Noir horror

Rating: 9/10 (23 July 2007)

Watched that noir horror movie Se7en on the weekend because I was stuck in a household without many commercial-free alternatives. I normally don't go for grisly films, especially those with Brad Pitt, but since it had such a good write up on rottentomatoes, and I am such a bad movie theater goer these days, I couldn't really pass it up - even if it meant sitting through almost 30 minutes of commercials as is wont on New Zealand TV. I thought it was rather wonderfully done, despite the grisliness. It's not often that you get Dante and Chaucer as major plot references in Hollywood films these days. (If you don't want to watch the film, there is a highly readable film script). You can't but admire the tenacity and the complete obsession of John Doe with his project. I had him down as an Asperger's Syndrome guy right away but I was unsure about his priorities. I mean, we can all empathize with getting a pound of flesh back out of a greedy lawyer, but why did the prostitute have to die? She wasn't the one guilty of lust, her johns are and they got away with only a knife dildo strapped to their groin. And why did he think sloth the worst of all the deadly sins? The victim took a whole year to die a particularly slow and nasty death - much worse than Jesus in The Passion - while the others were dispatched relatively quickly. I still can't take Brad Pitt seriously, but Kevin Spacey has surely deserved his place among the screen's worst baddies.