Behold one of the best screen kisses I've seen in a long time. It was tender and bittersweet, and the couple is gorgeous. From one of the best movies of the year--I think--Eastern Promises. Just came out last week. Loved the sexual tension between the two characters, but it's not a Romance. It's probably the most violent movie I've seen in a while. But, okay, I went for Viggo. If he's in the cast, I'm there.So I open the Friday Entertainment section of the paper this morning, and I see that Hollywood is pumping up the raunchy sex for the holiday season, citing the latest Ben Stiller/Farrelly bros collaboration, Heartbreak Kid. They did There's Something About Mary, which I loved. But the trailers for this one don't interest me. I could be wrong. But the premise doesn't seem to go with 6th grade boy humor, which I enjoyed in Knocked Up and 40-Year Old Virgin, but the premise of HK doesn't sound like it would work for me. According to the Strib, "There's never been so much sex and skin in theaters." Graphic violence seems to be hitting a new high, too. For me, theses are elements that only work in the hands of a master storyteller. Otherwise, it's just titillation, which, on its own, pretty much turns me off.
I want character, and Eastern Promises has it in spades. Viggo plays the "driver" for a Russian mob boss's son. He's wonderful. I don't know whether he's actually fluent in Russian, but I was convinced. He plays this mysterious character with such restraint that you can't take your eyes off him lest you miss some nuance. You know he's dangerous, but it's more about what you're conviced he could do than anything he actually does. Well, until those thugs attack him in the steam room. Yep, that's quite a scene. Yep, the full monty. But it's not gratuitous. It's ... you have to see it. I looked away from a couple of parts of this movie, but not this part. Not that I considered the violence gratuitous, but I'm a wimp when the bloodletting looks real. But when the story is this gripping, I can look away for a few seconds and appreciate the fact that this is about real people caught up in a real-world situation that ain't pretty.
But they have their pretty side, their good side.Can we talk about personal boundaries regarding sex and violence in our entertainment? Any examples of popular stuff that just didn't work for you? Anything that really (and maybe surprisingly) did?
