Posts Tagged ‘Viggo Mortensen’

Road to redemption?

James Drew has the chance to talk with John Hillcoat, the director of The Road (2009), during his visit to Brussels.

There’s no way that The Road (2009), filmed by Australian director John Hillcoat (The Proposition (2005)) could ever be described as upbeat, life-affirming, or having much good to say about the human condition.

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With a whimper…

‘Not with a bang, but a whimper’ – that was how poet and playwright T.S. Eliot once declared that the world would end, and there is no doubt that the most powerful cinematic evocations of Armageddon have made this concept their central tenet.

As with Michael Haneke’s Le temps du loup (The Time of the Wolf) (2003), John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009) thrusts us into the world that exists after a nameless, cataclysmic event – animal and plant life has been decimated, leaving the survivors who choose to carry on living to forage for whatever food can be found.

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Saddle up

A chance to enjoy an entertaining (if conventional) Western…

It has a habit of coming back ’atcha, does the Western – while other genres have a tendency to become moribund over time, such as the traditional musical or the traditional vampire flick, the Old West is a tradition that a variety of directors have returned to over recent years, such as with Kevin Costner’s well-received Open Range (2003) and, a decade or so previously, Clint Eastwood’s marvellous fin de siècle opus, Unforgiven (1992).

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All his own work?

Carl Fogaty: Any last words before I blow your brains out, you miserable prick?
Tom Stall: I should have killed you back in Philly.
Carl Fogaty: Yeah Joey, you should have.

It’s all, ahem, ‘Viggo’ for the mo – but one can but hope that a discussion of what is perhaps the best mainstream thriller since Se7en (1995) will not bring too many complaints…

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Classic Cronenberg

He can seemingly do no wrong; Canadian David Cronenberg, responsible for some of the finest examples of films that really do hit you where you live, has crossed the Atlantic to the UK for his first effort ever to be filmed completely outside his home country.

And his adoption of Viggo Mortenson, as Scorsese did with De Niro in the 1970s/80s, is proving to be perhaps the finest modern director/actor partnership – you only have to go as far back as the superlative A History of Violence (2005) to see the potential that David Cronenberg so obviously saw in the Lord of the Rings star.

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