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| Marc |
 Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2011 4:23 am |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
Posts: 8424
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| Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void is a mindfucker. Try to catch it on the big screen if you can. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2011 12:45 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9016
Location: Shanghai
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| Has anyone seen Blue Valentine with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams? Getting some good early buzz. |
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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2011 1:29 pm |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6965
Location: Black Hills
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| I've liked Gosling in about everything I've seen him in, so will look for it ASAP. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2011 4:09 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9016
Location: Shanghai
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Conviction is really awful.
As in Bad Tv Movie awful.
Just so clumsy and poorly handled from scene to scene.
Tremendously crappy screenplay.
The aging makeup seems to be the only redeeming feature.
The actual story -- poorly portrayed in the film -- is inspirational. The movie isn't. Avoid. |
Last edited by gromit on Wed Jan 12, 2011 8:03 am; edited 1 time in total
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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2011 8:12 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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| I think gromit overstates the case against Conviction. It certainly smacks of TV movie, but the acting isn't bad. Curiously, I didn't like the aging makeup at all. Sam Rockwell wound up looking like a cartoon character. |
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| Ghulam |
| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2011 8:35 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 4742
Location: Upstate NY
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| The Fighter is a winner. It should be nominated for Best Director and Best Editing. Christian Bale's bravura performance too deserves recognition. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2011 9:12 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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The phrase “they don’t make movies like that anymore” is an apt description of Gaspar Noe’s psychedelic epic Enter The Void. When was the last time a movie directed by a major film maker was created with the sole intention of blowing your mind, not merely with special effects but with grand metaphysical aspirations? In attempting to replicate what he imagines as being the stages the soul passes through after bodily death, Noe has created a magnificent head trip that recalls the visual scope and poetry of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the pataphysical leaps of spiritual fantasy that infuse the similarly lysergic El Topo. The fact that Noe had cutting edge digital technology at his disposal and knows how to use it makes Enter The Void not only a provocative intellectual experience but a ravishingly visual one as well. But it must it must be seen on the big screen…uncut.
Noe has experimented with psychoactive substances since he was a teenager. More recently, he went to Peru to experiment with Ayahuasca. The psychedelic experience not only informs Enter The Void, it IS Enter The Void. The subject of the film is the film. Noe understands what few contemporary movie directors understand: film is chemistry with the potential of being alchemistry. Of all forms of art, film can best approximate dreaming or visionary states of consciousness. Enter The Void aspires to nothing less than altering your brain chemistry. And as much as a movie can, it succeeds. I staggered out of a screening of Enter The Void like someone coming down from an extended DMT trip. It took me a few minutes to orient myself well enough to drive my car. And other than seeing the film, I hadn’t had anything stronger than one glass of wine. I noticed that groups of people leaving the film seemed likewise in a daze, many of them laughing giddily like stoned freaks.
Enter The Void is not perfect. It is repetitive at times and probably 20 minutes too long (though I was never bored). Noe claims 2001 as an influence and like that film the performances in Void are often stiff and unconvincing. But the acting is hardly the centerpiece of Noe’s film. Afterall, the main character is a disembodied spirit. Noe goes for sensation over narrative rigor. He loves constructing lavish and lurid spectacles that are charged with sex and and shot from weirdly skewed perspectives. It’s not all tryptamine, there’s opium in there too. And like another one of his heroes, Kenneth Anger, Noe likes to play with the dark side. For all of its soulful yearning, the movie has scenes of transgression every bit as disturbing as Noe’s Irreversible and I Stand Alone - two films that on the surface are profane, but at heart deeply religious.
Enter The Void is haunted by the ghosts of the dead and the living dead. In its depiction of the afterlife as just another dimension of this life, the movie blurs the distinctions between living and dying. Throughout the film there are references to the “Tibetan Book Of The Dead” (almost comically so) and it seems that Noe is passing through his own Bardo planes as an artist, traveling through darkness to get to light. Noe explores the idea of the soul in transition like a man possessed. There is a sense of spiritual urgency in Enter The Void that recalls the beatitudes of a Carl Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc. Only this time it’s day-glo.
