Break

A long postponement of the top 10 (maybe my order of movies will change by the time I start again?)... due to a family vacation. Instead of watching movies, we played a fun guess-the-movie game, when it was too cold and dark to enjoy the Florida beaches, so it wasn't a complete cinematic break.

The weekend before I left I did watch one movie...

BRONSON (2008)

This was available via Netflix instant, and came highly recommended from Ain't It Cools Harry Knowles. It was also a more recent film from the director of the Pusher trilogy, Nicolas Winding Refn, so I was excited, especially after the awesome opening credits. Hands down, no opening has pumped me up so quickly then those for the Pusher trilogy and Bronson. Start out with such a heart pumping, pounding beat of a title sequence, that focuses attention squarely on your characters, and it builds a lot of goodwill to follow whatever path the accompanying film takes.

Bronson is based on a true story of a notorious British prisoner that seems to have a primal reaction to incarceration, which is to beat the living crap out of everybody. Branching out from that base instinct is a very complex character and a great performance that seems to try to capture the expanded insanity that comes from extended solitary incarceration. Often times I thought I was viewing a portrayal of failed reprogramming that comes very close to A Clockwork Orange. It just got a little too stylized at times for me, with extending classical musical accompaniment to brutal scenes and a scenes that were a little too dragged out.