I have just watched the
really rather excellent “Eastern
Promises” directed by David
Cronenburg on surprisingly restrained form, well there is quite a
lot of blood and some violence but for a Cronenburg film it's
restrained. It is a great film focusing on Eastern European organised
crime in London, I won't tell you more than that, I don't want to
spoil it for you.
This is not a blog post
to review the film, I'm not clever enough, erudite enough or
knowledgeable about film enough to do that beyond “it's really
good” but I would like to point out one little thing that really
put me off whilst watching it.
The film stars Naomi
Watts and the ever excellent Viggo Mortensen who is brilliant pretty
much everything he does but, having said that, it is he who is the
problem. It's not his acting that is the problem but his hair and his
wardrobe.
In the film he is
involved in acts of rather extreme violence, he gets beaten up,
stabbed and has a fight in a sauna whilst naked and, in an early
scene, he is having rather joyless sexy with a prostitute and all
whilst be-quiffed and suited. In short, he looks exactly like EXACTLY
LIKE MARK
KERMODE! You know Mark Kermode? Author, TV presenter, award
winning contributor to the BBC's flagship movie review show, slightly
obsessed with The Exorcist?
This, as you can
imagine, is a little disconcerting, watching Viggo/Mark cut a corpses
fingers off or seeing Mark/Viggo's tight bottom as he got the bejesus
beaten out of his tattooed self. It was just a little bit upsetting.
