Late in the new movie “Shame,” the main character’s sister tells her brother that “we’re not bad people. We just come from a bad place.” That place — the people and the circumstances that made them who they are – is never discussed in the film. But the consequences of it are abundantly clear in this tale of a sex addict who begrudgingly lets his sister move into his home.

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Michael Fassbender, who surprised viewers earlier this year with portrayal of Magneto in “X-Men: First Class,” plays Brandon Sullivan. Brandon begins the story lying in bed, looking as alone and sad as he usually is. He’s addicted to sex in all forms. And he has no power to control that addiction. Even when x-rated images and videos are found on his work computer, he can’t seem to confront his own misdeeds. He’s okay letting his supervisor blame a lowly intern for the sickening images he gawks at during work.

Early on, Brandon’s sister Sissy, played by a captivating Carey Mulligan, arrives in town. She just suffered a bad break up and asks her brother if she can stay with him for a few days. Brandon reluctantly agrees, but he’s accustomed to a quiet life in his sparse apartment. He has female guests over, but they usually only stay a few hours at a time. Sissy’s presence abruptly throws his life off track.

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The sexual furies that roil the new movie “Shame” are poundingly, startlingly graphic for a mainstream release. (The picture is rated NC-17.)

The film’s protagonist, Brandon Sullivan, played with fearless commitment by Michael Fassbender, is an emotional zombie anonymously employed in a glass-and-steel cubical farm in high-rise Manhattan. Brandon drifts through his workdays in a fog of apathy. His consuming interest is an unending search for orgasm—with prostitutes, with nightly pickups, often with himself in office bathroom stalls and laptop porn sessions in his sterile midtown apartment. It’s not much of a life, but it’s all that this priapic automaton requires.

The English director, Steve McQueen (Hunger), tracks Brandon’s obsessive prowlings with a serene, long-take camera style and carefully controlled color design, cooling out the action with Glenn Gould’s elegant Bach variations. So the blunt full-frontal nudity and frenzied couplings are kept at arm’s length, and drained of erotic sensation. The picture has a flawless visual beauty, but it’s as arousing as a laboratory report.

Although Brandon admits that his longest romantic relationship lasted only four months, some women are drawn to his unapologetic predation.

Read the full review at Reason.com:

Thank you, Veterans, for … everything.

And now a look back at a time when Hollywood fought for America and liberty, not against it. There are notable exceptions today, but sadly the word “exception” does apply.

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Much more below the fold…

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With Hallowmas upon us, I thought I would go over the reasons why I consider zombies to be the greatest monsters yet invented, a sort of grand synthesis of all of the best elements of previous fright-mongers. See if you agree, and offer your own opinions and counterarguments in the comments section below.

1. They’re anthropomorphic.

There’s all sorts of beasties under the sun (and moon), but in general I’ve always found that the creepier specimens are the ones which assail you while housed in a human body. Bruce the shark in Jaws, the Blob chasing a young Steve McQueen, or the wide assortment of killer piranhas, rats, and dinosaurs out there don’t hold a candle to things like vampires, werewolves, and zombies — monsters that retain aspects of their humanity even as they terrorize us with their doom-laden, inhuman fates.

2. They’re the living dead.

An adjunct to #1 above. Some monsters are nothing more than exotic animals, others demons associated with the netherworld of some ancient religion or mythology, and still others ordinary humans with a black nullity where their soul and conscience is supposed to be. All provide us with legions of good scares, and may they continue to do so! (more…)

A 1995 Los Angeles Times Magazine cover proclaimed him “The Coolest Actor in the World,” and yet most Americans to this day have never heard of him. For fans of Hong Kong films, though, he is Asia’s answer to Steve McQueen — if the latter had made over seventy movies in ten years, most of them decent and some of them great.

The artistic pinnacle of his work in Hong Kong are his collaborations with John Woo filmed between 1986 and 1992. Those of us who equate the modern action movie to elder tales of heroic bloodshed such as The Iliad and the Norse sagas find these films to be sources of endless delight, and much of the credit for this feeling must go to Chow. In John Woo: The Films, author Kenneth E. Hall makes a trenchant point when he writes that, “Not much is usually said, in connection with Woo, about Chow’s contributions to character studies, but his efforts in A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled have created at least three memorable and distinct characters who are yet all of a piece, men of an essential integrity and heroism who rediscover or reaffirm their humanity in struggles with evil.”

This thematic tableau is red meat to conservative film lovers, the same stuff I was talking about when I wrote a piece on Taken here at Big Hollywood last year. But even to give Chow Yun-fat credit for all of this is selling him short — unlike many more muscle-bound action heroes, those Woo classics by no means delineate the limits of his talent or appeal.  Bey Logan, the HK film fanatic who authored the entertaining volume Hong Kong Action Cinema, insists that, in the wake of his collaborations with Woo, Chow became not just Hong Kong’s greatest action star but its greatest acting star. “Chow was the first Hong Kong thespian,” he notes, “to attain boffo box-office with vehicles as disparate as the tragi-comic Autumn’s Tale, the action-packed A Better Tomorrow and the slapstick Eighth Happiness. Chinese audiences just adore Chow Yun-fat in any of his many guises.”

