Eastern Promises
So Tania and I watched another film made by the same guy that did A History of Violence and again starring Viggo Mortensen. It was a good and very poignant, poetic-justice sort of story, but it was very brutally violent. Now we watch a lot of violent films because I like them when they're over the top in the Kill Bill 1 & 2 or Shoot-Em-Up sort of way (excellent movies all three, btw).

However, this movie was just a bit much. I mean, do we really *need* to see a dead man's fingertips cut off once the character says he's going to do it? For those of you who don't know this charming tradition, it's a way of preventing a body from being identified by its fingerprints. Do we really need to see not one, but two throats cut in a single movie?

I suppose it could be argued that the director was trying to show the brutal cruelty of the reality in which the characters lived. Yet, I don't think I missed much of the brutal cruelty of the characters in movies just a few years back, when the camera cut away at the last second and didn't actually *show* what you *knew* was happening. Seriously, the sound effects of a throat being cut or fingers snipped off are enough, trust me. I don't think 'R' for 'Restricted' really tells the whole story anymore...