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Originally Posted by ninth
Altough I have to say that I found A History of Violence overrated. I expected a lot from this movie, and either I missed something, or it was just a brillantly filmed unoriginal story.
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Originally Posted by jjacob
I totally agree about History of Violence, even though Viggo Mortensen was excellent I found the film extremely dull, uninteresting, predictable and tedious. Why it got such good reviews is beyond me.
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You have no idea how often I hear that. I went into this long thing about somewhere in the IMDB boards about why I thought the plot was so cliched, as that is a complaint many people have.
I tried looking for it but it's apparently gone? I can't find the posts in my message board history. In any case, I basically feel that it wholly works with the movie because one of Cronenberg's goals was to comment on how inherrant and Darwinian violence is for humans. For me, Cronenberg was presenting a story that seems wholly unoriginally or borrowed from various influences, for instance the Western hero thrown into his violent past after trying to leave it behind when it suddenly catches up to him, the whole school bully plot, the comforting small town rocked by the big city immorality, etc, on purpose. The groteque and gory violence (which I think succeeds in both thrilling and disturbing the audience), wrapped up in such a cliche-ridden plot seemed to comment on how violence entertains, or rather, intrigues us even though modern society tries to repress it. The fact that in general the violence in the movie was one of the more intriguing aspects of the viewing experience while also going so far as to disgust me only helped me come to that conclusion. That and the fact that Cronenberg isn't any ordinary director; he's both incredibly intelligent (just listen/read to some of his interviews) and interested in things like inhumanity-from-humanity themes. So I don't know if it was necessarily intended, but that's how I read it, and in general the subversiveness of his film in dealing with several layers of narrative interpretation made it one of the top movies of the year for me. Match Point only barely beat it.
