Review of Clean, Shaven (1995) by Jesse O — 29 Mar 2010

This is a goddamn great movie, just great. At first it might not seem like it. I was watching a movie last night (called Jigoku) and I literally could not make it through after 30 minutes or so of watching I just shut it off because it just wasn't clicking for me, so I don't know why THAT carried over to this movie, but I was sort of hesitant that I might not get into this movie at all because of that.

Thank christ I was wrong, because this movie grabs you right at the very beginning and it's hard to take your eyes off this movie. It's just very mesmerizing and you're caught up in these characters.

..hell I shouldn't even say that because the movie is about Peter and Peter only, and Peter Greene is just fabulous in his role. There's not a great deal of dialogue in the movie, even less for Peter's character, but Greene gives such a fabulous performance.

What's most important about his character is what he DOESN'T say and his facial expressions, it's just a fantastic performance and Peter Greene definitely delivers. Another thing about this movie that I like, is that you sort of feel like a fly on the wall in most of the scenes.

Like you just sort of stumbled into Peter's live since he got released. It just felt like the people in this movie would just go on living their lives after the movie ended. Whereas in other movies, once it ends, the characters just stop existing.

It's very hard to explain to be completely honest, but I liked that aspect of the movie. It's a very minimalist approach to filmmaking, I will admit that right now. But sometimes, as the cliche goes, less is more.

In fact I find it funny because I own the dvd for this movie and one of the "special" features on the disc is the film's original soundtrack (you can download MP3s too) and I find this funny because there's little to no soundtrack to the movie, what soundtrack there is very minimal (see a theme here) and it never really gets in the way of the scenes as some other soundtracks tend to do.

Also another thing, this movie felt longer than it was and for the first time I don't mean that as a mistake, I still felt the movie was well paced and there was never a moment where I was bored with the movie.

All in all, just a fantastic movie, a fabulous character study and just an all around great movie.