How often have I been how great this film is and how stupid of me that I haven’t seen it. By different people even. A couple of days ago I saw it in the videostore and (unlike me) decided to give it a go.
Well, where and why is this film good? It is a boring teenager horror/thriller. Donnie Darko gets a visitor from the future and changes present time. Nothing scary, nowhere surprising, nothing special.
Not the kind of Japanese film like I have seen recently. No creepy horror-thriller, but a heavy drama. Strange that everything is in Japanese (credits, anouncements, etc.) but the title. Anyway, “Dolls” shows a couple of tragic lovestories. Overall “Dolls” is a strange film with pretty original stories. A red line is two young people who walk through Japan tied to eachother with a red rope. There are extraordinary beautiful shots of the Japanese nature. The film is very minimal, no sound when no sound is needed and the same goes for conversations. I am also heavily under the impression that there is a lot of underlying symbolism that I don’t understand. Wanderers have certain coloured clothing, the trees have very bright colours in different parts of the film, Japanese puppet-playing comes back at times apparently to clear some things out, but not to me. A Japanese film for a Japanese audience that understands such things?
In the end I can say that this is definately no feel-good movie, but a nice one if you want to see some other kind of film/drama sometimes.
Von Trier did it again. After no artificial light and no self-built stages he came up with something else: no stages at all! He worked it out brilliantly. The village of the title is a small village with 15 inhabitents. You can see the setting is a studio, the streets are named, houses are stripes on the ground with the name of the residents written in it and the bench says “old lady’s bench”. Here and there there is a part of stage, like a bed, a couch or the tip of a tower flying in the air. With this setting Von Trier manages to surprise you for about 60 or 90 minutes. The actors open fictional doors, knock in the air, etc. The funny thing is: you get used to it. The greates thing is that it makes things very literally transparrent. With one shot you can see the whole village and exactly what everyone is doing, but of course people can’t look inside eachothers houses, so this openness is only for the viewer. Light, dark, day, night, snow and fire and made with the least material possible, but are effective enough. Very well done!
BUT, the story is stretched out over three hours. It is told in a funny way though. A voiceover telling a story in nine chapters and a prolog, with a very nice sence of humour (British I would say). It was totally unnessary to use three long hours to make the film though. The story is about the simple village Dogville which lays in the Rocky Mountains in the middle of nowwhere. There is only one road to the village which even ends there. Nicole Kidman ends up in the village when fleeing from a group of criminals. The village hides Grace (Kidman), but as time goes, demands more and more in return. Overall “Dogville” is a charge against the market economy. The price of Grace gets higher with the danger the village is in. This eventually leads to inhumane behaviour and ends in an eruption of violence.
I like the idea behind the film, I love the way Von Trier worked it out. Totally unique with stage-playing more than film-acting, but I sure hope that there will be a shorter version of it some time. -3/9/03-
De Ontdekking van de Hemel (1992) by Harry Mulisch (1927-) is seen as one of the highlights of modern Dutch literature. I never read novels and I certainly wasn’t planning on reading this 900+ pages book by Mulisch. Even when the Dutch actor Jeroen Krabbé (1944-) decided to make a film of the book, I had no intention to see it. But since I don’t go through life alone, I got to see the two hour film anyway.
The film begins by showing how two men meet and become best friends. Even when they run into a girl they alternally (and simultaneously) have a relationship with, things keep going well between the two. Then the three have a car accident, Ada (the girl) falls into coma while pregnant (but who is the father?), gives birth and remains in a coma while her son (Quinten) is raised by her mother and Max and not by Onno (who is thought to be the father). All right and well, not? But as the boy grows up, he has dreams of his mother and of a strange building and the story turns towards a vague semi-religious Dan Brown-like plot and the ‘other people’ having conversations prove to be (arch)angels running life on earth and having nefarious plans with mankind. I kind of lost it there. The first part of the film is an alright drama, but the second half is a bit far-fetched. With the whole Da Vinci hype, I can see why this book is so popular. For those who can’t get thought Mulisch’s writing-style or just want to see a film, this Dutch, but very well English spoken, film isn’t too bad of a choice.
Countless times I had planned to go to savetibet.org and order something to at least to something for the suppressed people of Tibet, how little it is. We tend to forget. It has been so long ago since the Chinese decided to occupy Tibet and violently entered the country on the rooftop of the world. Monastries were destroyed, monks and nuns beaten or worse. China sent her own inhabitents to Tibet to force their culture on the Tibetan people and recently they even glamourously opened a railway connection from China to Tibet in the hope that more people (Chinese or tourists) will invade the country. For economic reasons, the West doesn’t do a thing. China is too much of an interesting partner to point towards the injustice they commit in their neighbouring country. Worse even, Westerners think it is hip to go on a ‘spiritual journey’ to the city of Lhasa or visit one of the monastries (under Chinese command). Exactly what the Chinese want! In any case, for a long time, the “international campaign for Tibet” try to bring the subject under attention. With success I might add, since many people buy their Tibetan flags and DVDs and so did I. I hope the money is well-spent, but I think a Western “no” to China would be much more helpfull than some money.
