Movie Reviews for Pervs: Shame

So this Friday, I went to see the new Steve McQueen / Michael Fassbender Movie, Shame, at the 2011 New York Film Festival. I was in excellent company: Cat Grant bought the tickets and treated myself, Liz Silver, and Damon Suede to the showing. And not that they're not awesome people, because they totally are, but did I mention Michael Fassbender and Steve McQueen were there? Because they were :D

I shall limit my fangirl squeeing, primarily because once Michael went through the photo call (which we were able to watch from about twenty feet away, but had to peek between the row of photographers), his handlers hustled him past the rope pretty quickly. He did try to sign autographs, but they told him he needed to introduce the movie. Ah well.

Speaking of introducing the movie, here's the blurb from IMDB:

In New York City, Brandon's carefully cultivated private life--which allows him to indulge his sexual addiction--is disrupted when his sister Cisssy arrives unannounced for an indefinite stay.

Basically, it's about an OCDish sex-addict who holds down a highly successful job in (I think?) an ad firm and suffers so deeply from his addiction that he jacks off in the bathroom at work, keeps porn on his work computer, brings prostitutes to his house, and randomly picks up women wherever he can find them. He's a miserable SOB, either in agony or numb pretty much all the time. The impression you get is that orgasm is the one moment in life when he is not in agony, and he chases it with the relentless desperation of someone who knows it's killing him but doesn't know how else to feel. His sister shows up and throws a serious wrench into his orderly life. Worse, she seems to make him think about all kinds of things he'd rather not think about every time he looks at her. She makes him face his present, too; when he starts having to hide around her, he seems to realize how fucked up he is, and starts trying to change.

So, on to the review. I want to (and will) treat this as a real review because the movie was pretty incredible in a lot of ways, but I'll be doing it within the framework of the Perv Score. For those new to Movie Reviews for Pervs, here's the four criteria by which films are judged:

1. Hotness of the star(s)
2. How often and how thoroughly the star(s) get nekkid
3. Severity of ass-kickings to which the star(s) are subjected
4. And, as something of an afterthought, whether or not the movie was actually any good

So, combined real and perv reviews, beneath the jump.