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[beltmann]

I can only speak for myself, and I can say that I actively resist allowing budget and star power to factor into my reactions.

Generally, I'm always suspicious of extremes, both negative and positive. Heading into Gigli, I assumed that the bad press was a combination of overreaction, loathing for celebrity, and opportunistic chiding of Affleck and Lopez. (In other words, my skepticism was similar to yours.) This time, though, the bad press was actually accurate. There's not a single scene that plays well, not even close. Its meager charms--the occasional Lopez smile, the wink-wink Affleck grin--are completely subsumed by its deficits. Besides the sputtering pace and unappealing tone (it aims for mean-spirited jokiness), where do we begin to describe its bad taste? With the disabled kid being used for constant, appalling, unfunny comic relief? With Affleck able to "convert" the lesbian Lopez for one hot night? With the fish that snacks on human brain matter? With the crude, braindead dialogue? (Okay, maybe that last one is an inadvertent charm.) At no point are we convinced these two are actually mobsters (or that the kid is actually disabled, for that matter). And the conclusion is interminable, actually relying on two endless, ridiculous "emotional" goodbyes back-to-back. Quite shameless, this enterprise.

Still, I must agree with your overall point, Night Watchman. Hudson Hawk, Ishtar, or Last Action Hero are not as bad as their reputation suggests. None are good pictures, but they are (especially Last Action) indeed watchable.

Eric

[the night watchman]

Actually, I saw the movie before hearing any of the bad press. But I guess it all comes down to taste. I thought a lot of scenes did work well; Chris Walken's cameo had me chuckling for five minutes after his exit, and I found Pacino's scene tense and blackly humorous. (Even the brain-eating fish.) I also liked many of the monologues, specifically the debate over the superiority of male vs female sexual organs, which is the one that seems to get bashed the most. I also didn't see the love scene as the conquest of a straight man over a gay woman. It was almost the reverse. Lopez's character gently feminizes Affleck's character while she seduces him, something pretty daring if you ask me. (And it's also pointed out earlier on that Lopez is more bisexual than homosexual, although she prefers women and has ostensibly "chosen" to be lesbian, so the coupling isn't total contrived).

On the other hand, Justin Bartha's performance of the retarded Brian is atrocious, I'll give you that, and there are also quite a few scenes that don't work, as least as many as those that do (or at least worked in my opinion). The ending is dumb and overlong. Lopez and Affleck's characters were also unconvincing as mob enforcers, since both were too tenderhearted to last long in that profession. I did like their characters, however, and did think they had chemistry, and thought they were performed well.

But I think the thing that impressed me about "Gigli" was its novel way it approached what essentially amounts a romantic comedy, especially one that stars a real life couple. Making Lopez's character a lesbian puts a certain spin on the proceedings. And the emasculation and feminization of Affleck's character's machismo is something I've never seen in a mainstream movie. I think there was certain ballsiness to the proceedings I found endearing, even if in the end I couldn't overlook all it's failings.
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"If you're talking about censorship, and what things should be shown and what things shouldn't be shown, I've said that as an artist you have no social responsibility whatsoever."

-David Cronenberg

[Danny Baldwin]

What intrigues me more are the very mixed reviews; the hate it/love it ones. I can think of two recent occassions where critics gave a movie either a 4/4 or a 1/4. Moonlight Mile of last year and Northfork of this year. I can say, I really liked both. Major splits always make me want to go see the given movie, unlike negative reviews.
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Danny Baldwin

View My Reviews

[the night watchman]

Well, I picked up "Irreversible." Haven't quite worked up the guts to watch it yet, though.
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"If you're talking about censorship, and what things should be shown and what things shouldn't be shown, I've said that as an artist you have no social responsibility whatsoever."

-David Cronenberg

[beltmann]

I didn?t find Irreversible difficult to stomach, perhaps because the backwards structure reduces each act of violence to an abstraction; only afterwards are we allowed to fully identify with the situation and characters at hand. Perhaps it was because the film's hammering, monotonously overbearing style never allowed me to forget that I was watching only a movie. (As an aside, the only films that I recall being physically tormented by are In the Realm of the Senses and maybe Bunman: The Untold Story.)

