Enter The Void

Further proof that Gaspar Noe has nothing to say.

Plot in a nutshell: Guy lives in a Tokyo ghetto with his sister. He mostly takes and sells drugs, she strips and whores. Drug deal goes wrong, guy dies, sister grieves, guy's friend moves in to console her, guy gets reborn as their love-child. Oh, and did I mention the Tibetan Book of the Dead? Because the characters do, a few hundred times, without actually giving any reason why that rites-of-passage book has any bearing on, well, anything going on in the film. Except maybe the guy becoming a ghost after he dies, or his spirit floating around or whatever, though even this is a stretch.

About fifteen minutes into this movie, you're thinking "wow, this is very fresh and vibrant, this could be one of the best cinematic experience of the year".

About an hour in, you're thinking "OK, I get it. Now please stop."

The strobe effects are just annoying. The tendency of the camera to zoom and spin into the first visible circular object in a room (fan, stove burner, duct -- any hole will do!) becomes so tiresome that snorts of derision accompanied these transitions halfway through the second hour. The final hotel-of-love scene caused outright laughter when the glowing genitals made their appearance. Maybe a Cannes audience found it offensive, but the audience at the IFC Center just found it ludicrous.

It may seem nit-picking to focus on these three flaws in a film that provided so much in terms of cinematography, seedy sides of Tokyo, and down-and-out lifestyle ... but really, they ruin it. Perhaps the film could have been saved if there was any take-away, but it remains a collection of impressionistic sequences with a "love is all there is and by love we mean sex and such" message tacked onto the end.

* * * R A T I N G * * *

Enter the Void(IMDB)

Wince : [*****] Every time the camera goes into a duct.
Flinch : [**___]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [**___]
Groan :[**********] Yes, I added that just for this film.

Beerequisite : [****_]
Pornability : [***__]
Obscurity : [*____]
Explicability : [***__]

Memories I want to erase: ...about 3 hours' worth.

What I would do different: Maybe read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, for starters.

Death of Virgil

It would be remiss not to devote an entire post to a book that took nearly a year to finish.

The work in question is Herman Broch's The Death of Virgil, which is much less a novel than it is a weapon of last resort developed in concentration camps for use against the Nazis.

The book is written in stream of consciousness fashion -- think Finnegan's Wake with half the cleverness and twice the pretension. Bosch attempts to capture the complexity of a classical symphony in language: recurring themes, exaggeration of tempo, and so forth. What this boils down to are highly repetitive sentences of amazing length -- some so many pages long that they have to be broken up arbitrarily into paragraphs, probably due to some publisher's equivalent of the Geneva Conventions.

It is this grandiose goal which proves the downfall of the novel, for it has quite good things to say about the nature of art, the duty of the artist, and the philosophy of death, as it were. Barring the exceedingly distracting hallucinatory episodes, there is a compelling portrait of Virgil and his times. With some restraint, either limiting the too-clever-by-half use of language, or leaving it to another (hopefully shorter) work, this could have been quite a powerful novel.

In the end, it is a prime candidate for the Emersonian technique: skim the book lightly and quickly, letting your eyes discover for themselves what they may, rather than attempting any deep or thorough immersion in the text.

The Most Beautiful Night in the World

What does one expect, exactly, from a three-hour movie about sex?

Well, certainly not two hours of a newly-transferred reporter trying to earn his way back to the city by finding a scoop on any one of the village locals.

The story basically goes as follows. Many years ago, the Jomon tribe maintained an paralleled birth rate due to their use of powerful aphrodisiacs. Eventually, they were slaughtered by jealous neighboring tribes who weren't getting laid. Years later, a medium with a lethal embrace and a terrorist master of the art of hung fu rediscover the source of the Jomon's power.

There's a lot going on in this movie, but very little to tell: it's good, it's fun, it's unique, and it makes you want to save the world through shagging.

* * * R A T I N G * * *

The Most Beautiful Night in the World (NYAFF)

Wince : [*____]
Flinch : [**___]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [****_]

Beerequisite : [***__]
Pornability : [***__]
Obscurity : [***__]
Explicability : [****_]

Catchphrase: Jomon Power!

Long Dream

A patient at a rather run-down hospital is troubled by dreams of increasingly longer length: in a single night, the patient will live hours, days, years. As the duration of the dreams increases, the doctors begin to wonder what will happen when his dreams become infinitely long.

Basically a well-thought out Outer Limits episode, with about the same quality of acting and effects. Fun though.

* * * R A T I N G * * *

Nagai yume (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [*____]
Retch : [*____]
Gape : [**___]

Beerequisite : [***__]
Pornability : [_____]
Obscurity : [****_]
Explicability : [***__]

Jigoku

Two students hit-and-run a drunken yakuza on a back road in the middle of the night, leaving him dead and his mother and wife out for revenge. The students immediately become a good/bad angel pair; the good one tries to fix things but only finds himself with more and more blood on his hands, while the bad one delights in thwarting the attempts of the good one to redeem himself.

Eventually everyone dies and they end up in hell, where they witness and endure the tortures of the damned.

There's really not much more to say than that. The Hell sequences are surreal and gory enough for the time, but will not prove terribly striking to a modern audience. The demonic bad student, however, is fun to watch.

* * * R A T I N G * * *

Jigoku (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [**___]

Beerequisite : [**___]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [***__]

The Bothersome Man

In the afterlife, everyone has a good job with a decent boss and any woman they want, and everyone is happy -- except for that one malcontent who wants things to be just as they were before, pain and ugliness included.

Andreas is this malcontent: a man wondering why food has no taste, liquor doesn't get him drunk, and everyone around him is shallow and emotionless. At first he thinks it's his fault, and he has made the wrong choices in the afterlife; then he finds that this is the way things are supposed to be, and he tries to find a way out. Andreas is not rebellious or spiteful or driven by revenge; he's just a quiet, friendly little cog being a quiet, friendly little pain in the ass.

A decent film that makes you question what it would take to keep you happy for eternity, and that makes damn sure you'll never throw yourself in front of a subway train.

* * * R A T I N G * * *
The Bothersome Man (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [**___]

Beerequisite : [**___]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [*____]
Explicability : [***__]

Scene I'd watch on endless loop: Jumping in front of the subway train.

Memories I want to erase: The joyless sex with his wife(?).

What I would do different: There were a couple of brief scenes, such as the kitchen or the very end, that could have been extended by three or four minutes. These scenes can be understood as filmed, but they lack any weight, and give the impression that the director did not want to commit to what the scene depicted, or how the protagonist was affected. Also, for fun, I might have made the bus break down.