“Devotion and Defiance” is a 35-minute documentary that may not bring much news. You will see about the invasion of China, the suppressed Tibetans, the ups and downs of the people, a bit about the monastries. I may have seen this documentary, or one much like it, on TV already, but that doesn’t mind. It is only $ 6,-, undoubtely by far not enough to make a stand, but still, if everyone buys something from this organisation, something might happen some day.
It had been far too long since I saw this brilliant comedy! Jeunet didn’t make a whole lot of films, but his “La Cité Des Enfents Perdus” (city of lost children) (1995) and his highly acclaimed “Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulin” (Amelie) (2001) definately belong to the highlights of the comedy genre (a genre I am not too fond off). Two years after Amélie there seems to be a new film coming up with the title “Un Long Dimanche De Fiançailles”.
But to “Delicatessen”. The story is about a post-apocalyptic France in which everybody does everything to get food. In one building lives the gruesome butcher Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) who hires young men to kill and eat and sell their meat after a few weeks of them doing small jobs around the house. His new worker is Louison (Dominique Pinon) used to be a clown in the circus and is as inventive as naive. I won’t tell you too much of the magnificent story. The film is full of contrasts. The atmosphere is always very grim caused by the idiotic characters, the colours and the stages. There are some extremely silly scenes and the humour is so subtle and brilliant that this is a funny film that doesn’t loose it’s grim atmosphere. The characters are berzerk, some scenes insane (a woman trying to kill herself in different ways, a girl that is almost blind, etc.), this is really a masterpiece.
Also great are the Lost Children that I really need to see again some time soon, another dark comedy of Jeunet. Amélie is much lighter (but no less funny) , so I don’t know what to expect from the upcoming film.
Apparently just on DVD this old Italian film of the famous Decamoron of Giovani Boccacio (1313-1375). Different ‘stories of love’ following eachother without notification, running through eachother and being not too interesting. The acting is rather overdone, Italian old films have the bad habbit of not ‘going synchrone’ (images and sound) and the blurry story isn’t too exiting. Maybe just a film for people who like classics.
I have never been fond of horror films, so I never saw the 1978 original of this film. Watching DOTD I already see why I never watch this kind of horror. The beginning and the end are good, strange filmographic jokes and a nice, dark atmosphere. The rest of the film is slashing and not the least bit scary, atmospheric or anything, just a bloody action film. I usually see these kinds of films as comedies, but after a few hundreds of liters of blood, also the fun goes down rapidly.
The ‘story’ is about a strange epidemic in which people are bitten by a rerisen dead and become ‘undead’ themselves. The undead have to eat living human flesh. A few survivers hide in a mall. They better waited until the undead simply died of hunger, but in order to make the film more interesting, they leave their hiding place and get killed themselves. I wasn’t bored stiff watching the film, but it certainly didn’t rise any interest in the American horror genre. <10/4/05><2>
As regular visitor of these pages will know/expect, I haven’t read the famous book by Dan Brown and I wasn’t really planning on watching the film until it would be on TV some time. A friend bought a copy, so I saw the film anyway. I already expected that I was going to be annoyed by the half- and misinformation in the story. A weird interpretation of the organisation of Opus Dei, an erroneous history of the Knights Templar, etc. This was to be expected. What I did not expect that the story itself is very thin and very predictable too. Besides a few scenes with a nice atmosphere, there is nothing much good about this film and I didn’t even have any good expectations. Nothing more than an all-American mystery/conspiracy film based on a popular book.
A wonderfull film that I have seen long ago, but not reseen it on tv. The story is about a city that is made and maintained by an extraterrestial race called ‘the strangers’. They experiment with humans to find out what makes humans different from themselves, a search for the soul. In order to do this they swap memories and change the city to see if this effects a persons personality. At midnight everything is put to sleep and the strangers ‘tune’ a new city. Buildings arise or disappear, strangers go out to erase or add memory with the help of a human doctor (Kiefer Sutherland). The strangers don’t like the light, so everything is always dark, it’s always night. One human seems to be uneffected by the powers of ‘the strangers’ and even has the ability to ‘tune’. Naturally he saves the world.
A great film with a strange atmosphere. However ‘thrillerish’ it is brought as a comedy, but of course not one of these hilaric ones. Really wonderfull!