Squee Posted May 17, 2009 Share Posted May 17, 2009 Translated from Ekstra Bladet: Satan came to Cannes Film journalists left the big cinema Debussy completely pale after having watched Lars Von Trier's extremely shocking movie, "Antichrist". Some were scared to death while others laughed nervously. Most were so shocked they couldn't even put words on what they had just witnessed. A lot of women said that the movie was another one of Lars Von Trier's evil attack on the opposite sex. http://ekstrabladet.dk/flash/filmogtv/film...icle1169107.ece The article kind of spoils alot of the scenes so I won't tell what happens, but from what I've read it sounds pretty damn sick - and pretty damn awesome. I will give you a couple of hints though... » Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «Clitoris + scissors, something pointy + erected penis, and bloody orgasm Here's the trailer for those of you who haven't seen it: Trailer I'm going to watch it on wednesday and I hope this is Lars Von Trier's trip back to evil land. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Mr Salads Posted May 17, 2009 Share Posted May 17, 2009 Cant fucking wait for this, plus Gaspar Noe's latest Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Squee Posted May 17, 2009 Author Share Posted May 17, 2009 Cant fucking wait for this, plus Gaspar Noe's latest Damn, I wasn't aware he had a new movie at Cannes! Enter the Void Enter the Void was shot in Tokyo talks about how it will accompany the hero just as much in his normal state of awareness as in his altered states: the state of alertness, the stream of consciousness, memories, dream. The script was partially inspired by the accounts of people who have had near-death experiences. But in the director's words, Enter the Void is about a young man who, after the brutal death of his parents, promises that he will protect his little sister no matter what and who, sensing that he himself is dying, fights desperately to keep his promise. A film where the life of one person is linked to the love he has for another human being. Sounds great! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
funkaholic Posted May 17, 2009 Share Posted May 17, 2009 is kingdom hosti[al any good? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Squee Posted May 17, 2009 Author Share Posted May 17, 2009 is kingdom hosti[al any good? I've never seen the Stephen King version but the original is awesome. Part II is actually better than the first one and here's why: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
funkaholic Posted May 17, 2009 Share Posted May 17, 2009 is kingdom hosti[al any good? I've never seen the Stephen King version but the original is awesome. Part II is actually better than the first one. thats what i meant, the original, couldn't remember the name! or is it the same name? is it scary? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Squee Posted May 17, 2009 Author Share Posted May 17, 2009 is kingdom hosti[al any good? I've never seen the Stephen King version but the original is awesome. Part II is actually better than the first one. thats what i meant, the original, couldn't remember the name! or is it the same name? is it scary? I don't really know if you could call it scary? It's messed up. That's what it is. It's very dark but keep in mind it was made in the mid 90s. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr Clitterhaus Posted May 17, 2009 Share Posted May 17, 2009 Yes, Squee, yes, but that clip still needs subtitles if you want to communicate effectively to the nerds here. Otherwise, you'll get complaints..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Squee Posted May 17, 2009 Author Share Posted May 17, 2009 Jesus, I just watched a couple minutes of The Kingdom Hospital by Stephen King and it's absolutely pathetic compared to the original. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Mr Salads Posted May 17, 2009 Share Posted May 17, 2009 Dude most of Kings direct to tv shit is pathetic on delivery Cant fucking wait for this, plus Gaspar Noe's latest Damn, I wasn't aware he had a new movie at Cannes! Enter the Void Enter the Void was shot in Tokyo talks about how it will accompany the hero just as much in his normal state of awareness as in his altered states: the state of alertness, the stream of consciousness, memories, dream. The script was partially inspired by the accounts of people who have had near-death experiences. But in the director's words, Enter the Void is about a young man who, after the brutal death of his parents, promises that he will protect his little sister no matter what and who, sensing that he himself is dying, fights desperately to keep his promise. A film where the life of one person is linked to the love he has for another human being. Sounds great! I know! It sounds epic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brian trageskin Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 wow. this looks shitty as fuck. and i love lars von trier's movies Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
essines Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 http://ekstrabladet.dk/flash/filmogtv/film...icle1169107.ece lol i read the whole thing and now have less of an idea of what the movie is about. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atop Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 Antichrist looks amazingly amazing! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Squee Posted May 18, 2009 Author Share Posted May 18, 2009 Wow, according to the papers the reviews are VERY mixed. I've read that people were laughing, booing, and someone even said that he never wanted to watch it again, but what's weird is that I can only find good reviews online? Indiewire: With “Antichrist,” Lars Von Trier fully lives up to his reputation as an outrageous provocateur and master image-maker. Love it or hate it, boo it or applaud it-as audiences did both simultaneously after the world premiere here in Cannes-the film is the most shocking of the festival so far, with critics and journalists buzzing around the Palais post-screening in a newly energized frenzy. Described in early reports as a horror film, “Antichrist,” certainly has its moments of shock and suspense-and a notable dose of body horror, specifically. But it would be wrong to liken the film to an “Exorcist” or some strange spin on the rape-revenge narrative (i.e. “I Spit on Your Grave”). While it shares some weird sexual politics with those movies, “Antichrist” doesn’t generate fear in the same way. In several scenes, Von Trier’s sense of foreboding recalls David Lynch, as trees, bushes and images of animal flesh take on a similar sense of uncanny dread. The story stems from a morbid riff on Freud’s concept of the primal scene: The moment that a young child sees his parent’s having sex. But in Von Trier’s version, the child’s bearing witness coincides with him jumping out the window to his death. The film opens-in a highly stylized black and white sheen-with the unnamed parents (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe) fucking in slow-motion all over their house, in the shower, against the washing machine. The sexual act, shown in fully explicit detail and yet highly surreal, sets the stage for the extreme anxiety attached to sexuality, which reaches its full-blown apex at the film’s gory climax. Dafoe’s psychiatrist husband plays the kind of rational man that frequents Von Trier’s work - the detective in “The Element of Crime,” the doctor in the film within “Epidemic,” Tom Edison in “Dogville” - all characters whose belief in logic and humanity are proven horribly, ironically, self-destructive. In “Antichrist,” the theme is also present, as Dafoe tries to cure his wife’s pathological mourning through reasoned exercises and talking cures. The couple then goes to their house in the woods to confront the wife’s irrational fears of “nature,” which are somehow tied to her son’s death. Whether that’s nature - as in leaves and little critters - or human nature, we have to wait to see. But one realizes it’s only a matter of time before “chaos reigns” - to quote a particularly memorable moment from the film - and the arrogant husband gets his comeuppance. And yet, nothing is so predictable here; Von Trier exorcises his deepest, darkest perversities to go in some entirely new directions. While there’s no doubt that the place he goes is off a precipitous edge, one can’t deny the film’s continuing primal power. The laughter heard during the film’s most disturbing final act is probably more a result of its efficacy than its excessiveness, though I can’t be sure. There’s an instance of body mutilation that will turn off the most tolerant viewer (and surely, the most open-minded distributor). And while one can’t begin to dissect the film’s attitude towards women - long a subject of contention for the accused sadist director - “Antichrist” probably won’t do much to change the mind of those who question his sympathies towards the opposite sex. But this is Von Trier, after all. You got to take the brilliance with the pathologies. Indeed, many of the film’s images have an unshakeable authority. Dedicating the film, in its end credits, to Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky (which further provoked shock to rattled viewers), the movie contains deeply evocative forest landscape photography that recall the Russian master’s own-particularly a sequence in which we enter the wife’s mind in a hypnotized state. In ultra-slow-motion and wearing a semi-diaphanous white dress, she walks against a backdrop of lush, twisting greenery. Without the film’s wildly lurid final chapter, Tarkovsky fans might actually feel proud. Hollywood Reporter: CANNES -- With his latest offering, "Antichrist," Danish bad-boy director Lars von Trier is in no danger of jeopardizing his reign as the most controversial major director working today. Visually gorgeous to a fault and teeming with grandiose if often fascinating ideas that overwhelm the modest story that serves as their vehicle, this may be the least artistically successful film von Trier has ever made. As such, commercial prospects appear slim, though many of the auteur's most ardent fans will want to see the film anyway. And they should. "Antichrist" is relentlessly and solely focused on a married couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. As we learn in a rather pretentious prologue shot in slow-motion and black and white, their toddler son has fallen to his death through an open window while they were making love. Bereft, they retreat to Eden, their ironically named cabin in the woods, to recuperate from their loss. At this point, von Trier switches to color and his signature chapter headings. The fact that the first three are "Pain," "Grief" and "Despair" does not bode well. In discussing this self-styled "most important film of my career," von Trier has referred to the forbidding Swedish playwright August Strindberg. Clearly, or rather not so clearly, von Trier is working in a full-out symbolic vein here, as did Strindberg late in his career, but alas the film medium inevitably carries with it, like an albatross, a heavy charge of realism. Hence, many of von Trier's more outrageous, ultra-serious symbolic moments (such as a talking fox, its guts half ripped out, muttering "chaos reigns" in an "Exorcist" voice) will -- and did, in the press screening -- undoubtedly provoke unintended laughter. Or horror, as when genitals are scissored off, masturbation produces blood rather than semen and holes are drilled into legs. The film's most successful thematic confrontation is that between frail reason (embodied in the pathetic, infantilizing attempt by the husband, who's a psychotherapist, to treat his deeply disturbed wife with cognitive therapy) and the uncontrollable forces of emotion and mystery which emerge victorious. Another powerful idea, that nature is cruel and vicious and completely antithetical to human welfare, seems to align von Trier with the German visionary director Werner Herzog. ("Nature is Satan's church," the wife utters apocalyptically at one point.) This focus on nature subsequently gets conflated with human nature and finally with female nature, where von Trier's careerlong misogyny comes into fullest bloom. In any case, all the ideas of the film are so extravagantly and feverishly expressed that one fears that von Trier, always working on the edge, has finally become unhinged. The film works much better on a purely visual level, if only viewers were able to forget that these are real people being represented in these voluptuous images, abetted by an often superb sound design. From the opening titles, abstract expressionism reigns powerfully and conveys a great deal of intense, if finally unspecifiable, meaning. Unfortunately