That was what I was thinking re Oscar's remarks. However your observations, here, arsaib, are quite specific and I appreciate that. Thanks for saying I was clear and rational and complimenting my sheer presence on the site, but I don't know that I can bring to mind the details you've got at your fingertips from the film now. I would have to have another viewing to reexamine my viewpoint -- and reconsider the more favorable ones expressed here. I still have to feel at this point that the film is more thought provoking in theory than in practice. I don't think either of the principals is of the depth or complexity the high praise of the film would require. In particular, I find Viggo as I said to be something of a handsome hunk, a blank, not an actor of depth and this of his not a performance of any complexity. As for the story line, it comes out of a comic book mentality and it remains that. Granted as Oscar said greatness on film can be made out of pulp, but in this case I just think the critics have gone too far and overrated the film.As far as I can remember, the first sex scene took place before the diner heroics.
As for the cogent arguments by New York critics about the film not being so profound or original, one of the main ones was Matt Zoller Seitz, the New York Press's no.2 guy who's more balanced and less provocative than Armond Whilte. (I think White is crazy, but I still am interested in whatever he has to say--though I don't always stay to pour over it, it depends.) The review can be found here: http://www.nypress.com/18/38/film/seitz.cfm. You can take it from paragraph nine on. "The movie's moral algebra is more simplistic than the Cronenberg norm....Despite Peter Suschitzky's elegiac, whisky-dark lighting, Howard Shore's depressive horror film score and other promising elements, Violence is actually Cronenberg's most structurally, morally and emotionally conventional film. Despite its clinical title, superficially melancholy and knowing tone, it ultimately depicts "good" violence that unquestionably solves more problems than it creates...Violence's role in Cronenberg's filmography is much like that of The Brothers Grimm to Gilliam, and of Cape Fear to Scorsese: a calling card movie from a great and important director who, by all rights, ought to be exempt from this sort of thing. A History of Violence is the movie Cronenberg has to make in order to keep making movies. It's not a manifesto, but an insurance policy. "
This was not the only negative review, but it gibes most with my opinion of the ones I can find.
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