The Road (2009)

2/5

The Road is a poorly-made adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name. It follows a man (Mortensen) and his son (Smit-McPhee) fighting to survive in a post-apocalyptic world terrorized by nomadic groups of rapists and cannibals. The book is extraordinary, even though its message can be somewhat difficult to decipher. The movie, despite some arresting images, is unimpressive in almost every way and contains some very odd decisions by director John Hillcoat. He uses music in an attempt to bring emotion to a stoic piece, but instead just adds melodrama. He films a birth scene with as much uncomfortable awkwardness as the sex scene in Munich. He uses inane and unnecessary voice-over narration to reiterate what we are already watching on screen. The editing is jarring and stilted. The acting is either overwrought overacting or amateur hour. I'm not saying this is a bad movie, I just see no reason to waste your time watching it.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898367/

Eastern Promises (2007)

4/5

David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises took me by storm. I was entirely underwhelmed by A History of Violence, so I came into the theater wary. But his new movie blew me away. In addition to a compelling and engrossing plot, believable and realistic characters portrayed through precise acting, it has quite possibly the best fight scene I've ever seen put to film. The cinematography is brilliant, as is the set design, costuming, and make-up. You cannot turn your eyes away from this film. The story unfolds effortlessly and draws us in with perfect pacing, building with twists and turns until its unforgettable climax. That's what she said.

A number of things bothered me though. First, the subtitles. Sometimes they subtitled English dialogue, or sentences spoken half in English and half Russian. This should not be so. Second, the graphic violence. Most of the time it was gratuitous, by which I mean excessive and unnecessary. There is one scene where a dead man's fingers get cut off, which isn't particularly gruesome, but it occurs after the scene has wound down and ended. This ties in with my third complaint: the editing. Every single shot and scene went on just a half second too long. It made the acting and dialogue sometimes seem stilted and staged as shots set up and rest on characters during dialogue instead of seamlessly transitioning between them. Fourth, the ending shot, which would have been cool if The Godfather movies had never been made. All in all, however, these are mostly small, nitpicky aspects and did not affect my enjoyment of the movie. What did affect my enjoyment of the movie was the idiotic family who sat behind us and treated the movie theater as their own living room, kicking seats and discussing banal topics and generally ruining the mood and ambiance. Cocksuckers.

IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0765443/