When I started doing movie reviews I told myself that I will make reviews right after I saw the movie. But there is an exception to this rule. The first and the last time I saw The House That Jack Built was in Jerusalem Cinemateque in the end of 2018. Roughly 5 years ago. And this review will be made from the memory I have of the movie. I have no problem with the existence of this movie. Freedom of Speech is important. But I am not willing to watch it again. Even though I am kind of a fan of the director Lars Von Trier and the movie is arguably very good. It's just I'm not brave enough to sit through it again.
Then I written two drafts of the film that were about a police investigation into deaths of 8 year olds. I remember another 18 year old helper guy. Or perhaps he was 20 or something. He told me that it would be better if the kids that die would be 18 years old. I thought that it would not be better. Because nobody cares if an 18 year old dies gruesomely. Every single slasher film does that. I wanted people to feel so much terror and so much hopelessness that they would never want to see a movie ever again. I was not familiar with work of Lars Von Trier at the time. So I foolishly assumed that I would make the most intense horror film ever.
Lars Von Trier is an interesting filmmaker. He directs mostly very depressing movies that are very hard to watch. Breaking The Waves is an interesting case study in his filmography because on some weird level this is one of the rare examples of a Lars Von Trier film with a happy ending. Even though you could perhaps argue that the ending is nowhere near happy at all.
The incredible hatred of American people to expressions of utter sexuality in media made Showgirls an easy target for mockery. People perceived it as a rather surface-level soft-pornography, and not a film. And the critics scores of various websites reflect that consensus. Yet I am not one of them. And I think if Verhoeven did the same exact movie, say in Denmark, or some other place in Europe, the film would have received a much greater praise. Just look at Nymphomaniac by Lars Von Trier.
I was avoiding Nope for a few reasons. One of them was because people kept saying that it is very disturbing. It has a scene which I thought was to traumatize me. Now that I actually saw the film I can tell you that Jordan Peele, the director of Nope is not Lars Von Trier and therefor the scene is not actually that bad. To be quite frank, it seems like shooting that scene the way Lars Von Trier would have done it probably goes against the message of the movie.
Yes, the movie is weirdly focused on the sensory images. You would have shots of necks, or knees of pretty women. Or shots of the sea. Seemingly with no apparent reason. I don't know if Michael Mann is a fan of Lars Von Trier, but this movie feels like an action film directed by Lars Von Trier. And Lars Von Trier has explained his editing style as focused on emotion. Where they would erase everything that is not emotionally charged. And therefor keep the audience always emotionally engaged. And combined with the free camera style of directing that he employs, this looks rather interesting.
Which bring me to the third musician. And it is Eric Serra. At first it seems like the music in the movie is kind of strange. And it is. It is not your typical Hollywood score with orchestra and stuff. Eric Serra is a bit more creative than that. Though what he did was interesting. He merged the style of composing of Bjork and the style of Sting and made the score of the movie in such a way that both "Venus as a Boy" and "Shape Of My Heart" sound completely natural within the broad sonic landscape of the movie. And it is very interesting because those are very different songs on their own. Bjork, for example is an experimental artist. She goes fucking crazy. If you listen the stuff that she produces now, you will start hearing her creative insanity even in the early stuff like "Venus as a Boy". How the hell did Eric Serra merged it with Sting? I guess he is just genius. To be frank, Leon's score is not my favorite music from Serra. I think it would either be the opera piece he wrote for the Fifth Element ( also directed by Besson and the song performed by his wife Maïwenn ), or the soundtrack of Le Grand Bleu, a Besson movie about dolphins and people who like to swim a lot, also starring Jean Reno, and by chance starring Jean-Marc Barr who played in a Lars Von Trier movie starring Bjork herself. For which she received an acting award at Cannes from Besson. What a circle of madness!
It was very nice to have a marathon of Ryan Gosling movies, because I stumbled upon this unique masterpiece. Lars and the Real Girl is a story about a sad relationship. About a man named Lars and his girl named Bianca who is sick and getting worse and worse with every passing day. The twist is, Bianca is actually a live sized sex doll.
This movie opens with a butt of Nicole Kidman. It ends with Nicole Kidman saying "Fuck" to Tom Cruise. From these two, you can probably already tell what the movie is about. Wikipedia says that the movie is an erotic-thriller. Which is kind of - yes. It's is rather erotic, though not in a way that somebody like Lars Von Trier would do. And it is also very much a thriller.
The direction of the movie is obviously very good. Luca Guadagnino shoots his movies with very precise camera. Nothing too fancy. Everything serves emotional purpose. He likes people to do things that would be in their character, but not necessarily important to the story, like dance. Which makes his editing very intuition-based and less clarity based. Which reminds the style of Lars Von Trier but not quite there. If there would be a scale between chaotic documentary style and a very precise and calculated cinematic style, Lars would be way closer to documentary than Luca. Luca is more in control, but lets a lot of character and intuition through. Which is very interesting.
You know how sometimes an artist might limit himself with what is available to him to make something unique? To force creativity? Like when Lars Von Trier did a movie without sets. And so the characters and the drama had to be on another level, so the audience wouldn't mind a movie with no sets. Or like when a writer might reveal the ending immediately, just to invent interesting ways to get to that ending, so the movie would still work. So this movie has a limitation that Brian Duffield set on himself.
While on the other hand European movies are more open about sexuality. Directors from Europe like Danish filmmakers Lars Von Trier and Nicolas Winding Refn, French Luc Besson, Maïmouna Doucouré and Gaspar Noé, Italian Luca Guadagnino and many others are notorious for near pornographic ( if not entirely pornographic ) depictions of sex or explorations of sexual taboos in films like Nymphomaniac, The Neon Demon, Léon: The Professional, Cuties, Love and Call Me By Your Name to name a few.