The other day, I watched Steve McQueen’s 2011 film Shame. I’ve liked Steve McQueen for a long time – I even saw 12 Years a Slave as a pre-screening before it was available to wider audiences.[1] As such, I had been meaning to get around to watching this movie for awhile but hadn’t gotten around to it until now.
Shame is a film about sex addition. Michael Fassbender plays ostensibly a yuppie New York executive who will literally stick his dick in everything. I would say I have never seen a man’s acted O face so many times in my life, but he usually just looks in pain while undergoing the act. The story centers around why this guy literally cannot do anything except fulfill his addiction, and the movie does a great job of showing the anguish of it. You repeatedly get the sense that Fassbender’s character does not want to be doing this but is just chasing a sick compulsion he can’t stop. The story centers around his relationship with his sister, played by Carrie Mulligan, and I actually think she steals the show in this one. Anyway, aside from those performances I wasn’t really blown away by this movie. The story was fine, the acting was good, and the stylization and visuals was a bit uninspired in my opinion. I think it is a very competent movie, and clearly has a voice to it, but it’s filmed very matter-of-factly and it just didn’t really click for me. Maybe that’s the point of it, that it wants to show you the world as it is. Either way, I wouldn’t call it anything close to a visual masterpiece. I think aside from the acting, Shame is pretty above average across the board. Not mediocre, not excellent. If my grading system called for letter grades, I would give it a respectable B+. But that would be a dumb movie grading scale, and I’m not a hack fraud.
The fact that this is my shortest review ever and I basically jizzed this out in 10 minutes is my own personal “Shame.” I think it’s best for all of us that we get this one over with and move on to bigger and better things. I should have listened to TNT and watched Hunger, but instead, I, like Fassbender’s character in Shame, am left going through the motions.
Script/Story: 6
Acting: 9
Characters: 7
Visuals: 5
Sound: 5
Overall Impression: 6
Total: 38
[1] Weird flex, but ok MD.