Word: film
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Despite this fairly straightforward unfolding of events, the film remains entertaining. Amid the obligatory smattering of slapstick comedy scenes, whimsically amusing details highlight the differences between Earth and Planet 51. The aliens exchange “high fours,” alien children don astronaut costumes for the premiere of a new “Humaniacs” movie, and Chuck’s “Macarena”-playing iPod is labeled a dangerous and cruel weapon. Chuck’s mechanized companion, Rover, is a source of endearing robot humor that resonates with all audiences, despite being...
...years in solitary confinement in various British correctional facilities, earning the moniker “Britain’s most violent prisoner.” The historical Charlie Bronson is a sociopath and a lunatic, a senseless rage-addict and a goon. But apply the words that open the film to the persona Refn manifests in Peterson and, more subtly, Refn himself, and “Bronson” offers a much more sensible portrait of the artist than it ever does of its subject. But ambitions at auto-portraiture aside, “Bronson?...
...world around him; he’s taken to the hole, then to the insane asylum, where he performs and sabotages himself in bombastic fashion. It’s with Peterson as a free man, however, released from prison for nearly 70 days in 1988, that the film offers up the closest thing to a sensible psychological portrait of someone who, up to that point and from that point thereafter, resembles something more akin to a force of nature than a human being. Peterson returns to the town of his birth and falls in with a set of predominantly-homosexual...
...reducing Bronson to an animal, a rebel or a martyr. The film’s haunting final scene is certainly a moment of revelation in relief with the story that Refn chooses to tell, but it’s less a moralization than a confirmation of suspicions. Throughout the film proper, however, Bronson remains a living paradox: a submissive sadist, a free slave, an absurd hero...
...moments on the outside—where the swaggering Bronson is, for once, ill at ease—the film is at its funniest. Flushed and shaking with rage, he manages to suppress a violent outburst when his sweetheart declines his marriage proposal for another man. Believing his fighting prowess would find him fame overnight, he complains to his handler that his most recent display was underappreciated “magic”: “Magic? You just pissed on a gypsy in the middle of fucking nowhere. It’s hardly the hottest ticket in town...