Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)
Directed by Dan Gilroy
Big money artists and mega-collectors pay a high price when art collides with commerce. After a series of paintings by an unknown artist are discovered, a supernatural force enacts revenge on those who have allowed their greed to get in the way of art.
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7 films that influenced Velvet Buzzsaw
What critics say influenced Velvet Buzzsaw
It is a bright, vividly colored slice of gore, a pop art riff on “ Final Destination ” with bright red flames, blood, and paint.
Velvet Buzzsaw es un hilarante e impredecible relato que combina elementos de la película nominada al premio Oscar The Square con la franquicia de terror Final Destination .
With the horror elements, what you see is pretty much what you get; most of the Final Destination-esque death scenes aren’t particularly imaginative or shot with much flair – surprising given DP Robert Elswit’s involvement – and mostly feel like they belong in, well, a Final Destination film.
The tension between art and commerce is as old as the Renaissance, so the anthropomorphized, bloodthirsty paintings and installations have only slightly more subtext than the Final Destination series.
At the same time, the film never leans into the goofiness of its situations as much as it could and ends up feeling a bit like a pretentious Final Destination for it.
‘Final Destination’ meets the art world, with a batty performance from Gyllenhaal at the helm in ‘Velvet Buzzsaw,’ which heads to Netflix this Friday.
Everything from the visual effects to the costumes and caricatures (Catherine O’Hara’s Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice would fit right into this world) fly in the face of what one might call “taste,” because in Velvet Buzzsaw taste and its subsequent valuation is the beginning of a very slippery slope.
Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal is hilarious as the camp critic, reminiscent of Glenn Shadix’s Otho in Beetlejuice but dialled up to eleven.
La idea de la esfera comiéndose un brazo sale del horror de Audrey Hepburn en la comedia romántica Roman Holiday (1953); los changos que salen del cuadro parece un escupitajo de Jumanji (1995); la muerte a manos de Hoboman es una clásica aplicación ominosa de la pistola de Chéjov; la muerte por integración a la pintura siempre se ve mejor en Witches (1990); y la sierra tatuaje es una vil excusa para el nombre de la cinta (que no se justifica en sus connotaciones sexuales: “Velvet Buzzsaw” es un eufemismo algo violento para vagina).
It was shot by the great Robert Elswit (robbed of an Oscar nod for his work on Gilroy’s “Nightcrawler”) and his work elevates the piece overall.
Writer and director Dan Gilroy is drawing from the same well of a bitter, morally compromised Los Angeles that he did for 2014’s Nightcrawler, but Velvet Buzzsaw, as gleaming and sun-drenched as Nightcrawler is dark, is even more of an invective, and even more operatically heightened.
Modern art meets supernatural horror in the Nightcrawler filmmaker’s sumptuously spotty art-gallery chiller.
When Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler hit screens, it generated a fair amount of discussion as to whether it constitutes a genre film, but that question is altogether answered for us with his latest.
Writer-director Dan Gilroy (of Nightcrawler and Roman J. Israel, Esq. , both excellent films) has convincingly crafted a whole world, a whole vernacular.
Hes not as memorable as the unscrupulous videographer he portrayed in Nightcrawler , also directed by Gilroy.
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Between this and his role in Bird Box, one suspects the acting vet must have a sweet deal worked out with Netflix (namely, not much work for a whole lotta money).
Velvet Buzzsaw takes a bit to find its footing while it introduces its characters, including Toni Collette (Hereditary) as a museum curator, John Malkovich (Bird Box) as an artist afraid he’s lost his muse, and Daveed Diggs (Broadway’s Hamilton) as an up-and-comer afraid of selling out.
No vemos aquí la elegancia sobrada y sobrestilizada de las geniales cintas de Tom Ford (en particular, la maravilla angelina que fue Nocturnal Animals (2016)), no vemos aquí la crítica mordaz al mundo despiadado del arte contemporáneo que hizo Ruben Östlund en The Square (2017); Gilroy no logra la originalidad en el horror de Mandy (2018) o Hereditary (2018); y no encontramos, ni siquiera, el mismo esplendor fantoche que logró Refn en The Neon Demon (2016).
So in horror movies with any significant body count (unlike, something like Get Out or The Visit , which focus on one or two desperate, sympathetic protagonists), it’s become fairly standard to make sure the early cannon fodder consists of people who’ve marked themselves as worthy of death via selfish, reckless, or outright dumb behavior.