“We’re not bad people, we just come from a bad place.”
I love this film. it’s horrible and gut wrenching and I always feel like I’m going to throw up by the time it’s over, but I have watched it more than once and I will watch it again. the acting is unbelievable all round, even if I think some of the themes were badly approached by the writer and director. there were some outs taken that I… disliked. but on the whole? Shame is the best film I’ve seen in, oh, probably a decade.
fair warning: unless you have the emotional composition of a rock, Shame will gut you. so if that’s not what you’re looking for in a film, you might want to keep walking.
I love it when a film just gets into you, when it becomes part of your set of general references for how you think about the world. I saw it twice, so in some ways it’s not very surprising that I remember so much of the film so distinctly - but then, I have seen other movies multiple times recently and not had the same level of visceral recall as I do with this one.
I guess in a way I feel like I know these people - really know them, I mean. Which is interesting, because I don’t think the screenplay is phenomenal - I think it’s good, but not really doing anything that ground-breaking - and usually I really prefer movies with amazing screenplays. But what McQueen does with it, and what the actors do with their parts, completely put it on a different level. This was pretty easily my favorite film of last year (though Drive and Weekend were pretty fucking good, too), and Fassbender’s performance is probably one of the two best I’ve ever seen (the other being DDL in There Will Be Blood). I mean, it’s just unreal. I don’t know how it’s possible.
Have you seen Hunger? If not, I would definitely recommend it - it’s one of my top… four? five? of all time. (Shame would go on the list, for sure, but further down.) I’d hesitate to say that it’s less emotionally gripping or affecting than Shame, but it’s operating in a very different way - it is incredibly agonizing but not in a personal psychological way; it’s much more abstract. I think it’s a better film/work of art, but it doesn’t have a Brandon, that’s for sure.
(Source: kelmeckis)
