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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.
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.
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From:
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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.
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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.
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I agree about the two Kingdom seasons. The first is marvelous. The second, which finally came out on DVD this month, is less so, though still interesting.
The only other Von Trier film I've seen is Zentropa, which I thought was a mess.
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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.)
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The Bourne films, on the other hand, are great fun. I don't care if they're predictable and formulaic; they action scenes are fantastic. They make me happy.
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The Bourne Supremacy. What a perfect way to clean one's clogs after a Lars von Trier film!
The information relayed to the audience through the rapid editing - like the less than a second long shot of the pharmacy sign in the third one and almost subliminally you know where Bourne is before the next edit - is simply stunning in all three of those films. That is artistry!
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and he was actually the one of the few danish dogme directors, with most of the others being german, french, belgian, and american.
if you're really interested in seeing what the dogme films are like, i can't recommend 'julien donkey-boy' enough, by korine or 'festen' by vinterberg.
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while i don't agree that von trier is necessarily misogynist, i do find his work to contain a discomforting degree violence and abuse toward women, which isn't really recitifed by the way he tends to have only women be 'pure of heart and deed.'
still, i'd rather have his examined yet aberrant ideas on film than the rape fantasies of fincher or the middle school misogyny of labute.
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although, i have to say, if you didn't care for that... then you really should avoid the other two films in the trilogy- 'epidemic' and 'element of crime.'
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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.
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'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.
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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.
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I've added the third Bourne movie to near the top of my queue. I wonder if I should back track and watch the first one...
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"They were later joined by fellow Danish directors Kristian Levring and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, to form a group sometimes known as the Dogme 95 Collective"--so most of the Dogme directors were indeed Danish.
But you're correct that Dogville is not a Dogme film. I just checked out the actual manifesto --I'd mistakenly thought that the obvious low budget, hand-held camera work (at least it looked to me) and lack of proper mise-en-scene was all part of the Dogme manifesto-the hand-held camera is.
I like some of Fincher's work, couldn't stand The Panic Room but I don't recall anything that seemed like a rape fantasy in that: or The Game, Se7en, The Fight Club, or Zodiac--and those are his major movies....so which movies did you perceive rape fantasies?
I have no desire to watch most of LaBute although I liked Nurse Betty better than I thought I would.
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i suppose 'rape fantasy' was a poor wording choice, but i find the majority of women in fincher's work to be nothing more than objects of abuse, often used to hurt male characters by proxy, and i have yet to see an honest or sympathetic portrayal of a woman in any of his films.
(that being said, i do find 'se7en' to be an important film, even if an incredibly flawed one.)
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while it was founded in denmark, the majority of work since its found has come from places and directors outside denmark, so i find it a bit inaccurate to think of it as a danish film movement, at this point.