aighhhh

[ellen_datlow]

I watched Dogville tonight--what a piece of ugly swill. Von Trier really seems to hate women--not to mention the US. Woman escaping from gangsters arrives in a small American town where she has to "persuade" everyone to like her so she can hide out. Her one ally is the handsome guy who finds her escaping and he gives her advice as to how to win over everyone. She befriends each but as the gangsters seem more and more eager to find her the townspeople start to show their true colors.

This is the first of his movies that I've seen the whole of (although I watched and loved the first year of his tv series The Kingdom and liked (less) the second year of it).

If you'll remember, I started to watch Breaking the Waves a few months and after twenty minutes could not continue--it was just too damp, clingy, depressing. Next to him Bergman's a comedian. Anyway, this is the first I've seen of his "Dogma 95" films: a group of Danish directors who subscribe to the philosophy of paring down the settings to almost bare stages, very plain camera work, and doing everything possible to prevent the viewer from getting totally involved in the movie as another world.

Which I admit I don't "get"--why would I want a movie to seem as if I'm not watching a movie. I'm sure he and his fellow Dogma followers have brilliant philosophical reasons but for me it's the antithesis of cinema. Anyway, I don't really want to see any more of his movies.

To cleanse the palate I watched the mindless, fast-moving Bourne Supremacy with a really neat car chase in the last 20 minutes and Brian Cox, Joan Allen. I probably should have started with the first Bourne movie but I could figure out what was going on. Oh yeah, and Frankie Potenta (who was great in Run, Lola Run looking anorectic in this one was in the first 20 minutes.

Nicely entertaining.

Comments

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I saw some of The Kingdom after I'd had my fill of Von Trier with Breaking the Waves. I couldn't work up what it took to see the whole thing either. I saw the end of it and it pretty much permanently turned me off the guy. Which is too bad 'cause The Kingdom looked much more fun, but it was soured by the taste of his previous stuff.

I got pissed off enough at Breaking the Waves that I looked up all his movies. Damned near all of them are about -- in one way or another -- women suffering.

I've got better things to do with my life. Like making sure there aren't any toenail clippings behind the toilet.

I'm also puzzled by the Dogme 95 school. It strikes me as being like publishing screenplays as novels.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

The first season of The Kingdom IS terrific but it starts losing its way towards the end of the season. Then just seems to completely get lost second season...but if you want to give it another try I don't recall women particularly suffering (more than anyone) else :-)

There are movies I refused to see when I was young because I'd read things about them that made feel they were really anti-female. Two examples were Liquid Sky and Straw Dogs--which both reportedly had really nasty rape scenes in them. I finally decided to watch Straw Dogs and thought it was very good and much more layered than I'd expected. Maybe one of these years I'll see if I can track down Liquid Sky.

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Funny thing about Straw Dogs.

It took me a really long time to get around to seeing it. What got me interested ultimately was my wife telling me stories about how her dad had helped Peckinpah cheat at school. So we rented the movie and watched it together.

It was kind of eerie how much Dustin Hoffman's character resembled my father-in-law. Not so much physically, but emotionally and behaviorally.

It added a very -- interesting -- layer to the film.

It was a helluva movie.

With Von Trier, I just feel vaguely implicated in his squicky crypto-fetish. (The end of Breaking the Waves is offensively stupid -- she suffers horribly, horribly for her husband until she finally dies at which time he's miraculously recovered and then giant bells toll in the sky to show god's great approval. Fuck you Lars. Fuck you.)

[nballingrud.livejournal.com]

But God always loves people who suffer needlessly. He's a sadist!

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Von Trier seems to have confused himself with the universe. ;)

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Well of course, it's her saintly sacrifice that cures him. (this makes me want to curse without seeing the rest of the movie ;-) )

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

I think I yelled at the TV when it happened, despite living in an apartment at the time and watching it at 3am.

For me, I think, what's really digging into my ribs is the deck-stacking he does to achieve his effect.

'Cause I loved Greenaway's Baby of Macon, and it covers not wholly dissimilar territory. But then, Greenaway likes for all of his characters to suffer horribly. And to be naked. A lot.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

I love some Greenaway but am not familiar wit that specific movie by him. Yeah, I feel Greenaway is actually far more inventive overall and when his stuff works it works big time. Of course when it doesn't...blchchh.

Lucius has tried to persuade me to watch Dancing in the Dark or at least the musical scenes....

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm a bit hit-or-miss with Greenaway. I solidly liked The Cook, The Thief, etc, was amused by but largely bored with Prospero's Books (loved the soundtrack though), adored The Pillow Book, have mostly forgotten A Zed and Two Noughts (except for the snails), quite liked The Belly of an Architect liked at the time I saw it but have since forgotten 8 and a Half Women and I've been digging his short films.

The Baby of Macon is pretty universally reviled. It has -- as far as I know -- no distribution anywhere in any format. For some reason, people get touchy about dismembering infants, I guess. I don't think it was ever screened in the US at all. I've only ever seen a bootleg which came -- I think -- from an Italian VHS edition.

I'm not sure if it's more well known for the graphic infanticide, the full frontal Ralph Fiennes and Julia Ormond or it's vicious anti-church politics.

If you're interested, I could probably find a way to get the bootleg to you...

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

I very much liked The Cook, the Thief, etc. and also liked The Draughtsman's Contract and A Zed and Two Noughts--zebras, you don't remember the zebras? Also Drowning by Numbers.
I also found Prospero's Book dull.
I've got some of his short movies in my netflix queue.

