#25
Melancholia: A Review
The credits of Melancholia are currently rolling, and the timer on the Blu-Ray player is at two hours and thirteen minutes. I call my accountant to draw up an invoice for those two hours and thirteen minutes, to be sent directly to Lars Von Trier.
I will admit, gentle signori and signore, from the second part of Melancholia onwards I was deliberately forcing the film out of my attention, choosing instead to focus on the bleary digitised reality of Facebook. But I could not bear to continue watching, I really couldn’t, after sitting through an hour of Kirsten Dunst noodling around a nicely-lit mansion on the verge of tears in ultra-high-res shakeycam. To go into any further detail about the plot would cause me to vomit uncontrollably, stinging, acidic tears streaming down my burning cheeks, the veins in my forehead tense and ready to hemorrhage, and so I will merely say what was wrong with it, concisely and furiously.
It made me genuinely angry, sitting through something as over-indulgent and painfully insubstantial as this film. This is not what film is meant to be about. I know that’s a general, blanket statement, and that evidence must be provided for this claim to be taken seriously, but I am feeling very delicate right now.
It seemed that the film was designed to be just comprehensible enough for idiots to understand, thus making them feel like they were achieving something artistic and intellectual by watching it. It seemed to me to be a failed attempt to mix a broad, overly vague concept with a cinéma vérité style, and the end result resembles a performance by an amateur improv theatre group taking themselves far, far too seriously. “Okay, we’ll need an abstract noun and a film style. Oh, I think I heard “depression” and “pseudo-epic faux opera jism”.” The only way the film could be saved is by being cut to half an hour long and played as a comedy melodrama, directed by Mel Brooks. Lars; please leave. Just… leave.
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curlyingenue reblogged this from mfarrugia and added:
Really? I didn’t think that at all. Of course all reviews...subjective but I thought there...
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itsverybeautifuloverthere reblogged this from mfarrugia
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