Either he's on the level, creating an thoughtful, serious meditation on the symbiotic relationship between the creation of art and humanity's infinite capacity for evil and depravity......
Or he's laughing his ass off as he trots out a geek show of nauseating horror and waits for the audience to either wince, throw up and just walk the hell out of the movie.......
Regardless of how this might strike a viewer.......as high art, scummy exploitation or a mixture of both.....overall it's a weary punishment to sit through, 153 minutes of pretentious posturing and gorehound "gotcha" gristle.......
Then again, it's something of a remarkable achievement to make a movie designed to simultaneously try the patience of both culture vultures and popcorn gobblers.
Supposedly, the rise of Trump inspired von Trier to vomit up this movie and yes, it's the only rational explanation for the film's existence that makes sense.......
How do you explain a world in which a lunatic, lying sociopath like Trump ascends to hold power over millions? How do you hold on to any shred of a moral compass or sanity as you watch Trump's insane, evil antics cause the deaths of thousands in the middle of a pandemic?
So maybe von Trier was on to something here........the purest evocation of Trumpian madness.......in which random cruelty and atrocity are raised up to the level of supreme artistic expression. Trump's art lies not in the 'Art Of The Deal', but in the 134,000 corpses that steadily pile up around him.
And the film itself? It's an episodic travelogue of a serial killer's increasingly epic murders, each one more disgusting and repulsive than the one before. Matt Dillon gives it his all as the OCD afflicted monster who holds chatty internal conversations with a wise old Euro-therapist named "Verge".(Bruno Ganz))
The purpose and function of 'Verge' become apparent in the film's finale.......nothing but an elaborate in joke for culture vultures and literature majors........though we did chuckle at the idea of Jack's ultimate fate looking like something from "Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom"......
There's only one moment in this horror funhouse with delusions of grandeur that unsettled us at all.....(we yawned through all the crap deliberately designed to make us gasp and puke, the child murders, the duckling mutilation, the breast turned into a change purse, yada , yada, yada....)
It's the moment when the inhuman Jack gazes into a mirror in a futile attempt to mimic human emotions....like a friendly smile, a pathetic imitation of empathy. The task is beyond him.
.......as it is for Trump, who doesn't even bother to try.
For cinema adventurists, we'd say this movie is a must see. For everyone else, it's redundant, repetitive, bloated with phony self-importance and totally unnecessary......similar to the book published today by Trump's niece.......
We don't need Mary Trump to tell us what an abysmal human being her uncle is......we have eyes and ears......and we sure as hell don't need Lars von Trier explain to us how it is the world allows a creature like Trump to exist......the human 'condition' in its purest form. 1 & 1/2 stars (*1/2)
No comments:
Post a Comment