As do many Americans. (more…)

Hard Boiled is a film that serves as not just a great movie in its own right, but as a fitting capstone to a complete body of work. The highly-charged stories, emotional spectrum, visual magnificence, and moral subtext of John Woo’s “heroic bloodshed” canon owes everything to the circumstances of the man’s early years. His is a directorial mind forged in the crucible of a hard but spiritual life.

He came into the world as Wu Yu-Sheng in October, 1946. Originally hailing from Guangzhou (Canton), in the south of China, his family fled to British-controlled Hong Kong in 1950 to escape the newly organized Communist government. Woo and his parents lived in a shantytown slum until a terrible fire destroyed the whole works in 1953, then survived on the streets for a year before finally settling in government housing. “The neighborhood had lots of drug dealers and gangsters,” Woo says, “There was gambling and prostitution. Every day I had to deal with a gang. I used to get beat up by a gang and I used to fight back very hard. I got in lots of fights. But I had great parents who taught me to go straight and to live with dignity and be a decent man.” His father soon contracted tuberculosis, and would die from the disease while Woo was in his teens. “Because we were poor,” Woo says, “I always thought we were living in hell.”

Throughout those grim years, only two things kept Woo’s spirit intact. The first was an event he now sees as miraculous: he became the beneficiary of an anonymous donation from an American family intended to send destitute Chinese kids to school. “I was deeply impressed,” he says, “with the altruism of the American family who paid for my education that my family valued but was simply unable to supply.” Soon Woo was in a Lutheran school and attending church, with the goal of both to “make decent young men and women out of us slum-dwellers. And, I must say, the school achieved its aim.” (more…)

Betrayed by Liberal Hollywood

Psychologists say that a parent’s grief over the death of a child is “the most difficult loss to endure and surely among the most difficult to integrate into one’s life” because our children are an enormous part of our legacy, and “in their deaths, a large part of our own future dies.”  The natural order of our lives has been turned upside down, bringing on an emotional chaos.

For the parents of military men and women who have died after volunteering to serve their country and walking into the face of death in the 21^st century’s war on terror, this grief and chaos has been exponentially multiplied by liberal Hollywood.  But one has to actually walk this path to understand it.  The anti-war sentiment and films that have spewed from liberal actors, producers, and directors have burdened our hearts unspeakably as they have served only to aide the greatest enemy our country has ever faced and to deface and demoralize the greatest ambassadors our country has: the men and women who wear the uniforms of the United States military. (more…)

Looking back at The Karate Kid (1984), which turned twenty-five years old this week, a thought keeps recurring.

Wow. . . Avildsen made it work twice.

John G. Avildsen is, in some ways, a director of little distinction when compared with well-known marquee names like Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan, and Tarantino. The vast majority of his movies are utterly forgotten by the average filmgoer — indeed, he’s been nominated for Worst Director at The Razzies three times. And yet, like Victor Fleming decades earlier with his twin successes The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939 — read a great recent article on Fleming here), Avildsen has twice punched way above his weight, netting himself an Oscar for Best Director and giving birth to some of the most memorable moments in motion picture history. (more…)

3:15pm PST - Hell is for Heroes (1962) – A small U.S. squadron holds off the Nazis in a desperate last stand. Cast: Steve McQueen, Bobby Darin, Fess Parker, Harry Guardino Dir: Don Siegel BW-90 mins, TV-PG

No classic, but damn close and certainly a tough, engrossing WWII actioner, as though director Don Siegel teamed with Steve McQueen could come up with anything else. My favorite scenes involve a very young Bob Newhart putting the telephone bit that made him famous to good use as he fakes phone calls he knows the enemy is listening to in order to create the impression just a few guys, cut off and badly out-numbered, are something just a tad larger. (more…)

There was not a great deal of drama surrounding this year’s British Academy of Film & Television Arts Awards, commonly known as the BAFTA Awards. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) is a movie with deep roots in the UK. Director Danny Boyle was born in Manchester, England, lead actor Dev Patel is the star of the popular British television series Skins, and the movie is a gigantic hit in the British Isles with an impressive $20.6M (US dollars) in box office for Pathe, since its release there on January 6.

BAFTA Winner Mickey Rourke

The two major uncertainties entering Sunday’s ceremony were whether Kate Winslet, twice-nominated for Best Actress, would split her own vote and miss out on her second BAFTA Award and who would prevail in the Sean Penn-Mickey Rourke battle for Best Actor. Aside from that, it seemed like a Slumdog sweep, and that’s exactly how it played out.

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