Posts Tagged ‘violence’

Too black and white

Bille August (Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1997), Les Miserables (1998)) heads up this multi-European country co-production, but his take on the tale of the relationship between a white South African prison guard and Nelson Mandela is flawed from the outset.

Approaching the immensely marketable material (James Gregory’s autobiography, detailing how his life became entwined with apartheid’s enemy-number-one Nelson Mandela because of his fluency in Xhosa, Mandela’s mother tongue) purely from a predictable, ‘How long will transformation take?’ perspective, badly vitiates the story’s suspense, rendering what could so easily have been a nuanced, subtle exploration of two men’s psychologies trite and curiously bereft of passion.

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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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Many of you will know that I am an unashamed Batman fan, and always have been. I was quite happy – eager, even, that my eldest son (who’s 10) should come to see it with me. For me, it’s the same thing as the Dads who drag their children of two years or so to see Nohope United every Saturday when the poor buggers have no idea what’s going on. I at least waited until I thought was mentally mature enough to get something out of the experience.

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Kicking

Without doubt, the central characters in writer-director Nick Love’s seminal study of football/violence-related male bonding, The Football Factory, would give me a good kicking for the poncey review that follows.

Similar treatment would doubtless be dished out by the real-life ‘gentlemen of the terraces’, whose Saturday mass-brawls inspired the John King novel from which this electrifying insight into the psyche of displaced masculine identity was adapted.

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London brawling

Welcome to being Tommy Johnson. His is a world of dead-end jobs, no prospects and an uncertain future. His story is set out pretty well in his opening voiceover: “There’s nothing different about me. I’m just another bored male, approaching 30, in a dead-end job, who lives for the weekend. Casual sex, watered-down lager, heavily cut drugs. And occasionally kicking fuck out of someone.”

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