Ewan McGregor Gets Naked in Young Adam

Ewan McGregor... Totally Naked. Nude. Full frontal. Loooong shot.... of Ewan McGregor no less. Did I mention he gets naked yet?

I kid you not.

What? You still want to know the plot and all that stuff? Hard crowd here. Yeesh.

OK.. so in the movie Young Adam, McGregor is this real cad kinda fella. He finds out his sometimes-gal is pregnant and oopsie! She sorta falls off the wharf and drowns. Now, our Ewan gets scared and of course doesn't own up to anything at all here. No. In fact, some other schmuck gets arrested for murder. This, then, is the moral battle within a person on whether they should do the right thing or save their own ass. You'll have to watch to see what Ewan does.

As far as dilemmas go, this wasn't a bad premise. Unfortunately it wasn't pulled off as well as it might have been under more experienced hands than Scottish Director David Mackenzie. I'm not saying Mackenzie botched it, but the pacing might have been a bit better. This one went a tad slow for me.

Yes, I realize that introspection is usually slow by default, and I have greatly enjoyed a few with slower pacing than this one. It's just that a few scenes were more drawn out than they maybe should have been, and a few that should have maybe been dug deeper were not. Like I said, great premise here. It's just that I would have liked to have seen it explored more fully. I would have liked to have had more of the internal struggle that Ewan's character was going through. Granted, Anti-Socials would have no struggle with this, but clearly this was not the case with him. He had those tendencies to be sure, and part of his anxiety was merely his fear of being found out, but there was enough shown to indicate a moral dilemma was happening inside that pretty head of his too. I would have liked to have seen more of that explored.

As for Ewan's acting... heck man a guy doesn't have to act if he's hung like that, alright? I mean really... those uncircumcised dangly bits really were the star of the show. More than a mere cameo performance there. You won't have to pause and zoom in to find it either. Having said that, eh, he did OK. Alright he did more than OK. McGregor is good and I doubt I'll get much argument for saying that. But he has to get extra kudos for the drawn out nude bit too. I mean come on! We get to see Obi-Wan's jewels! And the Force is definitely with him...

Tilda Swinton of Narnia and Vanilla Sky (to name a few) plays a bit of a harlot here, and provides a place (unknowingly) for McGregor to hide out and see what happens. Swinton is awesome. Very low-key, yet we can see right away that this is one tough cookie. I was just very impressed with this gal. She ain't afraid to let it all show either. heh.

Young Adam runs about 93 minutes and is Rated NC-17 for some explicit sexual content. Well yeah. But there is an edited version out there for American release which is rated merely 'R'. I haven't seen that version so I couldn't tell ya what parts they took out.. but I know they did not get all Bobbitt on it; Ewan wouldn't let them.

So... 3 stars for Young Adam's plot-line and acting, plus 1 for the dangly bits. Total: 4 stars. Nuff said.