A History of Violence

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Escape Goat

Escape Goat

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WTF was this movie supposed to be about? I dont think it worked on any level. The guy comes home to his family after killing more mobsters and its all honky dory. **** the past and your dads murderous dealings. And what was up with the wife? Kinky one moment then getting turned on by assault/rape? Talk about a dysfunctional family. And the main character showed NO EMOTION. Hell, Keanu Reeves could have delivered better lines.

In summary, the movie sucks balls (in the abd way)
 
Teh Hamburglar said:
WTF was this movie supposed to be about? I dont think it worked on any level. The guy comes home to his family after killing more mobsters and its all honky dory. **** the past and your dads murderous dealings. And what was up with the wife? Kinky one moment then getting turned on by assault/rape? Talk about a dysfunctional family. And the main character showed NO EMOTION. Hell, Keanu Reeves could have delivered better lines.

In summary, the movie sucks balls (in the abd way)
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The movie is awesome.
 
A History of Violence was awesome.

Teh Hamburglar said:
WTF was this movie supposed to be about? I dont think it worked on any level. The guy comes home to his family after killing more mobsters and its all honky dory. **** the past and your dads murderous dealings. And what was up with the wife? Kinky one moment then getting turned on by assault/rape? Talk about a dysfunctional family. And the main character showed NO EMOTION. Hell, Keanu Reeves could have delivered better lines.

In summary, the movie sucks balls (in the abd way)
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This tells me you can't understand subtlety or complex relationships. The only thing not working on any level here is you.
 
Dan said:
A History of Violence was awesome.


This tells me you can't understand subtlety and complex relationships. The only thing not working on any level here is you.
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Durrrr. Subtlety wuts dat? Dad says "We dont solve our problems by hitting people" then goes and blows away 9 other people and assaults their mom. So please enlighten me with this complex relationship and subtlety.

edit - he didnt kill the mom
 
Teh Hamburglar said:
Durrrr. Subtlety wuts dat? Dad says "We dont solve our problems by hitting people" then goes and blows away 9 other people including their mom. So please enlighten me with this complex relationship and subtlety.
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bn5.jpg
 
Teh Hamburglar said:
Durrrr. Subtlety wuts dat? Dad says "We dont solve our problems by hitting people" then goes and blows away 9 other people including their mom. So please enlighten me with this complex relationship and subtlety.
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:lol I haven't seen the movie, but, if true, that's a riot.
 
Sallokin said:
The part where the son finally gets back at the "bully" is cinema gold.
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I was just about to post that. Best scene in the movie. My friends and I kept laughing about how ridiculous it was for a kid to get angry at someone for catching a fly ball. I was laughing when he got his due.

As for the movie as a whole, coming out of the theatre I couldn't understand all the hype. I did feel a sort of tension and awkwardness throughout most of the more powerful scenes (due to the graphic imagery and strange soundtrack), so if that's considered high-brow cinema, well, mission accomplished. Neither the plot nor acting struck me as impressive, although I did like John Hurt's potrayal of the older brother. It's not a movie I regret seeing, but at the same time I don't feel I need to ever watch it again.
 
There's a couple themes/points to the movie.

-The escalation and nature of violence, like an unseen force that keeps going and spreads
-The fact the family was a lie, their life was a lie, the father was a lie, but in the end they rather live that lie than deal with the truth

I liked Viggo in the movie. If you WATCH cloooooooosely, in the final scene he comes in with the face of his past, and that face was there during the whole shakedown part, then he lowers his head, the daughter makes peace(also a sort of cliche form of innocence she represents but cliche doesn't mean wrong), then when he brings his head back up its the face from the start of the movie, the dad face and it goes back to mundane family life

And the wife gets off on roleplaying, which they show earlier. Bad naughty cheerleader, then the rape/sex which is so very disturbing. And afterwards she realizes and yadayada.

I had a better grasp of the flick after I had just watched it, this is a rough rundown of what I remember.
 
I thought it was pretty good, but my overriding thought after watching is that this is a movie that's elevated to a certain degree by film fans' (and critics') general love for all things mafia....

