Beauty and Bloodspray.

Dear readers welcome to this weeks installment of the Critical Canadian This week the reviews stand in stark contrast to one another: "Biutiful" and "Hobo with a Shotgun". As always I hope you enjoy reading them.

 "Biutiful" directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu is a melancholic meditation on beauty. Javier Bardem play's Uxbal a small time hustler and sometimes medium in Barcelona. Uxbal  learns early on in the film that he is in fact dying of cancer and that he has very little time left. The films title encapsulates the thesis of the film that beauty is subjective, fragile, and temporary just like our lives. Javier Bardem was a shrewd choice for this film his appearance and visibly broken nose would seem to preclude beauty, but Javier is in fact one of the most beautiful male leads working today (guys if you doubt me just ask your mother, your sister ,or girlfriend, they'll set you straight.) The downside to Javier being in this movie is that I doubt a few months from now whether I will even remember the other cast members in this wonderful movie which is unfortunate as each and everyone of them shows compelling flashes of beauty even mired in the the gutter as they often are. You can't see "Biutiful" fast enough if you ask me.

"Hobo with a Shotgun" is a return to classic grindhouse film. It features excessive, sadistic and plentiful shotgun assisted fatalities also it sports one of the worst scripts of all time. I find it interesting how the progression of the slasher genre is a parallel progression of how pornographic film evolved. Rutger Hauer very convincingly plays the "Hobo" it's amazing what thirty years have done to the man he barely resembles the actor who played Roy the replicant in "Bladerunner". If you like slashers featuring blood fountains and somebody screaming every five minutes this is your movie. I say skip it.