Most days, it takes very little to convince me a movie is worth seeing. A strong trailer, a decent tagline, The Rock: these are the things that I usually need from my movies. When Another-Day’s music/movie guru, Jordan Koen, talked up Shame a while back, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it. It’s not that I’m averse to watching dramatic or art films, but maybe that I’m more turned off by the sort of audience that sometimes ends up seeing and heaping praise on films like this. As it turns out from the screening I went to for this movie, it’s really the lady two rows behind me, laughing because Michael Fassbender is fucking a woman up against a window that’s the audience I don’t like. She has every right to laugh at whatever she wants, obviously. The movie even provides a few moments that make you want to laugh, albeit nervously.
Shame is full of contradictions like that. It’s by far one of the most engaging films I’ve ever seen. And it’s still fucking hard to watch.