EDIT: Although I suppose it would be hard to replicate if he had any other sort of former life (outside, perhaps, of secret service)
 
Anyone hear about the screenwriter for this doing a "Monster" adaptation sometime soon, and is there anyway that could work well as a feature film?
 
Another hater here, I suppose it just wasn't my kind of flick.
I was expecting something much different from the trailer, did not expect it to end the way that it did. I was laughing at how bad the ending became...

I felt ripped off walking out of the cinema.
 
Teh Hamburglar said:
WTF was this movie supposed to be about? I dont think it worked on any level. The guy comes home to his family after killing more mobsters and its all honky dory. **** the past and your dads murderous dealings. And what was up with the wife? Kinky one moment then getting turned on by assault/rape? Talk about a dysfunctional family. And the main character showed NO EMOTION. Hell, Keanu Reeves could have delivered better lines.

In summary, the movie sucks balls (in the abd way)
Click to expand...

Exactly, I thought it was pretty straight forward and predictable. Worse Cronenberg movie since Crash :lol
 
Teh Hamburglar said:
Durrrr. Subtlety wuts dat? Dad says "We dont solve our problems by hitting people" then goes and blows away 9 other people and assaults their mom. So please enlighten me with this complex relationship and subtlety.
Click to expand...

The point is that in his new life he is trying to put away the violence, and he certainly doesn`t want his son to end up like him, so he trys to teach them the right way. But in the end, he realises that the only way to save his new life is to go back to the old one, albeit temporarily. Can a person ever really change, no matter how much they want to? In the end he goes back to his family but you sense that things will never be the same.

Made all the more poignant by the fact that the act of savings people`s lives started things moving out of control.

This happens to a lot of people. Perhaps not on this level, but many people try to move on with thier lives but can never quite put the past behind them
 
It's an indictment of American culture and its obsession with violence. If you weren't able to understand why his wife was disgusted, and yet aroused, by his dark side and then compare that to the first sex scene which involved the idealized American relationship (high school sweethearts, cheerleader, farmboy, etc) THAN you should go buy Stealth.
 
reggieandTFE said:
It's an indictment of American culture and its obsession with violence. If you weren't able to understand why his wife was disgusted, and yet aroused, by his dark side and then compare that to the first sex scene which involved the idealized American relationship (high school sweethearts, cheerleader, farmboy, etc) THAN you should go buy Stealth.
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I agree with your point, but the movie is so flimsy you could pin anything on it and make it work.
 
It's been a whil since I've seen the film, but I think one of the ideas of the movie was just to show that violence can still be unsettling. The way Viggo killed all of those guys, with the exception of the first one who just went through the store window, was very gruesome, yet closer to realism than most movies.

My personal opinion on the film is that it was pretty good, but no great. Everything important seemed to happen below the surface and the movie didn't do much to help you figure them out. It just left all of the clues possible but didn't connect a to b. The acting was superb and the movie was otherwise pretty good. I tend to agree with this guy:

Cronenberg's dissection of the violent spirit of man is the kind of film that can be read on numerous levels - it's one of those movies that makes film students write thesis papers. On the level of pure mainstream action flick, A History of Violence works as a thrilling, incredibly violent story of a man trying to protect his family. But there are deeper issues at work. Cronenberg sets up a world where violence comes quickly and suddenly. By the end, when you're not sure of anyone's motivations, you'll be nervously twitching, uncomfortable that anything could happen. Violence is cyclical and omnipresent. No matter how hard you try to bury or hide from it, it could come back into your life at any time. Cronenberg and writer Josh Olson (from the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke) never want you to get comfortable. They also don't want you to cheer these characters' violent acts - never glorifying them and pushing the MPAA envelope in their depiction of them.
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Iamthegamer said:
It's been a whil since I've seen the film, but I think one of the ideas of the movie was just to show that violence can still be unsettling.
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I don't get this, nor the "incredibly violent" in the review you quoted. Fried Green Tomatoes was more violent than this!

