Lars Von Trier's Anti-Christ

yea labute is easier to dismiss, as is haneke imo; von trier is intriguing enough where hes earned [some] endulgances in my book

Yeah, Haneke is way too smug about his bad vibes.

is it just me, or did the prologue with the kid falling out the window look/feel kinda like an advertisement for some luxury product?

"perfume commercial" was what entered my mind

i forgot 2 say, u can see the kid's shoes in that first scene ~ i took that detail as some hint at an underlying mental sickness in Her character

i guess. there's so much potential symbolism in putting shoes on the wrong feet that it sort of seemed significant on some level other than just random cruelty -- but it may be a mistake to read too much into the movie's symbolic scheme.

"perfume commercial" was what entered my mind

yes! jewelry was my other thought.

parts of the movie really feel like von trier's taking the piss but somehow it works

I loved it. And I definitely would say anything that seems vague or subtle is probably in your imagination. This seems like one of the most overt films ever.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2678/4078122071_6cd19337ef.jpg

A+

lool'd

oh my god, is there any way I could get a super hi-res version of that to print and place in my video store? it would make a whole lot of us so very happy.

the largest one they have is 665 x 1024 http://www.flickr.com/photos/samsmyth/4078122071/sizes/l/

Simon = future Tarantino?

ha there's about six more likely candidates where I work

SPOILER

whats the significance of the epilogue? he turns around and sees the 3 animals again and then women start climbing and surrounding him - who are they and is it implied that they kill him (since when you see those 3 animals, someone dies). guessing they were executed witches, since thats what her thesis was on

SPOILER

anyway dope movie, i wanna see it again

http://www.movieline.com/images/chaos_reigns_fox.jpg

lol

SPOILER

whats the significance of the epilogue?

i thought the women at the end were basically a vision of nature -- since in the scheme of the movie women represent nature ("satan's church"), the engine of birth and death etc. and of course his killing her was a futile gesture, nature is in and around everything and will always triumph over reason. chaos reigns.

sort of simple-minded, obv., but the strength of the movie is much more in its execution and depth of feeling than in its ideas.

(so in that sense you could say the women kill him, since by bringing life into the world they simultaneously condemn it to death. that's the movie's central terror. )

ok yea that sounds about right

ok so this is on netflix on demand.

pretty WOW. don't know what to make of it right now.

i was just saying to a friend yesterday that this is the movie i remember most from last year. which is not the same as saying it's the best thing i saw last year, but it did leave an impression.

This film was great! The most offensive thing in the whole DVD is the idiot from the Daily Mail demanding von Trier justify his making of the movie.

http://manilovefilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/CinCapsJediGhosts.jpg

The most offensive thing in the whole DVD is the idiot from the Daily Mail demanding von Trier justify his making of the movie.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1200742/CHRISTOPHER-HART-What-DOES-film-banned-days.html

love the plot description in this because it gets nowhere NEAR how graphic and crazy it is.

Considering showing this and 'Possession' as a double-header at one of our Film Club gatherings. Not sure they'd actually compleement each other that well though. Would have to do 'Antichrist' first I think as well. Hmm.

hated this

Didn't totally adore it but appreciated it for being pretty unique and hard to forget

Is there a Melancholia thread? Just saw it the other night, and I loved it.

I plan on seeing it but haven't yet. friend of mine saw it at the Castro theater and said he laughed through tons of it, which was um an atypical reaction in terms of the rest of the audience

was shown this the other day. it's a fairly remarkable work - i had expected to hate von trier, but the balance of empathy is almost entirely with gainsbourg's character here. put crudely, the film is about how dafoe's character fundamentally misunderstands, mistreats and patronises her to the point of rejecting her desires for intimacy, her nature, her need to be loved rather than treated like an unexploded bomb - until she does explode - and then he kills her. an allegory for how men have treated women since time immemorial. he is almost too awful in his obtuseness - but this is what men are, all too often, when confronted by female anguish.

the issue of the shoes, placed on the wrong feet - this is the toughest part to explain within that narrative - i suppose that von trier is attempting to demonstrate that people (especially women?) can be irrational & operate under logics contrary to the (nefarious) scientific method which dafoe wields so fatally - this is a sympathetic reading, perhaps, but at no point in the film did i feel my misogyny sensors (insofar as i'm 'allowed' them) beeping - it really did feel like it was on gainsbourg's side (while retaining some small empathy for dafoe, the pedantic fool)

it reminded me of how technically skilled and imaginative he is. people getting worked up over his narratives tend to overlook or underplay how well he uses light, sound and editing. there are things in antichrist that really don't look like anything else i've seen.

― flying squid attack (tipsy mothra), Friday, September 18, 2009 2:14 PM (5 years ago)

agree w/this. i rate this film pretty highly even though i don't think i could ever explain what exactly LVT was trying to say with it, or whether it even means anything at all, but it's just an incredibly beautiful and unique film just on a surface, sense-oriented level. the only recent film that stuck with me for similar reasons was 'under the skin.'

this film and melancholia are masterpieces. shame about nymphomaniac.

i'm going to have all three hurled at me before too long! delightfully intense opening gambit

But Nymphomaniac (director's cut) is the best one of the three! Again, technical things, editing especially, but also the beautiful images of trees or hospital rooms or genitalia (joke). And just the whole rambling construction, all 5½ hours of it, with digression upon digression. Nobody does shit like this. Anymore.

I showed the first seven minutes in my film class. A couple of open-mouthed responses. I'd forgotten about the close-up of Willem Dafoe (or his body double's)'s meat.