I did in fact put a link here to my thoughts and to those of another I largely agree with. If you want to argue against either, then we can continue. Otherwise, yes, I see that you still don't like the movie and don't care to think too much about it. Certainly, there are a lot of crude aspects to the filmmaking, so I can understand someone not being able to get past that.

As for Hannibal, I still don't see why you're focusing so much on it relative to our disagreement on I Spit, but: If I wasn't clear, yes, there is certainly more to Hannibal than showing one act of violence after another (a la Faces of Death). There's a story for one thing, and that story involves a basically decent woman falling for an evil, murderous man. All of this is played for entertainment, and I don't see much more to it than that. However, there are reasons for why we find something entertaining, so even the most mindless, entertaining fluff can lead to a more complex model/theory/hypothesis of why we do. That, too, can lead to an interesting and productive analysis. I'd rather read Slavoj Zizek talking about what's interesting in a shitty film like The Village than reading yet another starred plot summary of the best film out there.

I got a little bit more out of it than that: Everything on earth is evil, and women made it that way. It's a (sort of) reinterpretation of Adam & Eve. The acceptance of chaos and violence is the Forbidden Fruit; and when in the end Dafoe is literally reduced to consuming fruit, women overcome him. I haven't yet listened to the commentary track or viewed any of the supplemental material, so who knows what else may have been intended.

Also, I've never before seen something initially released as a Criterion edition. I've seen a few that followed along shortly — Rushmore comes to mind — but never the initial release. So that's interesting.

Interesting interpretation.

Criterion's had a few initial releases: the last ones from David Fincher, Olivier Assayas and a couple from Wes Anderson.

Just saw the new version of ISoYG. Zarchi, the director of the original, was the producer this time around. It would probably be wrong to say I enjoyed it, but it was really well done. Unlike the original, the characters are actually developed and the revenge parts don't rely on seduction. My favorite part was the drawn-out passage of time between the second and third acts. Very tense. Least favorite part, the ambiguity in the ending.

I'm guessing most of the criticism aimed at it has to do with the remake frenzy currently going on in Hollywood, which is understandable. Rick Trembles called the revenge pieces "hardcore Rube Goldberg," but were actually about as poetic as one could hope to expect from a movie like this.

Real brutal? More like fake brutal. Or maybe real boring. The shaky-cam, pathetic acting and cop-out editing were real brutal, though. The plot hinged on the absurdity of killing a family and then hanging out in their house for a few days. Even Charles Manson wasn't that stupid. Bits lifted from Hostel, Ju-On, V For Vendetta, Haute Tension and "Mr. Goodbody" from Captain Kangaroo. Decent idea behind it all, just too bad that wasn't revealed until the last five minutes.

I heard the make-up guy committed suicide. Oh, and whattayaknow, an American re-make is in the works...

Isn't all of this fake brutality? Most films, including all that you name, are fairly tepid in comparison. I agree that realism wasn't the film's style. Anyway, fictional brutality, for me, has to be equal parts specular viscerality and ideology. Dead Alive's far gorier, but a joke. You did see the unrated version, right?

Yep, the unrated. I mean that the brutality wasn't channeled in the direction the narrative needed it to go. I was into the first scenes, the one little girl showing such kindness to the other was great. Then they do that hackneyed "shadowy figure sweeps across the frame" move and it was all downhill from there.

Laugier's intro (which I wish I hadn't watched) reminded me of Terry Gilliam's intro to Tideland, attempting to reinforce the faux hype about the film.


Just finished Irreversible. Ugh. I'm hitting all the boring French movies today. Hopefully the Italian stuff for tonight will go better.

Well, I certainly had issues with the film, and thought it failed at its intention, but I didn't find it a cliche, boring or predictable.

Irreversible, I love.

Madget, I watched DESCENT, but couldn't get past the soap-opera looking badass dude or the new age spouting fratboy-rapist for it have any reworking of my psyche. Dawson proves herself a good, dramatic actress, but everyone else is terrible in the film.

It was every cliché. Laugier says in the featurette that the idea was to take the viewer to where they thought they knew what was going on, then shift direction. The clichés were necessary for the effect — the torture potty chair, the contortionist monster girl, invading the super nice house, one shell left, possible lesbianism, the mom's not really dead, the monster is imaginary, smash through the plate glass window (and not die), cool metal body attachments (I thought the look in the eyes was important?), it's a secret cult/government conspiracy, V For Vendetta torture sequence, twist ending. Blah.



Have you watched it reversed? That is to say, in the correct order. I watched it twice. The first time it kept putting me to sleep and I had to keep rewinding, so technically three times. The first time was just confusing, as I didn't know or care about the characters. The second (or third) time I reversed the chapters. The story then became very simple (simplistic, even) and I could focus on Noe's direction. The reverse order wasn't necessary, and justified very poorly with a couple of throwaway lines from Monica Bellucci. Constantly moving Blair Witch camera except for the conversation on the train and the rape scene, where the camera's lack of movement actually became obtrusive and perhaps revealed more about the director than whatever points he was trying to make about the characters.