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It takes a pretty engaging movie to make you forget that Michael Fassbender is as egregiously handsome as he is. Shame was that engaging -- more engaging than that, actually. At the beginning I was wondering how a movie featuring a character's sex addiction as a central and serious plot element was going to be carried off without being lurid or glamourized with such a ludicrously good-looking leading man, but after about 15 minutes in I stopped looking at his ass and forgot I was interested in looking at his ass in the first place; by the end I felt like I was watching the humiliating struggles and breakdown of some poor troubled person and that getting off on it would be creepy and voyeuristic, so in that sense, the movie did really well. (So did his acting.) Sex is a hard topic to carry off seriously in American cinema. We tend to be really uncomfortable with it.
Actually, I really liked the movie altogether. I can see why it's gotten such an excellent critical reception. It's been sort of billed as being about a yuppie's sex addiction, and being "like American Psycho with sex instead of violence," and in that it's a repressed-overachiever-has-a-downward-spiral film it's got some things in common with American Psycho and Black Swan, yes. But Black Swan is part psychological horror film and American Psycho is dripping with Bret Easton Ellis's contempt for 90s yuppie culture -- Shame on the other hand has plenty of compassion for its unhappy main character, which is what really makes it work as a movie, in my opinion. A movie called Shame about a miserable protagonist drowning his sorrows in a pathological sex addiction could have been incredibly exploitative and/or judgmental, but I never got the sense I was supposed to look down on Brandon (or Cissy) or feel superior to them. I felt like I was watching someone's unhappy life, with all the little embarrassments and miseries involved. There was some underscored subtext of an abuse history that the siblings shared, but it wasn't beaten to death.
The NC-17 rating liberated it to show whatever details of Brandon's life we needed to see to understand him, which made it succeed without being prudish or shock-value -- cutting it to an R would've upped the luridness factor considerably. It says a lot that a film like this was an NC-17, though. As I recall, the only disturbing content was one short, violence-centric scene near the end (well-done, but disturbing). The rest was just nudity and sexuality.
Meanwhile, Hostel clocked in at an R. Yup.
Actually, I really liked the movie altogether. I can see why it's gotten such an excellent critical reception. It's been sort of billed as being about a yuppie's sex addiction, and being "like American Psycho with sex instead of violence," and in that it's a repressed-overachiever-has-a-downward-spiral film it's got some things in common with American Psycho and Black Swan, yes. But Black Swan is part psychological horror film and American Psycho is dripping with Bret Easton Ellis's contempt for 90s yuppie culture -- Shame on the other hand has plenty of compassion for its unhappy main character, which is what really makes it work as a movie, in my opinion. A movie called Shame about a miserable protagonist drowning his sorrows in a pathological sex addiction could have been incredibly exploitative and/or judgmental, but I never got the sense I was supposed to look down on Brandon (or Cissy) or feel superior to them. I felt like I was watching someone's unhappy life, with all the little embarrassments and miseries involved. There was some underscored subtext of an abuse history that the siblings shared, but it wasn't beaten to death.
The NC-17 rating liberated it to show whatever details of Brandon's life we needed to see to understand him, which made it succeed without being prudish or shock-value -- cutting it to an R would've upped the luridness factor considerably. It says a lot that a film like this was an NC-17, though. As I recall, the only disturbing content was one short, violence-centric scene near the end (well-done, but disturbing). The rest was just nudity and sexuality.
Meanwhile, Hostel clocked in at an R. Yup.