I would never argue that the picture is exploitation or incompetently made. Clearly Noe has a visual sense, a certain dark virtuosity, and both Belluci and Cassel are quite marvelous. There?s also a great scene where three characters freely discuss their bedroom feelings on the subway. Still, I question the movie?s aesthetic weight. Unlike Haneke?s Funny Games, which also asked us to confront conventional notions about screen violence, Irreversible inflicts certain realities without offering any new ideas about them. Honestly, do we really learn anything new, valuable, or insightful about rape, revenge, men, sex, anger, guilt, or relationships from this film? I wasn?t offended by much in it?perhaps the fascination with anal activity could be read as homophobic, supported by the depiction of the club?but I did find the movie rather tiresome and adolescent.

Noe insists that the underpass scene increases our understanding of rape, which baffles me: What do we gain in the eighth minute of Belluci?s assault that we didn?t already know after the first? Or that we didn?t already know going into the movie, as human beings? Worse, Noe confuses the violence of rape with an act of sex, by lecherously gazing at Belluci throughout the entire film, even placing her in a dress that overtly sexualizes her before sending her down to the underpass. The tunnel?s red walls, described later (earlier?) by her as part of a dream, clearly carry sexual significance as well. Again a comparison to Funny Games seems appropriate: In that film, there?s a ten-minute segment in which virtually nothing happens, except two torture survivors sit, bloodied. The length of the scene is necessary, because it builds both psychological and emotional tension (and its real subject is the practical aftermath of violence). In Irreversible, the length of Belluci?s assault is extraneous, because the scene doesn?t increase in horror as it continues, and doesn?t provide new insights as it progresses. (One might even argue that the length desensitizes us to rape, rather than the reverse.)

What sticks in mind when Irreversible is over is not its fatuous ideas or violence, but merely its stylistics?and when ten-minute takes, rotting lights, and hang-gliding cinematography upstage the awfulness of rape, the ham director has trivialized his subject. After I Stand Alone, which brilliantly offered a glimpse into the mind of psychopaths and understood how social- and self-hatred informed their behavior, Irreversible seems to me a step backwards for Noe.

Eric

[filmsRpriceless]

Yes, Haneke's Funny Games is a brilliant study of violence. But so is Irreversible.

I read once that the camera spinning around at the beginning and at the end signifies three things: cyclical violence, Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence", and the vertigo of life itself. During the beginning, Noe pays tribute to Hitchcock's Vertigo. And at the end, which is really the beginning of the day for Alex, there is no experience of vertigo at all. At the end, when the camera spins around in the park, it suggests somehow that the movie is spinning out of control entirely and it sticks with me because even though we're witnessing a blissful and beautifully poetic moment, it's a visual distillation symbolizing chaos in a way by a blinking white strobe light. I think that the strobe light is important to note when we recognize where Alex is during the rape sequence (the framing of her body somehow relates to garbage and the light is mirrored again when she is in bed with Marcus at the beginning of the day). And natural light is just as important; during the rape, any natural light is refused. There is an apparent difference made between the bedroom and rape scene that Noe makes a point of by way of light and skin tone and sexual digression in the bedroom. The song played in their house implies that we're heading in circles in particular relationships; that it results in a downward spiral of sorts, but the real questions is: where is it heading? Where are we going?

During the painful and wounding rape sequence, there are moments where Noe makes statements on violence itself. The tunnel splitting into two symbolizes the menstrual cycle most likely, evolution and biology are shaped by loss, and a descension into the unknown. It's possible that Noe labels the other half of the tunnel, realizing it as another class altogether, a new sexual orientation, gender, and a person. I've read a few interviews by him, and I'm not 100% on what his intentions were (but I do know that he studied Nietszche for a few years). Another thing about the rape scene that provokes me because of how it parallels to the bedroom scene. There's a moment where Marcus is positioned the exact same way Le Tenia is during the actual rape, as his hand is over Alex's mouth so he can sleep. Why do you think she's wearing the fleshy dress? Le Tenia brings it up: "Your boyfriend must be a fag to let you wear a dress like that!" I honestly don't understand why a few people say it's a flaw for her to take the underpass so late at night. Don't they understand that she's devastated of Marcus and she takes the underpass because a woman tells her it is "safe" to take.

