jenny🧿

Velvet Buzzsaw

i am confusion.

breakfastcowl

Velvet Buzzsaw

Not as bad as everyone was making it out to be? Me and Ezzie both agreed, this was an R-rated episode of Goosebumps that got some "alright, sure" laughs along with some "hell yeah, fuck 'em up" kills.

Codeliusthe2nd

Velvet Buzzsaw

Horror, as a genre, is typically regarded as one of the "lower" forms of film, since its focus isn't necessarily on aesthetic or plot, but rather show carnage and pure terror. This film has been described as a "high art horror", which in itself is an oxymoron if we're going off of the general perception of the genre, as horror and high art are two entities that shouldn't collide. With this in mind, Velvet Buzzsaw doesn't deliver on the full balance of horror and high art, but rather embraces much of the horror side to create a film not as scathing as The Square on art criticism, but one that shows that the art world can be a terrifying place when it comes to artist and critic. Velvet Buzzsaw is a horror film at its core, but embraces much of the satirical side of art culture, perpetuating the idea that art criticism detracts from the artist's true purpose when creating art. As an artist, I can understand how you can put yourself into every piece of artwork, and this film takes that very seriously, literally putting an artist into his work. Here, we see various critics only embrace the new and innovative, rather than look at the artist and their creation. This culminates with an unknown artist's pieces being found, and despite his instructions to destroy them, they are put on display and cause a shift in the art culture. Rather than follow what the artist wanted, these critics show the art off, and face the consequences of their actions. With this shift, this film dives from a high art satire into a campy horror film, and that's where the fun really starts. Rather than shy away, this film embraces horror (and it could have honestly went deeper into the horror elements, but it went deep enough to satisfy me), which creates a very interesting dynamic when compared to the first part of the film. We drop the conventionality of the first half of the film, and walk into a world of terror. While this film isn't necessarily scary, there are many scenes that I actually was surprised to see, which balanced atmosphere and score (which, done by the excellent Marco Beltrami, is stunning) to make scenes genuinely frightening. I can see why people may not enjoy Velvet Buzzsaw, but I genuinely enjoyed the film. It didn't fully balance horror and high art like I hoped it was going to, since the film really was separated into two parts, rather than integrate both throughout, but it was the perfect balance of camp and terror, which makes for a pretty good horror film. This film in itself is an oxymoron, as well as this review, since doing a critique on a film which criticizes critics seems irrelevant, I thought I'd do it anyways. Velvet Buzzsaw is a film to best go in blind to, as I did, and with an open mind to what art is, and what horror is as well.

Lex

Velvet Buzzsaw

I feel completely shallow about this because the characters are pretentious and it does make an impresssion of pretentious plotline. I would like to make a comparison on games that are about art that comes to life like Layers of Fear, Call of Cthulhu and Ib did better than this