(Ok, on a more serious note...if that was (part of) Cronenbergs goal, I think he failed miserably. I didn't react to the violence at all.)
 
aku:jiki said:
I don't get this, nor the "incredibly violent" in the review you quoted. Fried Green Tomatoes was more violent than this!

(Ok, on a more serious note...if that was (part of) Cronenbergs goal, I think he failed miserably. I didn't react to the violence at all.)
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Look up some of the reactions it got at Cannes. American reviewers laughed at the movie as folks from other countries were (reportedly) unsettled by the movie.
 
White Man said:
Look up some of the reactions it got at Cannes. American reviewers laughed at the movie as folks from other countries were (reportedly) unsettled by the movie.
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i bet the sex scenes had the opposite effect. Unsettling to Americans, shrugged off by foreign viewers. Wouldn't suprise me.
 
it was cheesy as hell and when it got to william hurt, the story had already fallen apart and the action/violence was retardation at best. Its a very very poor movie. Great first 8 minutes that showed some sort of promise that quickly fell apart.

+

bad acting from all involved. How THE **** DID WILLIAM HURT get a oscar nom for this?!
 
Jax said:
it was cheesy as hell and when it got to william hurt, the story had already fallen apart and the action/violence was retardation at best. Its a very very poor movie. Great first 8 minutes that showed some sort of promise that quickly fell apart.

+

bad acting from all involved. How THE **** DID WILLIAM HURT get a oscar nom for this?!
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At the very, very least, it's better than last year's Crash.

Like I said, I think Viggo (and yes), the teenage son were the only real problems.
 
White Man said:
At the very, very least, it's better than last year's Crash.

Like I said, I think Viggo (and yes), the teenage son were the only real problems.
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well, considering thats where the main story arc happens, I consider that to be a movie killer. Plus that monica bello acted really badly too. The movie has a very unbelieveable aka ridiculous undercurrent to it.


Crash was really bad (as in condescending piece of shit) but if it was edited/scripted differently, the performances, are all uniformly better than ALL THE ACTING combined in AHOV.
 
Yeah I just watched it last week, I remembered all the praise it was getting on GAF but I never let any of that stuff affect me anyways going into a movie.

It's teh suxx0rz!1
 
Great action, but the dialogue was very poor. I forget what was said, but the scene where Viggo is being driven to the mansion and the driver asks him a specific question and Viggo answers with "yeah". It wasn't meant to be funny but it was so bad that it was.
 
White Man said:
Look up some of the reactions it got at Cannes. American reviewers laughed at the movie as folks from other countries were (reportedly) unsettled by the movie.
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But I'm swedish.

When it comes to unsettling violence...all of Irreversible was some hard watching. And, hell, the hockey puck scene in Running Scared was all kinds of WTF.

Jax said:
The movie has a very unbelieveable aka ridiculous undercurrent to it.
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This pretty much sums up how I feel about it, yeah.
 
Just got around to seeing this movie.

This movie was painful to watch. Some of the scenes were unecessarily long. Why do I need to see him driving to philly, they show him driving for a good 5 minutes. Everything about this movie dragged.

A lot of this movie was so over the top. The bully getting pissed off about a fly ball being caught had me laughing for a while.



This movie was one of those really bad movies that I couldn't stop watching because on some level I enjoyed watching the train wreck get worse.
 
Viggo was great, actually.
The son, eh, who cares. Not too great, but whatever..
In summary a superb movie.
 
Awesome film one of the best of the year. No one does sex and violence like Cronenberg. He in no way raped his wife, if you watch the scene there is a very clear pause were he stops and she is like WTF I'm all hot and bothered finish what you started. The high school bully was pretty weak but thats the only flaw I saw.
 
This movies was unbearable. About a half hour of the movie could have been cut out. Some scenes were so pointless, it seemed like a rookie director was behind the wheel. Why the hell would I want to watch Joey order a drink at a bar, pay for it, get change, and then tip the bartender.

Also, how William Hurt was nominated for an Oscar blows my mind. He was in the movie for about five minutes. I am glad that I saw it though, becasue now when someone asks me; "What is the worst movie you have ever seen?", I can say it was A History of Violence
 
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