Groen-Pull

Although I usually like to post at least a couple of times a week, I don’t want to just say something for the sake of being heard. If I have a point to make, I’ll make it. I’m just lucky (like so many others), that this blog provides me a forum for speaking my mind.

I don’t reference other articles too often, but I’m such a fan of this writer, I had to draw attention to his art. Rick Groen, a writer for The Globe & Mail, is by far my favourite movie critic, if not my favourite columnist, period. He has a talent for summarizing complex concepts, and stringing them together in a concise, elegant cord of logic, yet it is somehow so tight.

In this article , Rick discusses the undercurrent of violence in the major Oscar nominated movies this year, and how these are the first indications of a broader artistic awareness of post 9/11 life which is informed by violence. In describing what I felt was the best movie of the year, Rick describes A History of Violence thusly:

There, in the opening sequence, we see a pair of evildoing strangers murdering an innocent family. We see that evil justifiably avenged by a dubious hero who, in so doing, perpetuates the cycle of violence embedded in his own past. We see his act of vengeance applauded by an admiring media. We see the sins of this father visited on the son. We see his wife simultaneously revolted by and sexually attracted to the violence resurrected in her husband. And, in the last frame, we see violence, personified by the flawed hero, returning home to sit at the head table, where it's tacitly accepted and silently welcomed.

That was the movie in 107 words. I should only hope to be so succinct. Meanwhile, go check out the article. Rick raises some great points, and cements my fandom.