I would be interested. I've heard nothing of it.

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I don't remember the zebras. There's a faint recollection scurrying around in my skull but it's managing to stay just outside the beam of light. I've never managed to track down Drowning by Numbers.

Do you have a VHS player? I can just send you the copy I got. I've since managed to find a digital copy of it. Elsewise I can probably make a DVD of the digital version.

(I don't even have a VHS machine anymore)

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

I don't have VHS either, I'm afraid.

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Aha! I managed to make a watchable DVD off the file I've got. Apparently, there is a regular DVD release of it, but it was only in New Zealand and it's been out of print for many years.

If you'd still like me to send you a copy, I'll be happy to.

Just e-mail me the where-to at

voidmonster (at gmail.com).

[nick-kaufmann.livejournal.com]

Liquid Sky is hardly anti-woman. It's actually a feminist punk film!

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Really? Well, it's not on netflix so I don't guess I'll ever see it anyway.

[lokilokust.livejournal.com]

wow.
i'd forgotten about 'liquid sky,' which i haven't seen since i was a child.
and, now that i think about it, i can't even remember much of the film, nor how i feel about it.
.
'straw dogs' does have a very difficult rape scene, and it does bear peckinpah's typical scornful attitude toward women... and i've always found his idea of masculinity to be tiresome, at best, and often rather oppressive.
but i still find it a masterwork of american cinema.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Well all rape scenes are difficult, but the whole psychology of what was going on in Straw Dogs was fascinating. Before I saw the movie I'd read a lot about it and was ready to agree with the charge of misogyny in the film. But there's much more to it. I wrote about it on the Nightshade BB when I first watched it. I just found the post and will repeat it here:


I was surprised. The fact is that none of the characters are admirable. The Dustin Hoffman character is an asshole who treats his wife like a simple child (to be fair, she behaves like a spoiled child. She has no life of her own and will not allow him to work because she's bored and he doesn't pay enough attention to her).

Before seeing the movie, I'd always been under the impression that viewers/reviewers felt she "asked for it" (the rape, that is). She certainly was being deliberately provocative (leaving the upstairs curtains open and parading around half naked) but this to me seemed obviously aimed at the guy with whom she had a "history." And it can certainly be argued that she was enjoying the sex with him--although the other guy was most definitely raping her and she was NOT enjoying it.
So we've got some contradictory stuff going on here.

What I found interesting is that the DVD packet blurb says that her rape lead to the siege of the house. This is so wrong that it makes me believe whoever wrote it hadn't seen the movie. No no no. Dustin Hoffman doesn't even know about the rape. The siege is a direct result of him rescuing the retarded guy from the mob. Duh. Anyway, this whole protection of an "innocent" is nicely ironic, because we the viewers know that the David Warner character did kill someone, even if it was an accident.

So all in all, I'm glad I finally got around to seeing it.

[lokilokust.livejournal.com]

i would tend to agree with most of that.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

What my experience made me realize is the danger in judging movies without having seen them--no matter how much talk you've heard about them, or how many reviews or film criticism you've read....and in my 20s and 30s I read a LOT of film criticism both in college and thereafter. I read all of Pauline Kael's books and many others--for the fun of it. Which is why I can often describe movies and who directed and was in them --that I've never seen.

[lokilokust.livejournal.com]

and here i thought i was the last person alive with any sort of affection for kael (who i almost always disagree with, but have always enjoyed reading.)

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Nah. I liked her too, even if I disagreed with her.

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

What makes the movie extremely effective for me is that it's got room for all the horribly messy human stuff that's often pared out when making brutal little revenge movies.

I sincerely hope that the writer's strike killed the remake that was happening. The impression I got from the guy that was optioning it to direct was that he specifically felt the rape scene was 'in poor taste' and it needed to fixed.

For me what's working so very well in that film is that it trots out damn near all of the ugly quasi-justifications for rape and puts them in orbit around that scene and then lets the ugliness of it shoot down all of them. There was a real tendency in films of the era to feature rape as titillation. It seems to me like Straw Dogs was the squeak of that faucet being shut off.

It's odd that I hadn't thought of it until now, but there's a scene in a more recent movie that provides a fascinating counterpoint. Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day has a scene that is strangely similar, but with the gender roles reversed. It's got the distinction for me of eliciting the most interesting audience experience of any thing I've seen. I won't fully describe what happens, but it's a moment that the film leads up to, and you know it's going to be something bad and then it's kind of worse than you imagined, but it's erotic at the same time. At the time I saw it, I hadn't seen the footage of the Milgrim experiment, so I was a bit taken aback that there were people in the audience laughing at what I was seeing. Later on, I saw the Milgrim stuff and I recognized the laugh of the guy who thought he'd just killed a man.

And supposedly Trouble Every Day is where Vincent Gallo stole the prosthetic penis he used in The Brown Bunny, or at least that's what Claire Denis says.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Oh noooo. I hope it doesn't happen. Not a remake of that!

You've gotten me to add Trouble Every Day to my queue.

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the remake dies quietly and the whole idea is forgotten.

I am stunned that Netflix has Trouble Every Day. It's even the same edition I got. The description they have up at Netflix is... Um... Amusing.

I would describe it as a vampire movie (and Vincent Gallo even looks exactly like Vlad Dracula in it) with a Tindersticks soundtrack. It's not strongly narrative though, it kind of meanders through a thin veneer of story.
You'll probably want something fun and straight-forward to pair it with.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

I don't read the descriptions of the movies on the mailer until afterwards.

Thanks for the warning.