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User's review
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[ATTENTION: This review reveals content of the movie.]
WOW!!! I gotta say WOW!!! In terms of impact, this movie hit me more powerfully than anything I have watched in years. I suppose you could look at some of the structural elements as contrived or cliche, but at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself how you felt about it and I was floored. The film seems designed to appeal to no one. Mamet's fans will resist the topic and Martial Arts fans will resist the Mamet. I happen to be one of those people who appreciate both, so my opinion may be useless to other readers this time. But I thought that the humility and understatement of the main character captivating. I also thought that some of the moral dynamics compelling. And I thought Randy Couture's presence did a lot for the films credibility, particularly his ear. I'm loooking forward to other reviews of this one. The guy who gave it a 3 seems to have been looking for martial arts. I'm wondering what people looking for Mamet will say. Finally, the comments about the inferior quality of the fighting -- I've gotta say something about that. Mamet WANTS to suppress that dimension of the film because he does not want his audience to succumb to gratuitous violence as the meaning of the text. By diminishing the sensationalism, he forces the viewer into an intellectual relationship with the text. This understatement become even more central in the last fight scene, which is done without sound and largely in the mode of aesthetic poetry. On the one hand, the formal elements can be explained in the they were both BJJ guys, but the silence and the limited audience centrality gave the scene a sacred quality, much like the silent slaying of the cow in Apocalypse Now. In this way, Mamet was trying to gather his audience into a sacred experience, which is precisely the opposite of what they were expecting to see, both the fams at the arena and the fans in the movie theater. By reintroducing the sacred to the event, he touches the core of the martial arts traditions and reveals the reason they are rightfully called arts. I was deeply moved by this movie.
10/10
11.5.2008 -
com2013@ - age: 13-17
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