In my reverie over Enter The Void, I’ve failed to discuss the amazing technical accomplishments of the film. Put simply: the film is a visual marvel unlike anything I’ve ever seen…on a screen. The camera is in constant motion, following the action from every perspective imaginable, from heaven above to inside the womb. There’s a jawdropping shot of a penis from the point of view of the interior of a woman’s vagina. I laughed to myself imagining what it would have looked like in 3D. The wet neon of Tokyo at night is gorgeously shot by Benoît Debie. Color, lighting and set design blend in an orgy of eye candy that makes most Hollywood films look like they were shot a century using cameras powered by steam. With shuddering surround sound, the whole experience is like being immersed in a hot tub full of peyote tea.
Gaspar Noe wants to fuck you in the head until your brain cums and in Enter The Void he gets some long strokes in. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2011 9:39 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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| Glad the movie excites and invigorates you, Marc, but everything you say about it kills whatever interest I might have had. I'm not much interested in movies fucking with my mind, or more specifically my brain chemistry (if one actually could). |
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You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.
-Topher |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2011 11:05 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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| All art fucks with your brain chemistry. Good art really fucks with it. |
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| Marj |
| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2011 11:36 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 10497
Location: Manhattan
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| Marc - Your review is enticing to say the least. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2011 11:46 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Houston
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Marc wrote: All art fucks with your brain chemistry. Good art really fucks with it.
Not sure what you mean by that. |
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You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.
-Topher |
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| jeremy |
| Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2011 12:57 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
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Joe,
The following is an extraqct from the Guardian review of Enter The Void. I would say that mind-fuck just about sums it up.
Quote: Enter the Void is, in its way, just as provocative, just as extreme, just as mad, just as much of an outrageous ordeal: it arrives here slightly re-edited from the version first shown at Cannes. But despite its querulous melodrama and crazed Freudian pedantries, it has a human purpose the previous film [Irreversible] lacked, and its sheer deranged brilliance is magnificent. This is a grandiose hallucinatory journey into, and out of, hell: drugged, neon-lit and with a fully realised nightmare-porn aesthetic that has to be seen to be believed. Love him or loathe him – and I've done both in my time – Gaspar Noé is one of the very few directors who is actually trying to do something new with the medium, battling at the boundaries of the possible. It has obvious debts, but Enter the Void is utterly original film-making, and Noé is a virtuoso of camera movement.
Now your not going to get start talking about brain cheimstry or mind and body interaction or the seat of our emotions, are you? |
_________________
I am angry, I am ill, and I'm as ugly as sin.
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit.
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2011 3:15 am |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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Quote: Marc wrote:
All art fucks with your brain chemistry. Good art really fucks with it.
Not sure what you mean by that.
Joe,
art alters your consciousness, the chemistry in your brain, just as the morning sun or a pile of roadkill does. Life is chemical. Good art should, hopefully, alter your chemistry in a good way.
Comeon, go with me. You're a poet. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2011 7:49 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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| Afraid I will never see Enter the Void. Marc and I are so diametrically opposed on the subject of Noe's film Irreversible that I fear we have no common ground on this artist. Irreversible is one of the most noxious films imaginable. It is virtually unwatchable. Make that completely unwatchable in part. Marc might respond that this is what's intended--the kind of horror so visceral that it qualifies as art. But for whatever reason, I utterly reject it. Noe is undoubtedly skilled, but he is not a person I would ever want to know, and though I can admire the skill, I cannot in any way respect it. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2011 8:32 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9016
Location: Shanghai
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The actors in Conviction never really have a chance to be good or bad given the crappy little scenes they enact. I'm not even sure if the makeup/hair was good or not, but it became the thing I focused on to get through the film. I almost turned it off about every 15 minutes. The title is actually good -- his conviction for murder, her conviction that he is innocent. The rest sucks.
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Katalin Varga is a pretty taut revenge drama.
The lead actress, Hilda Peter, is very good and the journey unrelenting. I'd rec this whenever/wherever anyone can find it.
Going into it blindly, I foolishly distracted myself trying to determine where this was and what language was being spoken. Hungarian I believe, though IMDb lists both Romanian and Hungarian.
Katalin Varga was written and directed by Peter Strickland, a Brit with just enough funding (around $50K) to make his film in the Carpathian Mountains, partly with locals playing the locals.
Really an impressive debut. A stark haunting film.
The story is fairly simple, almost mythic.
It seemed like a tale from the aftermath of the most recent balkanization of the Balkans, which is what confused me about the location and language. Apparently the director first considered Albania. |
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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
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