Shame on whoever filmed this for filming the play in the first place, but I'm glad they captured this moment. Way to go, Hugh!
As an actor and an audience member, I know how annoying this can be. Glad he stuck it to the rude people.
...the film itself remains strangely aloof, holding the audience at arm's length, its style often impeding the story's natural flow. The film's 1970s spy aesthetic is almost self-conscious, making it hard to really get sucked into the world of the film. It's often visually and aurally pleasing (mostly thanks to Hamlisch's music), but it seems more like a hollow exercise in style than anything else.Click here to read my full review.
"Whiteout" is a ridiculous, laughable bore from the get-go, with a plodding script and clumsy direction. It uses every cliché red herring trick in the book that even the least sophisticated viewers will be able to see through immediately. The premise isn't an altogether terrible one, but it's just so goofy that there is no way it can be taken seriously.Click here to read my full review.
I cannot dismiss this film. It is a real film. It will remain in my mind. Von Trier has reached me and shaken me. It is up to me to decide what that means. I think the film has something to do with religious feeling. It is obvious to anyone who saw "Breaking the Waves" that von Trier's sense of spirituality is intense, and that he can envision the supernatural as literally present in the world. His reference is Catholicism. Raised by a communist mother and a socialist father in a restrictive environment, he was told as an adult that his father was not his natural parent, and renounced that man's Judaism to convert, at the age of 30, to the Catholic church. It was at about the same age that von Trier founded the Dogma movement, with its monkish asceticism.Click here to read the full article.
I rarely find a serious film by a major director to be this disturbing. Its images are a fork in the eye. Its cruelty is unrelenting. Its despair is profound. Von Trier has a way of affecting his viewers like that. After his "Breaking the Waves" premiered at Cannes in 1996, Georgia Brown of the Village Voice fled to the rest room in emotional turmoil and Janet Maslin of the New York Times followed to comfort her. After this one, Richard and Mary Corliss blogged at Time.com that "Antichrist" presented the spectacle of a director going mad.There is some truth in that - Antichrist is something of a work of mad genius. But as Seneca said - "There is no great genius without some touch of madness." Ebert's piece is a clear-eyed piece of criticism, something that has been sorely lacking when it comes to Antichrist and Von Trier in general.
There is a reason Michael is only referred to as "The Shape" in the credits of the original "Halloween." He's the boogy man, the essence of pure, faceless evil, not some troubled child who just wants to reunite his family. Zombie may be ramping up the violence, but he's watering down the real terror, the mystery that has made Michael Myers such an enduring character. Movie monsters just aren't any fun if all they are is Freudian caricatures.Click here to read my full review.
Click here to read the full article.Von Trier can’t seem to keep from confusing the mythic power of the oppressed Female and the history of repressive violence done to women. The two kinds of violence arbitrarily cross paths. Thus Dafoe mutates from symbolizing masculine oppressiveness to being the castrated victim—a proto-woman himself. And this gets mashed up with horror movie conventions. He eventually morphs into the “final girl” who generically survives the knives of movie serial killers like Jason in various horror franchises. And the clitorectomy Gainsbourg performs on herself only dimly makes sense if she has also undergone a spiritual sex change, actively assuming the persona of vindictive masculine oppressor.
The youngsters are all right, but "Play the Game" belongs to its elderly stars. Griffith, Roberts, and Sheridan own this movie, but Griffith is especially the highlight. The film's tagline proclaims "Andy Griffith like you have never seen him before," and that couldn't be more true. Griffith definitely displays a new side of himself here that is both surprising and hilarious. "Play the Game" would have been little more than another throwaway romantic comedy were it not for his presence. The story and the screenplay are mostly cliché, but Griffith's immense talent and charm carry it a long way, adding a new and welcome twist to a tired formula.Click here to read my full review.