TOO MUCH BLOODY PERSPECTIVE ON CRONENBERG

Over at Caption Jockey’s Too Much Bloody Perspective you can find, amongst the sharp political writing and commentary, a recent post (dated October 8, 2005) in which he engages with David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. CJ saw it and loved it, as did I, but he got to it way before I’ll get a chance to, and his observations and reactions are strong and worth reading, so I feel honored to be able to recommend them and link you to them-- but only if you’ve seen the movie. Cronenberg’s amazing film works like a down-and-dirty B-movie programmer made under the gun (no pun intended) by someone like Phil Karlson-- it’s that brutal and efficient and prickly and limber of tone. But it’s also insistently disturbing in its ability to feed on both our impulses to see brutal violence, to participate in it, and our need to stand back from it and take measure of the moral quandary we’ve steeped ourselves in by doing so. CJ has more, especially on Viggo Mortensen, so if you’ve experienced the movie I urge you to experience what Caption Jockey has to say about it. If you haven’t seen it, it may already be too late, but I hope you can stay relatively far away from any reviews (including CJ’s) which might point, however directly or indirectly, to elements of the story that are integral to the film’s meaning and impact, elements that should be experienced as fresh and without foreknowledge as is possible. I’ll have more to say on the movie later, as I suspect it will stay where it is now, very near the top of my list of best films of the year.