at some point a story has to be told, no matter how minimalist, and with actual human beings, no matter how symbolically freighted. This is where the film falls apart. First Showing: Am I as screwed up as either of the characters in Antichrist if I say I had a blast watching this? Maybe it was the excitement in the air before it started, or maybe it was the combination of the laughs, shrieks, cheers, and jeers throughout Lars von Trier's latest film, but I think I enjoyed it. See that's the problem - Antichrist is fucked up. In a good way? Or in a bad way? Even I don't know the answer to that question (or maybe that's something you'll decide for yourself), but I can tell you it's one hell of an exhilarating experience watching this. My gut feeling coming out of it is that I actually liked it, screwed up or not. I don't want to say anything about what happens in this. Part of the experience is watching it all play out, from the first frame to the last frame. Lars von Trier bookends the story with a prologue and an epilogue, both beautifully conceived and shot exquisitely, and they're essential to getting the full picture. But beyond that, all I'll say is that the story only involves Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a married couple who experience some incredible trauma and then head to their cabin in the woods for therapy. Dafoe is mainly trying to help Gainsbourg, who has the worst problems, but even she can't be fully cured anymore. The funny thing is that Park Chan-wook, who is known for going to extremes as seen in his Vengeance trilogy, is not the one who went to the extreme this year. Park's Cannes film, Thirst, is tame in comparison to both Bong Joon-ho's new film Mother and von Trier's Antichrist. It's takes a while to get there, but eventually everything goes crazy in Antichrist, and while some will have to turn away, I expect others will lavish in this insanely edgy filmmaking. Von Trier breaks every "rule," but does it in a way that is so beautiful, it's almost hard not to appreciate it. At least, that's exactly what I thought sitting in the theater. Lars von Trier is a brilliant filmmaker, but he's also fucked up. He's got some personal problems, and some will love seeing him explore those problems through cinema, while some will hate it (right now, I'm for the former). I honestly don't really know what to even think about Antichrist - my mind is still numb from the whole experience. I really expect this to split audiences the same way Michael Haneke's Funny Games does. In fact, I'm very curious to see Antichrist again, because I may have a completely different interpretation the second time around. So be on the look out for that review, as I'll probably have way more to say then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest dial Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 I love Lars von Trier. He could do motherfucking Terminator and wouldn't fail! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Squee Posted May 18, 2009 Author Share Posted May 18, 2009 I love Lars von Trier. He could do motherfucking Terminator and wouldn't fail! Now that you mention T4... Here are some early review quotes: Variety: Darker, grimmer and more stylistically single-minded than its two relatively giddy predecessors. "Terminator Salvation" boasts the kind of singular vision that distinguished the James Cameron original, the full-throttle kinetics of "Speed" and an old-fashioned regard for human (and humanoid) heroics. The Hollywood Reporter: Although director McG manages to keep the machinery humming 18 years after James Cameron's "Judgment Day" and its liquid metal raised the F/X stakes considerably, anchoring it in any sort of satisfying dramatic context is another story. The College Times: Terminator: Salvation is still a good entry and a marked improvement over its third predecessor that may not exactly set the sci-fi genre ablaze with its effects or plot line but progresses the saga in an interesting direction with good action to boot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
playbynumbers Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 i have no clue why anyone would want to see this movie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bob Dylan Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 why do you say that? That's a pretty closed-minded thing to say Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Benedict Cumberbatch Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 i nearly saw william dafoes asshole Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Yegg Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 If you're into Lars, check out Jurgen Haabaarmaaster Embedding disabled. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Mr Salads Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 I think antichrist is going to be a LOT of fun. Can't wait. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awepittance Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 all the lars von trier movies i've seen are generic avant garde on film nightmares. but anti-christ looks pretty damn interesting Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
playbynumbers Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 why do you say that? That's a pretty closed-minded thing to say this idea that the absolute highest value is 'freedom' in the sense of license is an absurd prejudice of people under 30, and basically everyone on here; some things are more important than art Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pcock Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 what on earth are you trying to say. am i completely retarded? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest atropa Posted May 19, 2009 Share Posted May 19, 2009 This may be incorrect but I think it could have something to do with responsibility for starters. For instance, the telling of a terribly misogynist joke is neither rationalized by the intended humor that employed it nor the freedom to utilize that humor as a vehicle for said misogyny. In this case, it's art in place of humor? i have no clue why anyone would want to see this movie though come on now pbn, this was sort of a goading or dishonest question as your next post betrays the implicit ignorance here Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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