A DANGEROUS METHOD (2011)

A DANGEROUS METHOD does a nice job of telling a story but to me as a viewer who's not an expert on Carl Jung, Sabina Spielrein and Sigmund Freud I felt like this film was only scratching the surface of the story and the relationships between the three main characters.

The film opens with Spielrein being committed to a psychiatric hospital. Her doctor is Carl Jung and I don't really know how psychiatric hospitals work, but for some reason Spielrein kinda becomes Jung's assistant or something. Time passes and Jung becomes friends with Freud. The friendship seems to be strained from the very beginning because Jung married into money and Freud is jealous(?) of Jung's extravagant lifestyle. Jung also begins an affair with Spielrein which you would expect to be superhot, but it's not. It's not hot in the least and on top of that, the fuck scenes probably don't even add up to 2 minutes total.

I wanted to like this film and while I didn't dislike it I really had no feelings towards it at all. Overall it was a bland, disjointed and boring watch that I will never repeat. Skip it and read the Wikipedia pages on the three instead. I found the one about Spielrein to be especially fascinating. Her husband was murdered during Stalin's Great Purge in the late 1930's and she, their two children and 27,000 others were massacred by Nazi pussies at Zmiyovskaya Balka on August 11/12, 1942. Holy fuck, humans suck.

HUNGER (2008)

After being so impressed with SHAME I decided to look into the previous Fassbender/McQueen collaboration HUNGER and...

It's alright. The story is about Bobby Sands' hunger strike during imprisonment and his death 66 days later. Interesting premise, but, if like me, you know absolutely nothing about who the hell Bobby Sands is or why he's starving himself to death HUNGER isn't going to clear things up for you. I literally had to pause the film about halfway in and do some quick reading online to figure out what was the story surrounding this film.

HUNGER opens with a cop getting ready for work. He's silent, distant and obviously internally scarred from beating and assraping prisoners all day. Next we're introduced to a new prisoner. He's stripped naked, beaten then thrown into his small cell that's been covered from floor to ceiling with human shit by his cellmate. The new guy soon joins in the shit smearing. Finally we're introduced to fellow prisoner Bobby Sands who's is the leader of this cell block full of guys who refuse to wear clothes and like to doody all over the joint. Stuff happens: cramming things up butts, screaming, spitting, kicking, shit smearing, pissing, maggots, etc., but unfortunately none of it fully explains what all the hubbub is about. All of the performances were powerful (and Fassbender's weight loss was visually shocking), but overall I found the whole thing to be unsatisfactory and slow. HUNGER succeeds in capturing a moment in time, but unfortunately I don't know what the context of that moment is.

CENTURION (2010)

I have no idea how historically accurate this movie is and I don't care, because it was a lot of fun to watch. Set in 117 AD, CENTURION is about a Roman soldier, Michael Fassbender, stationed in a remote outpost in what I'm guessing is modern day Scotland. The inhabitants of the land, the Picts, aren't so happy about the Roman invaders, but they're doing a very good job of fighting them off by using a primitive form of guerrilla warfare. After one intense raid on the Roman fort (one Roman dude got a spear to the dick while he was pissing!), Fassbender is taken prisoner because he can speak the Pict language.

At the same time, the local governor wants to make an impression on the administration back in Rome so he sends the Ninth Legion to wipe out the Picts completely. Stuff happens and after a few exciting scenes, the Ninth has been massacred except for a captured general and seven soldiers who remain free. The soldiers head out to rescue the general. A lot more happens but you'll just have to check it out for yourself.

I really enjoyed this movie. The story was fast and entertaining as hell, strong direction, the action was awesome (this one dude gets an arrow in the back during a fight so he breaks it off and stabs the person he's fighting in the eye with it! Holy fuck!), the scenery was absolutely beautiful (make sure to watch the Extras on the DVD for more about the filming conditions), the main tracker chick was a badass and you got Michael Fassbender. I'm mean fuck what else do you want?! Hot naked chicks? Well, yeah that would have nice but it didn't happen. Sorry.

Hot naked chicks aside, if you enjoy gritty, action-packed hack and slash movies then check out CENTURION.

SHAME (2011)

Michael Fassbender lives in NYC. He has a high paying job, an swank apartment and a massive sexual addiction that's bordering on crippling. This dude is all about sex. He's nonstop surfing porn and jacking off, banging whores like it's going out of style and in the peaceful moments between all the stroking and pumping, he's eyeballing every woman that walks by. Of course, it helps that he's handsome as fuck and has a cush job. If he was some fucked up Ottis Toole-looking motherfucker it'd be a totally different story, but let's leave that to somebody else to direct. Because what director/co-writer Steve McQueen has captured here is a riveting glimpse of a outwardly normal man who is severely fucked up inside.  He's haunted by past demons. We're not told what they are, but it clearly has something to do with his childhood, so when his younger sister unexpectedly shows up it drives him to the edge...and maybe over? Well, you just have to see for yourself.

I cannot rave about SHAME enough. I enjoyed it from beginning to end.  The acting, the direction, the cinematography, hell even the lighting was awesome...and the original score! It was was perfect. No music in the world could have captured that moment on the subway better than it did. I literally watched that scene like six times times. I was in movie heaven. So how is it that a film that can transport a grouchy movie nerd like me to movie heaven be completely overlooked by the Academy Awards last year? I have no clue. There had to be some kind of weird disqualification or something. Because, in my opinion, SHAME should have had a number of nominations. Including a Best Actor award for Michael Fassbender. He was already robbed for FISH TANK, so they owe him.

In conclusion, if THE WAR ZONE and MYSTERIOUS SKIN were brother and sister and they were forced by their father, AMERICAN PSYCHO, to have sex and have a baby, the baby would be SHAME. Watch it and you'll see what I'm getting at.

I hate it when people spell cum "come". Stephen King does that and it makes me mental.