is teaching us similar moves and despite the warnings of what could happen if we use these moves, it was still a wake-up call while watching this movie to see a person using them.

This movie features this apparently standard conceit in film wherein a woman being brutalized by a man starts to get into it. I will never understand this and it turns me off from every movie that contains it, that enough people would consider that realistic and important to a film enough to include it.

“Yikes you’re beating me up and forcing me to have sex with you… mm oh yeah wait this is hot never mind”

PLOT/DEVELOPMENT OF CHARACTERS != FURTHERED

OK, I admit, not to everyone’s tastes. However, I really, really liked it.

Some others have said that’s it’s hokey, unbelievable and unimaginative…

...but I think it’s a subversive study of identity and relationships hung on pulpy B-Movie conventions. As such, I think it’s a sly, deceptive movie.

Also, this is not a film about plot, but character.

At least, that’s what I think! :)

I picked up A History of Violence because it was directed by David Cronenberg, and I was not disappointed. Overall, it’s a very good movie, and I appreciate what was said in the DVD extras about exploring the nature of violence and so on.

My only objection is that there was some discussion about how the violence in the film was “realistic.” I don’t think it was realistic at all (not that I would know). To me, most of the violence looked like the flashy sequences you see in an action film. Violence, yes, but artistic, choreographed violence (with lots of blood and gore). When the character of Tom Stall goes into action, he doesn’t perform like you’d imagine a street thug would; you have the impression he was trained in the Special Forces… taking on multiple attackers and coming out alive is quite a feat, and I doubt that it occurs much in reality.

I didn’t see the previews so I wasn’t sure what the movie was about beyond the title. At first I thought it had an interesting premise, but it soon turned ridiculous. The graphic scenes just cheapened it for me, and the mobster stuff was just unbelievable. At the end I was laughing when I think the intention was to make me sad.

Screenwriter Ernest Lehman said that Alfred Hitchcock had an array of scenes he wanted to put into a movie, but could never work them into any of the pictures that he did. Apparently, he and Lehman were supposed to be working on The Wreck of the Mary Deare, but it was a project in which Hitch was totally uninterested, so he wasted their writing time talking about what kind of things he would like to write and shoot. When they had a conference with studio bigwigs to report on the progress of their still-not-started script, Hitch asked their indulgence so he could get their feedback on a project he had in mind. He proceeded to describe all the scenes he wanted to shoot, glossing over the connecting bits he hadn’t come up with yet, and tied them all together in such a way that the movie execs ended up dismissing him from the Wreck and compelling him to do the film he was describing. It became North by Northwest.

Somehow, I get the feeling Cronenberg shot A History of Violence this way. He had a couple of fairly graphic sex scenes and quite a few more very graphic fight scenes he wanted to use in a picture somehow. He wove these scenes around some very one-dimensional characters and together with a very unbelievable, vapid, and cliched storyline and – voila!—A History of Violence was born. Or maybe he just got inspired by The Long Kiss Goodnight, which did this latent-killer-disguised-as-middle-American theme so much better, and took a very unoriginal shortcut in the process.

Sad because, individually, I usually like the work of the bulk of the actors in this film, but together, I just didn’t believe them. I didn’t buy the family relationship. I didn’t buy that one guy who was characterized by his brother as so violent and deranged that he even disgusted violent career criminals could suddenly change and become Mr. White Bread America so completely his wife didn’t recognize him as anything else and yet—after 16 years of middle America—he suddenly busts out the “I’ll kill you with my bare hands” moves as if he did it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week. I didn’t buy that a nerdy smart kid who has been harrassed and picked on every day of his school life and accepted it docilely is suddenly going to beat up on his aggressor and win. Beat up on his aggressor and lose, maybe, but if he is that good at fighting, why didn’t he just deck the guys months before and get it over with? And then the best his dad can come up with is “Son, you know we don’t handle our problems with violence?” And this is supposed to be an understanding, loving parent-child relationship? Maybe a schizophrenic, the-director-can’t-figure-out-what-kind-of-family-we-have-here relationship…

