Movie: The Road (3/5 stars) (2009)

"The Road" stars Viggo Mortgenson as "man" and Kodi Smit-McPhee as "boy". There are no names at all in the movie. There was a "woman", played by Charlize Theron and lots of other parts like "bearded man", "thief" and "old man" etc...

The movie is a post apocalyptic science fiction movie. I can only assume that it is set in the future, but it may have been set in the past - it's hard to tell. There is only devastation and barren waste everywhere in the movie.

The story is simple. A man and a boy are wandering the wasteland headed south for no reason except that they are looking for the ocean and hopefully something better than what they left behind. They meet some people and see some screwed up crap and you quickly get the idea that the world is not what we are used to. This isn't "The Book of Eli", where there is a quite thick veil of bullshit over the entire movie. This feels REAL.

Despite its simplicity, each scene is thick with detail and has real impact. The psychology of the situation is evident constantly and the concepts of "hunger", "loneliness", "happiness" and "friendly" are violently twisted into new meanings.

The movie does nothing to explain the apocalypse itself, i.e. what happened or why. It isn't part of the focus. We don't know if there was nuclear holocaust, a disease or aliens, we just know that we're here and it's dire.

In many ways brilliant, but at the same time, depressing and and unsatisfying. You go away impressed at the quality of the acting, directing and cinematography, but don't really know the point of it.

Movie: "A History of Violence" (1/5 stars) 2005

This is another David Cronenberg movie. I don't like Cronenberg and never have. I'm usually pretty patriotic, but his being Canadian just embarrasses me. He's done some of the worst movies ever and people bow to him as some kind of master director.

I had no idea that this was a Cronenberg movie while watching, so my negative reactions were unbiased, and I don't think this movie is overly Cronenbergish.

The biggest negative to me was how overly simple the scenes and dialog were. They go out of their way at the beginning to show how happy and well adjusted the family is. Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello play Tom and Edie Stall, the perfect normal American couple in the mid-west, living the normal life with two well adjusted kids.

I've seen all of the actors elsewhere and they've always been pretty good, but the quality of the writing (especially the dialog) and directing was so low that there was no way they could come off looking competent. It was painful to watch it, especially at the very beginning.

Small spoiler: There was a sex scene between Maria Bello and Viggo Mortensen where they get violent and then just have sex on the stairs. It made me laugh out loud and shake my head it was so bizarre. They are always so tender at the beginning that this comes out of left field. It was like the lesbian scene in Crash.

Oh! Another thing - there were a few scenes where two men are facing each other... the moment is tense and the actors just look like they are going to kiss - all the body language is there. Both myself and Una noticed it independently.

All in all, a poor quality, let down of a movie. One of the worst I've seen in a while.

This is made worse considering that it's so highly rated, both on imdb and elsewhere.