On 11/11/2011 12:15 PM, turquoiseb wrote: > In a sentence, "Cinematically prettier than Terrence Malick's 'The Tree > Of Life,' just as pretentious, a little less ponderous in parts, but on > the whole more depressing because it's about...uh...depression." > > The plot of Danish bad boy Lars von Trier's new movie is not exactly a > nail-biter. You see the ending of the movie (and coincidentally the end > of the planet Earth) in the first 7-1/2 minutes, appropriately with > Wagner as the soundtrack. Because I suspect that few here will be drawn > to see it, I'll do a kind of flippant mini-review. > > Basically, it's about two sisters, played by Kirsten Dunst (who we > finally get to see naked) and Charlotte Gainsbourg (who we've seen naked > onscreen many times before), both playing their parts well -- clothed or > naked. There are other heavyweight actors, too, including a father and > son played by Stellan and Alexander Skarsgård. Then you've got > Charlotte Rampling as the sisters' mother, John Hurt as their father, > and Keifer Sutherland thrown in there somewhere as an American corporate > asshole. He manages to pull this off as convincingly as the > Skarsgårds pull off being father and son. > > The movie, which is strangely being billed as SciFi, opens at a wedding, > which goes sour in the way that big, expensive family weddings tend to > go sour onscreen. But then the sourness escalates when everyone learns > that the "new star" that Justine (Dunst) saw in the sky on the way to > the wedding is really a planet on a possible collision course with > Earth. This news could be perceived as somewhat depressing, and sure > enough many of the characters in the movie find it so, pretty much for > the rest of the film. > > This movie won Kirsten Dunst a Best Actress award at Cannes but lost out > on its supposedly "foregone conclusion" Palme d'Or award because von > Trier tried to make a dumb joke about Hitler in a country that still > hasn't gotten over its collective guilt about its behavior during the > Nazi years. Since he's admitted that the film is partly about his own > bouts with depression, maybe he was just experiencing one of them that > night. > > It's a Lars von Trier movie. You either like him or you don't, and > you'll either like this movie or you won't. I'm not even sure it was > intended to be liked. It seems to me that it was intended to be a kind > of Wagnerian-scored homage to German Romanticism. As von Trier said > about it, "It's not a film about the end of the world; it's a film about > a state of mind." Personally I just wish that the state of mind didn't > rely so much on playing the same theme from Tristan und Isolde over and > over again as its soundtrack. I would have preferred something cheerier > and more uptempo, like Leonard Cohen's "Dress Rehearsal Rag." :-) > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzD0U841LRM > <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzD0U841LRM> > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNTFqSaFwyo > <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNTFqSaFwyo>
Available on Vudu (probably Comcast and other VOD too): http://www.vudu.com/movies/#!content/216792/Melancholia I'm used to Trier's stuff. ;-)