I hated the unfinished business throughout this movie. Is Cronenberg some kind of attention-deficit-disorder director? For example, there is a scene where the son Jack and his girlfriend are sitting around talking. Next, you see the bully driving by in the pick-up truck. He and his bully buddy decide to go teach Jack a lesson, cutting a u-turn in front of the vagrant homicidal maniacs in the process. Suddenly, we see the vagrant homicidal maniacs talking about where they are going to get money. Huh? No follow-up to what happened with Jack and the bully—nothing, nada, zip.

The only character I did like was William Hurt and I only liked him in a sick, black-humor kind of way. If the whole movie had been shot in that kind of sick, black-humor type of vein, it might have salvaged itself. But alas—it took itself way too seriously for the flawed project it is.

This movie is poorly written, poorly directed—well, I could go on, but I would just start repeating unFunGames in the way Cronenberg has repeated the worst parts of way too many action films and we know where that kind of thing would get us.

Lean script. Good directing and acting. Overlooked at the Oscars, but hey that’s a Hollywood industry self-congratulatory show. Best to be your own judge in films.

This movie left me feeling disappointed. I liked a lot of the cast, but even they couldn’t keep me interested. It was boring and predictable.

I had high expectations for this movie, since it was nominated for the Best Picture Golden Globe. However, this is yet another awful movie in one of the worst years for movies in recent memory.

It’s based on a “graphic novel” (which just means a comic book for people that are ashamed of using the term), but I have a hard time believing that comics are this stupid. This is a prime example of how Hollywood can rape source material and the average American dolt, who knows nothing of good cinema, can be fooled into thinking it’s great.

Lets start with the first 30 minutes of the movie. This is the big set up where they shove the family angle down your throat. You see how they all get along and love each other. This would be fine, but you know exactly why they’re doing it. You know the plot of the movie. You know all of this is to just make Aragorn’s past be more impactful to his family. Sorry amateur filmmakers, but this kind of set up doesn’t work when we already know what’s going to happen.

The absolute funniest part of the movie though is Aragorn’s son and his little subpot where he’s getting bullied at school. Yeah, he’s a teenager, but apparently bullies exist in high school. There’s a scene where he’s playing softball and the school bully hits him a flyball, and the kid catches it, so that’s why they’re now enemies….because he caught his flyball. No joke. He wants to fight him after that. I swear to God. I am not making this up. This isn’t a cheesy 80’s movie I accidentally put in the DVD player instead of A History of Violence. Oh and then there’s the scene where the bully pushes him too far and he uses super human nerd strength to beat him up, even though his punches probably couldn’t harm Mike Brady’s white blood cells.

Oh but wait, there’s an even better awful part in the movie. There’s these 2 guys travelling around the country killing people, so they decide to rob Hidalgo’s cafe. So they go in and they’re all like “yo, give me some coffee” and he’s like “you cannot wield it!” and they get pissed off and point a gun at him. So one of the guys then commands the other one to rape a woman to show them that they mean business (because apparently armed robbery isn’t evidence). This is when Baby Teeth McGee gets pissed and kills them both.

The movie may have been OK, but there’s way too many idiotic moments in the movie that distracts me. Idiotic moments that I hope were in the graphic novel, because if the writer of this movie put them in there then he should be writing Steve Martin and Vin Diesel movies instead.

Watch it…if you are a dolt.

I didn’t like this movie. Maybe it was a good film, maybe it wasn’t but it, and the audience reaction to it when I saw it in the cinema, really disturbed and upset and depressed me. I wish I hadn’t seen it.

On a different note, William Hurt’s performance, which has had the words “bravura” and “showboat” applied to it? Was just ridiculous. Every minute he was on screen I was thinking Is this some sort of joke that I’m not getting? It was terrible.