K's reviews

Thanks Mark, that was great.

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The Freedom Roads

Nice reviews you little

I saw The Deer Hunter at the movies when it came out I wasn't sure what to expect it blew me away Umm does that statement show my age

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

Pretty much. You were 19 in my head.
Thanks for all the rep Neb.

Yes you are right well I wish you were

Antichrist



Director – Lars Von Trier.
Cast – Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg.

I heard a woman threw up at the movies while watching this. I was skeptic. Thought it was all a bunch of hype. I even told the women sitting next to me (who were covering their eyes all the time, even before there was any scary stuff) that this wasn’t a horror and they ought to calm down. I was wrong. Half an hour into the film I was the one doing all the covering and turning away.

This is by far the strangest, most disturbing, most horrifying and most graphic movie I have ever seen. I will never watch this movie again.

The plot is simple. It’s about a married couple whose baby son crawled out of a window and died, while they were making love. The husband is a psychiatrist and the mother has recently quit some sort of adult education. The woman suffers an emotional breakdown and the husband takes her as a patient and attempts to cure her throughout the movie. He takes her to the place she fears the most, the woods, in order to get rid of the fear. That specific part of the woods is called Eden. The woman eventually goes insane and, well, see for yourself.

Knowing a bit about Von Trier helps to understand this film. Von Trier has had to endure various, serious depressions and as a result, he views the world differently than most people, which is obvious in the film.
The beginning (prologue) and the end (epilogue) of the movie is shot in very similar styles. It’s black and white and the slow motion effects and background music makes it very beautiful. Everything in between is dark and horrible. Maybe this is a statement. Everything between birth and death is suffering and only in death, or non-existence, do we find peace.

The baby boy, who usually is a symbol of life, beginnings and joie de vivre, dies, or if you stretch it, commits suicide.

Various animals appear throughout the movie; a blood-covered fox, a deer which is in the middle of giving birth and an infant crow. The fox is in China believed to be a signal from the spirits of the deceased. At some point in the movie the fox looks into the camera and yells; Chaos reigns! Thus stating that there is no afterlife.

The deer giving birth is, like the baby boy, a symbol of life. However, the deer infant is dead and nothing about the miracle, that is birth, is beautiful.

The crow is commonly known as a symbol of negative omens. At one point, the husband attempts to kill a new born crow, because it’s giving away his hideout. However, the crow proves difficult to kill and it takes several blows with a rock before the bird falls silent.

Have a look at the movie poster. The tree is supposed to be the tree of life. However the tree is fertilized with dead bodies. And that is, in a nutshell, the message of this film. What if birth, life and death aren’t beautiful miracles, blessed by God? To Lars Von Trier they aren’t and this movie is a lens through which we are offered to view the world as he does.

I honestly wouldn’t recommend this movie to anyone. Not because it isn’t a wonderfully executed piece of cinema but because I felt sick watching it. I very rarely have to look away and I never experienced that I couldn’t eat my popcorn. Until I watched this movie.

One Danish film critic said that one third of the audience would give this movie five stars. The second part would give it zero. And the last part would have no idea what they’ve just seen.

This seems to be the way a lot of people are approaching Antichrist...talk about how disgusting and horrible it is, and then give it .

I've read about some of the content, and I'm not sure I'll ever be seeing this. It does make me want to write something about what the goal of most cinema really is, and whether or not simply having an objective and achieving it is deserving of any kind of praise.

The "content" of the movie is disgusting and horrible. But the movie itself isn't. The symbolism is ingenious.

Then I suppose the question becomes whether or not the content is at all necessary to symbolize these things. Obviously, I'm skeptical that it is. I think there's a temptation to excuse such content because there's art within it, but I tend to take the opposite approach: that it's all the less excusable, because the content overshadows and spoils whatever legitimate things the film might want to say. Because someone with genuine talent is capable of better, and should know better.

I realize, of course, that I'm discussing this in a very abstract way, because I haven't seen the film (and I won't), so forgive me if I'm pontificating a little.

Anyway, everything I hear about von Trier indicates that he's kind of a messed up guy with some pretty odd ideas about what movies ought to be.

