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Velvet Buzzsaw And The Art Of Mocking The Art People

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I’ll presume that you’ve seen Velvet Buzzsaw by now. The Dan Gilroy directed horror thriller premiered on Netflix on February 1st, but it took me a week (more or less) to watch it and to write a blog post about it.

Now this is by no means a review, but a general observation of a movie and what message it tries to send to the audience. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Morf Vandewalt in Velvet Buzzasaw. A snobbish bisexual art critic that’s both feared and revered for his sharp tongue and bitchy critic remarks. Unfulfilled with his love life and faced with the prospect of smothering someone’s art with his words, Morf stars to bang his (let’s say) colleague Josephina (Zawe Ashton) and to sell the paintings that she stole from her dead crazy neighbor- a former painter.

However these paintings possess more evil than originally thought, and bad things will start happening to everyone that benefits from those paintings.  Velvet Buzzsaw is  fine for the most part, but it’s not enough to say that is just a satire to the art world. It’s a dig to the art critics, the art dealers and art curators and all of their arty annoying snobbish elitism. You know… The Marina Abramovich, type of artist that piss most people off and not in a good way.

The movie shows how that art world operates, and it’s more a study of characters than anything else. Furthermore, Velvet Buzzsaw it’s about the fears of not being relevant, of the superficial way we form meaningless relationships with those around us and about the competition in this particular world.

Almost every single one of the characters in Velvet Buzzsaw are self-loathing and self-destructive in their own way, and they’re in the most grotesque way making a mockery of their superficial nature. They’re all bored to death in their daily routine and by discovering the paintings, it somehow for a brief moment in time, gave them a new reason to live. To be excited about something.

The deaths that followed were not particularly scary in Velvet Buzzsaw but the aftermath really is for some of them. Take a good look at the aftermath of Gretchen’s gnarly death. People coming to the gallery ignored her corpse as she lay there bleeding to death. I feel that only speaks about the clueless nature of the modern era people, and the fact that nothing shocks us anymore. Oh and perhaps the gallery attendees thought she was part of the exhibition, I don’t know. Children were playing in the pool of her blood and Instagram-ing her to the point of trending. She was an art piece for a brief moment, to be honest and not a good one.

And frankly besides Coco (Natalie Dormer) and Morf at the very end, not a single character in this movie was particularly likable or redeemable. They were all terrible people, and frankly got even more terrible deaths.

However, Velvet Buzzshaw was a decent and engaging movie. I expected a little scarier and edgier product, but I figured Dan Gilroy wanted to send a message more than to scare the audience.

 

 

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