Daniel's New Reviews

I think Shame is a very disturbing and powerful film. Shame it didn't work for you (c wut i did thar)

Disturbing that it seems like he and his sister want to f*ck each other.

Powerful? Nope, why am I supposed to care either of them?

I really liked this movie but I'm drawn to movies dealing with addiction. I loved the 2 lead performances and thought the brother/sister relationship was intense and fascinating.

The problem for me though is that although the movie features addiction, I don't think it deals with it in any type of way. We're presented with two characters with problems, but we never get past that. It was nothing fascinating or unique for me, and I really thought it was a one-trick film that employed as many artistic tricks as it could to keep us watching. We don't know anything really about the characters or their lifes other than the snapshots we get of them (and they both seem pretty well off), and Fassbender's character seems to overreact to everything and seems very spontaneous a lot of the time which doesn't help in terms of sympathising with him.

So is it disturbing or completely fine by you?

You don't have to care for them, the film doesn't ask you to. It's convincing in its depiction of addiction, in my book, and is quite effective in showing how addictions can ruin lives, so I found it quite powerful in that sense.

Yeah I do think that part was weird/disturbing. That's what I found disturbing about the film. But I don't think that's particularly a compliment.

For something to be powerful I think I have to care for it, or at least be able to comprehend it in some way. and the film fails at doing that for me. I don't think it's effective or realistic, we are supposed to believe that this well paid man with a NYC apartment has his life ruined because his sister sleeps with his work colleague (that he takes along with him to see her sing already knowing what the man is like), we are supposed to believe he would react like he would and go completely crazy? We're supposed to believe he can get any woman he wants? What was with the gay stuff? It seemed quite offensive in the way it dealt with sexuality at times.

The issues and lifes of the characters could have been interesting, but the film completely failed for me.

The film doesn't show how rich he is, but that is beside the point.

The gay scene summed it up best for me. But what did you find offensive about it?

Offensive to us as viewers that we would believe that the characters would act in such ways regarding sexual activity, I'm pretty much talking about all the characters here.

edit: Will write some more tomorrow, going to sleep as I'm really tired. Good discussion though, I know it's a pretty polarising film around here, I like people actually engaging with my thoughts

I don't know if there's a complete lack of humanity before the ending. I thought there were some interesting glimpses of how war psychology stands against usual ethics. Pitt trying to learn the boy to kill a Nazi by forcing him and Pitt making him feel guilty for the death of a comrade because he didn't shoot fast enough are two moments that have that interesting ambiguity, for example.
Pitt's face expressions are a combination of pain and duty. On the one hand he knows that what he's teaching the boy is not "morally right", but on the other hand he knows it's the only way they'll survive and win.
It was a bit of a shame that I wasn't a fan of Logan Lerman's character (or his acting for that matter) or otherwise those could've been two really strong and intense scenes for me. I give the script and Pitt some credit for those moments, though.

Apart from that, there wasn't that much interesting "humane" content to the film indeed. Sometimes they aimed for something more, but most of the time those scenes didn't work for me. The scene with the two German women, for instance, only seemed to have one purpose, which was to make them die so the audience may feel shocked. I didn't buy the sudden relationship between Lerman's character and the German girl for one second though and otherwise the scene was just some comic relief with the other tank inhabitants and some slightly revealing dialogue about the characters that could've easily been done somewhere else. It all fell kind of flat.

Some people think the visit to the German girls is the heart of the whole film, but I would've personally scratched that scene for the largest part (especially the "romantic" aspect of it that felt kind of inappropriate).
I would've embraced where this film is really good at, namely battle scenes and delivering technical/psychological information about war. For instance, they could've made the tank more of a character than it already was by telling us a little bit more about how everything exactly works and they could've delved into the past of certain characters to show us how much they've changed or who they really are (especially Pitt's character seemed to have a possibly interesting background).

Regarding the ending, I do feel you're completely right about that. It's a total cop out. I was rolling my eyes. There's no way a Nazi would've let a guy live who was part of a tank that killed practically half of his company. The very ending simply had no message, significance or impact (on me).
I would've personally ended it with the Nazi shining the light on him and the boy looking back, fearfully waiting for his fate in a sort of cliffhanger final scene. It would've been much stronger than the real ending, in my opinion.

For me the final product was nothing more than a solid, very well executed but flawed war movie.

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Cobpyth's Movie Log ~ 2019

The guy is obviously addicted to sex. He can't find any satisfaction anymore though and when his sister comes, he seems to consider to find the sexual satisfaction he's looking for with her. He realizes it's totally wrong, so he tries to resist it (even though she's making it very difficult for him). The conflict destroys him inside and one of his desperate remedies for his "urge" is to try and have gay sex and maybe find satisfaction there.

Shame is not one of my personal favorite films or anything, but I did feel like everything had some sort of psychological logic behind it.

Shame deserves a psychology and logic rating of 1, and that's generous.

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Lol, Shame is offensive sh*t. Fetishization and removal of the complexity of image as style. Like Bresson but a worse painter

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Mubi

Good reviews, Daniel, even if you sound like you were in a bad mood when you wrote both of them.

I haven't seen the film, but your take on Fury doesn't surprise me, since that's the same vibe I got from the trailers.

Shame felt very cold and artificial, and I think it's portrayal of sex addiction was only moderately successful. Or maybe I just have a hard time empathizing with such an addiction. I mean, the guy spends a lot of time watching porn, jerking off and trying to bed any woman he can. What guy doesn't? I guess you could call me a sex addict, too, if I was just more successful at it. The only time the film made me feel like it was a true disease is toward the end, when he goes to the bar and basically molests the woman in front of her boyfriend. I got a great sense of his self-loathing and desperation in that scene. Too bad the rest of the film wasn't as effective or powerful.

Oh, and nude Carey Mulligan turned out to be a huge disappointment.

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It had some sort of internal psychological logic, in my opinion, so I don't really agree here.

It's a given that people who get overly exposed to something addictive (in this case sex) will look for more "extreme" or personally abnormal ways to get the same rush he/she once had when doing it casually.
In the case of sex, "addicts" often explore extremes like having intercourse with a gender you're not actually into (having sex with a man as a heterosexual for instance), masturbating or having sex on odd places or even fantasizing about family in an obsessive way.

There's nothing offensive or illogical about Shame at all content-wise as far as I can see. It's been a while since I've watched it, but I found myself understanding everything that happened very clearly.