Snark, Critic and Pop!

Editor’s Note: This is a re-post from out old site Film Is Pwn covering the 2009 Charlotte Film Festival, as we look forward to the 2010 CFF later this month:

Bronson is the story of a man. A man completely detached from the realities of the world and what it means to be human. He’s not nice, good or really evil in the typical sense of the word. What he does is evil but to him it appears that it’s nothing more than a game, a foray into the woods rather than being the very real actions with tangible consequences that they are.

I don’t believe I’ve enjoyed watching a movie more in a very long time. It seems clear to me that Director Nicolas Winding Refn had a clear vision when he chose to venture into this film. He was determined and he pulled together an outstanding cast and crew to see it into fruition. Tom Hardy as “England’s most violent criminal” is spot-on. His performance is dark and menacing, without remorse and completely insane. Exactly the type of man I rather imagine Bronson to be. There is no sanity to this film. No character to stabilize you. You feel constantly at odds against the main character, much, I imagine, like the prison guards must have felt these thirty years. (continue reading…)

Editor’s Note: This is a re-post from out old site Film Is Pwn covering the 2009 Charlotte Film Festival, as we look forward to the 2010 CFF later this month:
Bronson. It’s an independent movie skillfully and artfully made. Tom Hardy, looking like a true Haberdasher, plays the titular Bronson — based on the real life story of Britain’s most notorious and expensive — and is brilliant. If someone were to talk Best Actor for Mr. Hardy, I couldn’t disagree; it’s a brave, bold, menacing performance.

The director makes some stylistic choices with Bronson, in his mind, putting on a campy stage show to an enraptured audience where he gets to explain his sick, perverse outlook on life. There are other more serious moments where Bronson speaks to the camera directly as if in a confessional, where the nutjob is about as lucid about his madness as possible. I thought they worked and were interesting.

And I utterly detested the movie. I can’t fathom why a talented group of men and women would willingly conspire to write, produce, cast, direct, and perform the material. I derived no entertainment value from the experience and I would strongly encourage any caring human being to keep clear of theaters screening Bronson with a 30 mile radius, just to make sure they don’t accidentally wander into one of the showings by mistake. If there is a scientist who intends to show Bronson to criminally, clinically insane lab rats to gauge their reaction, I would gladly stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those loons from PETA to protest cruelty to animals.
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