The barbershop from Eastern Promises

The barbershop from Eastern Promises
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Regular readers will know that David Cronenberg's new film Eastern Promises is currently my film of the year despite Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly's best efforts to dislodge it. I was probably swayed by the fact that Cronenberg came across very well in the Radio 4 interview with Mark Lawson (no longer available on listen again) and Schnabel didn't when I saw him Q&Aed at Bafta. I found his name-dropping irritating but only because of his failure having mentioned Marty (Scorsese) or Harvey (Keitel) or David (Bowie) to delivery an interesting anecdote about them. Schnabel's a name-dropping celebrity cock-tease.

The worst bits of Eastern Promises are pure B movie (which isn't such a bad thing to be in my book) but the good bits are jaw-droppingly good. Both movies are flawed: the resolution in Promises isn't all it could be and the last third of Diving Bell drags a bit but both are definite ones to see.

Anyway, the point of this post was that the barbershop in the opening scene of Eastern Promises is the barbershop on Broadway market where I get my hair cut (£8.50). When I went in yesterday the nice barber pointed out some of the things they'd done to his shop for the filming including painting the sign you can see here which he's left on the window. And at the time I just thought he'd redecorated.

Eastern Promises: My new film of the year

So Control only got to be my film of the year for a few weeks (like buses, there's dross for months and then two great films come along in a matter of weeks) to be replaced by David Cronenberg's new thriller, Eastern Promises, which is set amongst the Russian gangster class of contemporary London. Excitingly (for me at least) a lot of the exteriors were shot round Hackney with the opening shot featuring the Joy Tandoori, our local curry house, on fashionable Broadway market. By way of a warning to the squimish it does feature several scenes of extreme visceral violence (which are quite amazing) but if you liked A History of Violence then you're in for a real treat and yet again Viggo Mortensen is outstanding.