Jack and I were carded twice last week, to buy our (senior) tickets and again to have them torn. Plus someone was stationed outside the door to keep kids out of this well-done explicit movie about a sex addict. Michael Fassbender (most recently here in A Dangerous Method) bares all and gives a great performance as the tightly wound Brandon, trying to keep his professional life and his mania going simultaneously. When his loose-cannon sister Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan (Drive), appears unexpectedly, he begins to unwind, and not in a good way. Surprisingly snubbed by the Oscars, this has a number of noteworthy nominations (see my list here) and won Fassbender Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival last year, as well as the Spotlight Award from the National Board of Review (the latter also for his work in A Dangerous Method, Haywire, Jane Eyre, and X Men: First Class, all 2011 releases).
British director Steve McQueen, who bears zero physical resemblance to the iconic American actor, also racked up awards and nominations for his first feature, Hunger (2008), and this is his second (a third is in pre-production and it looks interesting). He wrote the script with Abi Morgan (covered in The Iron Lady).
The moody music by Harry Escott complements the moodiness onscreen (helped along by the creativity of production designer Judy Becker (Garden State (2004), Thumbsucker (2005), Brokeback Mountain (2005), I'm Not There. (2007), and The Fighter, among others) who dressed those tony apartments beautifully). Here are some tracks (one, two, three) and Mulligan actually sings her song. There's a fun bit of trivia that imdb considers a spoiler, so I won't give it away either. In my opinion, the items before have more spoilers than the last one, so read them here after seeing this movie, preferably not on a first date. And have I mentioned we were carded twice because it's rated NC-17?
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