"We're not bad people. We've just come from a bad place."
I had gone to Boston to see three films on Thursday, and I only ended up with two. A modest disappointment to be certain, given that I'd been so looking forward to "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy". It's been on the radar as a handsomely constructed underworld spy film, and nothing could've crushed me more than the first ten minutes of what I saw. Mostly because, I couldn't understand a thing of what they were saying. There was a 3 second lag on audio, and it was about 10 octave too low on the pitch scale. So I swapped out of that pretty quickly, and sent my attention to "Shame", which I had hoped would be my night-ending film, which it quite unexpectedly was.
I was already pretty well downtrodden in mood, having felt ripped off by the theater I had visited. And yet this was pretty much the perfect transition into Steve McQueen's second directorial effort. The weeks past have made several statements on what this film does right and what it does wrong, with many a reviewer drawing some issue with it. Fox Searchlight has been gearing this as an odd Best Picture stab, a fantasy that is unlikely to come close to reality, sad as it is to say. It's almost outcast for the NC-17 rating alone, as if the content that gives it that mark has no further relevance. What is most ironic about all this is that Steve McQueen's style, however radical, does skew oddly accessibly.