Don't you think this could bring some different and interresting movies to the table though?

Sure. I'm just not convinced that anything different has much value merely for being different. I could make a film that was nothing but high-pitched noises and screams, and it would be different, and to some I'm sure it would be interesting, but I don't know that it'd be, well, good.

I guess that's what it comes down to: is something good just because it's unusual? Or just because it creates feelings of disgust? Should we be concerned with how a movie makes us feel, or only that it makes us feel? I've been thinking about this a lot, and will probably write something formal about it at some point.

I'm totally hijacking your review thread at this point, though. Sorry about that. I'm just very interested in this topic.

Let's continue this discussion when you do. In a different thread.

Will do. Thanks for indulging my babbling.

The way you describe von Trier's concerns about the world actually sound very similar to those of Werner Herzog, Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen, to tell you the truth.

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Inglourious Basterds – An Interpretation



They sure kill a lot of Nazis. That’s probably the immediate description one would give of the film. Then one could go on describing specific scenes that were extraordinarily violent; like when The Bear Jew bashed the Nazi’s skull in with a bat, when Aldo Raines carved the Nazi cross into Hans Landa’s forehead or when one of the Basterds shot Hitler’s face off. But in the midst of this Nazi-killing massacre and extreme violence hides a strikingly brilliant film.

The Basterds is a group of Jew-American soldiers, whose sole purpose is to kill as many Nazis as they possibly can. Their means are those of extreme, inhumane violence and they have no mercy. This group is lead by lieutenant Aldo Raines, an American soldier from Tennessee, who Brad Pitt plays to near perfection. Like the rest of the Basterds, Aldo Raines has no mercy for the Nazis, since he believes that they’re such cruel and inhumane adversaries that they don’t deserve any form of forgiveness or justice.

In the film a fictional movie named Nation’s Pride is presented. In the end an assembly of high society Nazis is watching this movie in a theater. During that scene I got the distinct impression that the movie the Nazis were watching was very much like the movie I was watching. Nation’s Pride was about a German soldier who was killing off opponents of the Third Reich by the hundreds. In the movie he was carving the Nazi cross into the floor of the clock tower he was shooting from.
Inglourious Basterds is about a group of Jew-American soldiers who are killing Nazis by the hundreds, carving the Nazi cross into their foreheads. The resemblance of the two movies is apparent. On our side, in front of the screen, we’re watching an American, anti-Nazi, propaganda film. On the screen, the Germans are watching a German, anti-Jewish, propaganda film.
Both movies are, after all, just about people killing people, who they believe deserve to be killed. And in the sense that Inglourious Basterds is just about killing and violence it doesn’t have much to say. But given that it has so little to say, it says a whole lot. In essence, it becomes a modern parody of an old German propaganda flick.

That's an elegantly-simple explanantion which shows why some viewers love it more than others. I like it, a lot, and I'm sure that Tarantino wants to invest the film with that duality since it is all over the place if you think about it even more. I just think it could still be a lot better even if it was perhaps a bit shorter or the Landa character didn't sell out for one of QT's joke finales. But, as I said, I like it a lot, and although I haven't seen as many new films as usual this year, it's probably the best one I've seen so far.

Are you talking about the "that's a bingo!"-line?

No, I meant the actual final scene with the swastika. For some reason, it reminded me of the ending of Four Rooms, and I hate the Tarantino segment because the only good thing it had was a stolen joke finale. Remember, I still like/love Inglourious Basterds.

Well, to me that scene was the final jab aimed at the Nazis. Basically saying that even though you're prepared to give up your nazi beliefs for personal gain, we're still hating you and you're still a Nazi and we still kinda wanna cut you in your head. It was hilarious to me.

Oh yes, it was a much better ending than Four Rooms, but it was almost totally-predictable since Brad Pitt had already spelled it out verbally and shown it previously. I think I laughed too in the theatre because the "victim" would apparently have no way of knowing it, although he's supposed to be the expert on most everything. Of course, Aldo Ray (I mean, Raines) says that he doesn't feel he gets as much respect as he should from Landa. HA!