The film is philosophical, to a degree. Is Noe truly existentialist? I don't know exactly. Existentialism applies to a film like Gus Van Sant's Gerry, while Noe suggests more nihilism in humanity in a fetishized world, and we're also told that there is no right or wrong in man's actions since Noe implicates everyone. An existentialist chooses to respect life at all costs, the freedom to live and to act of your own volition being the only act left. In a Noe interview, he says that the book that Alex is reading is An Experiment With Time by J.W. Dunne, "about a guy who is noting his dreams each morning and coming to the conclusion eventually that 80 percent of the material came from the previous day, but that maybe between 10 and 20 percent was made of things that were going to happen, say, the next day. He developed a whole theory on how the brain creates the perception of time when time is already there, pre-existent." Belucci tells Marcus of her dream: the red tunnel where she'll be raped. Ideas of pre-destination seems more Nietzschean. I am not as familar on this area as I want to be, so I apologize for rambling and most of the post is from one of my posts on Rotten Tomatoes.
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My apparent website

[beltmann]

[filmsRpriceless]

When the person glances, I asked myself a number of questions: Did he know Alex? Was he scared? Was he weak? Why was he watching and why were we watching along with him? Was he Pierre? Thoughts like this culminate in philosophical fetishism, disregarding filmmaker ethics for human instincts. What the film does is portray life as it is; it doesn't think about playing by its own rules. La Tenia is rich, but has used his wealth in an anti-progressive way, while Alex's progressive attitude refuses to fully come out beyond the sex scene towards the end. La Tenia is wealthy but still manages to fetishize wealth because he's surrounded by unstable energy, which he needs to make part of his life. His unstable energy can only be fulfilled by someone as sexy as Alex. It's a film like Eyes Wide Shut (which I am watching again soon and can't wait) about fetishized world. And in the world, Alex is the most free, unlike her two friends.

What also popped into my head during the rape is the metaphor for moral guidance -- as I said, the lighting is important to note that it twitches and doesn't obscure our view. I dunno if Noe had a lot to say, and like I said many times in the past discussing his film, its depth may not be directly from behind the camera, but what I am able to draw from it. This is the case with many great films I can think of, where the filmmakers intention does not matter to me. It is what I am able to grasp and watching Noe's Irreversible, I uncovered a lot more than I expected to, unlike watching Funny Games, which doesn't venture as deep as Noe's. It is still a great film, don't get me wrong.

The tunnel splitting into two most likely symbolizes the menstrual cycle, and how evolution and biology are shaped by loss, and descend into the unknown. The film doesn't merely say sex equals violence and that time destroys everything, etc. It is much deeper than that. A major point of the film is that, although we may weaken, we will continue to learn more and more as a race, further expanding, etc. I think I mentioned the song that Marcus played in the apartment, after Alex suggests him putting music on. Human error plays an important theme in the film -- the circle becomes a spiral, but where does it end? The idea that bliss can lead to fetishism or vice versa by way of romantic idealism is what Noe is hinting at and allows us to fill it in for ourselves, so the film can speak to us even on a personal level.

When the film ends in the park, we think of dreams, Alex's dream and of the mysterious notion that although premonition shows our fate, free will goes deeper than fate in the human experience and finds its way in love. Which is also what Irreversible is about at its core. But I think of it to be too difficult to spell out, so what Noe implies is knowledge may not be able to function as our survival from violence of history. I dunno about the end title, though of "time destroys everything." Which is rather unnecessary, but doesn't strike me as a major flaw. The film is a masterpiece overall. A second viewing confirmed so, but as much as it spoke to me, I dunno if I can sit through such a painful experience again.
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My apparent website

[beltmann]

[the night watchman]

Well, I watched "Irreversible." Damn, that tunnel scene was rough. I nearly didn't make it through. Yet, I thought the movie as a whole was really good. I'm not quite prepared to deliver my take on it quite yet, but I will say that I don't think Noe's intention was to "say anything new" about violence or revenge or man's destructive impulses. Not really. I think he was more interested in presenting life in the shadow of the potential of tragedy and devastation, hence, the reverse narrative and the use of the concepts of pre-destination and precognition. I also think Noe is arguing against, rather than illustrating, the notion that "times destroys everything" or that everything must be destroyed by time and tragedy -- that is, if I understood the final moments correctly.
_________________
"If you're talking about censorship, and what things should be shown and what things shouldn't be shown, I've said that as an artist you have no social responsibility whatsoever."

-David Cronenberg

[beltmann]

[the night watchman]

[filmsRpriceless]

[quote="the night watchman"]

[the night watchman]

If the woman at the end is Alex's mother, the movie would be completely nihilistic, and I think I would probably respect it less.
_________________
"If you're talking about censorship, and what things should be shown and what things shouldn't be shown, I've said that as an artist you have no social responsibility whatsoever."

-David Cronenberg

[filmsRpriceless]