(Antichrist will be discussed in detail in this review.)
First off, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is one of the best films of the year, if not the decade.
Not many are going to share this opinion, which is really a fact. Antichrist has once again sparked a current of reaction and rebellion to von Trier and his work, already always controversial. But it’s difficult to understand what exactly it is that people, or at least critics, have against von Trier. His public pronouncements seem to irritate them. His threshold-stretching films seem to make them uncomfortable, as do the similarly provocative films of Michael Haneke and Gaspar Noe, all of whom had films at the 2009 Cannes film festival. The general attitude seems to be that von Trier is something of a fraud, playing with ideas like an uncomprehending child with letter block toys. Antichrist isn’t the first film to inspire the opprobrium of the Cannes masses: the masterpiece L’aventura was jeered at Cannes, with the audience shouting “Cut! Cut!” at the film’s lengthy takes of Monica Vitta running down a hall and opening doors in search of her lover.
Assuming that these are indeed the charges against von Trier, they can be addressed simply. It is the role of art in part to make us uncomfortable, to show us the truth of life unflinchingly, though it is difficult to take. As T. S. Eliot wrote, human beings can only take so much reality. And if von Trier plays the arrogant buffoon in public in his interviews and sound bites, well, as D. H. Lawrence advised in his important book of criticism about American writers, trust the tale not the teller; look to the work of art itself, not what the artist says about it or himself. Which leads us to the charge of fraudulence. If von Trier is a “fraud” in the sense that he doesn’t take his own work seriously and enacts the role of filmmaker in order to undermine and toy with audience expectations, that is of little concern to the viewer. If the film is coherent, if it rings true, if it says about about the human condition, then it doesn’t matter what von Trier “thinks” about it or what his intentions were. We don’t really know the “intentions” of Shakespeare ““ he left no journals or interviews or other records of his opinions ““ but we have the evidence of the plays themselves, which contain a rounded view of life.
Antichrist is many things at once. It is a religious allegory (the “antichrist” of the title is nature itself), it is a horror film, it is a story of fairy tale simplicity and resonance, and it is a European art film in the Scandinavian mode of Ingmar Bergman, especially the Bergman of The Hour of the Wolf and The Silence; essentially it is a “two hander” in the manner of a Strindberg play. The film also has traces of Miike’s Audition, and even the Stephen King adaptation, Misery. Antichrist is provocative, but also extremely well written. To my mind, von Trier is under-appreciated as a writer. Dogville is one of the best crafted but also best written of films, a richly detailed, psychologically acute tale with a brilliant management of a complex idea within which numerous characters interact.
Antichrist will remind horror buffs right off the bat of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Both begin with the death of a child due to the inattention of parents, significantly in the case of Antichrist after the child witnesses uncomprehendingly the Primal Scene, though as the wife says later, “Freud is dead.” In von Trier’s thick imagery, death and orgasm are united. The rest of the movie profiles how that death haunts the surviving parents, with both supernatural and psychological elements.
In the case of Antichrist, the married couple are He (Willem Dafoe), a Seattle therapist, and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a student working on her thesis. The bulk of the film takes place at Eden, their cabin in the woods, where He takes her for a long therapy session to help her overcome her grief and her panic attacks. Not unlike Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke, this foray into into a private and isolated therapy session leads to disaster: the confrontation of a professional with the ethics of profession and the “patient” with the nature of her identity. von Trier hints at the ominous date with the forrest by frequently cutting to images of the woods, scored against unnerving music or sounds, long before they ever get there, as if the black forest is summoning them for a confrontation. Forests are often scary in fairy tales just as they are in real life. Like oceans, they are theaters in which living things fight for survival almost invisibly all around you. Certain horror films, such as The Blair Witch Project, capitalize on the inherent dangers and fearsomeness of the forest. Antichrist is very much in line with this theme in fiction, with an overlay of psychological questing. In the forest, He begins to experience the reality of nature or perhaps is simply experiencing visions of its grosser edge, of animals giving birth and of helpless creatures overcome by predators, illustrative of “nature red in tooth and claw.” These visions are the pole ends of what he thinks he is doing and what he is really doing to his wife, “giving birth” to her new identity free of panic attacks, but also dominating her and even preying on her psychologically. That their woodsy getaway is also called Eden links up with some religious concerns within the film (though von Trier skeptics might scoff that as an unbeliever he is using such themes cynically). This Adam and Eve are seeking to re-enter Eden and reshape themselves, with unEdenic results.
Like a Tarantino movie, Antichrist is divided in four chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. After the Prologue, in which their son Nick falls out of their apartment window to his death in the snow, there is Chapter 1, “Grief” in which He tries to wrest control of her therapy from the medical profession, Chapter 2, “Pain (Chaos Reigns),” in which they embark on the forest therapy retreat, Chapter 3, “Despair (Gynocide),” in which He learns some disturbing things about the way his wife treated their son, and Chapter 4 “The Three Beggars,” in which their psychological combat becomes physical. Finally, in the Epilogue, He is free of his wife, wandering the forest like a hunter-gatherer, comforted by the re-visitation of the three animals he has seen earlier, but then he is advanced upon by an ambiguous army of females, their faces blurred out.
Not only is Antichrist, which is about psychological states and physical actions that are difficult to take and difficult to watch ““ because it is dealing with facets of daily life that we spend most of our time suppressing ““ beautiful to look at, thanks to the photography by Anthony Dod Mantle, but its sound production is fascinating (Kristian Eidnes Andersen is credited as the supervising sound editor). The dialogue between He and She is sharp yet rich at the same time, with a strange echoey effect, as if they are always alone in a room. The film uses sound effectively, such as the constant plank-plank-plank of the acorns that fall on the tin roof of their cabin, an audio analog to their disenchantment with nature and Eden. In Returning to Eden, this Adma and Eve find that everything that was beautiful there is now hideous or difficult ““ in her words, dominated by “the sound of things about to die.” He at first takes a distanced, practical stance toward nature, but that doesn’t work for long.
At first He seems like the epitome of the compassionate husband, a rational man seeking to cure his wife and save their marriage. His approach to therapy, though, could be viewed as reductive as the Bay Watch Philosophy, which dictates that in every episode, someone with a phobia is encouraged to “face their fear.” The Bay Watch School of Therapy erases phobias through confrontation; von Trier’s existential humanism is less serene.
As the “therapy” continues, an underlying hostility of the wife to the husband emerges. But von Trier hinted at this tension early in the film when He is visiting She in a clinic. As they talk, the camera is first on her, then whip pans left to him for his response to her dialogue. von Trier uses this effect repeatedly in the film’s first chapter, to underscore the anger darts that She is throwing at him without his perception of them. These looks, those pans, suggest an underlying contempt for her husband, which suggests the overarching theme of the impossibility of love in such a world as the one we have.
Her contempt comes to the foreground in the forrest when she begins to speak frankly to him about his various foibles, such as his distance from She and Nick “last summer.” But he learns strange things about her, too. For one thing, she was hobbling her son with the wrong shoes, a fact that shows up in an autopsy report he at first refuses to look at. Her weird mistreatment of her son anticipates her Misery style ball and chaining of He. She also keeps something called a Gynocide scrapbook. Also, the book she was writing becomes increasing erratic in its handwriting (one of two or three subtle allusions to the films of Stanley Kubrick). She also begins to say “crazy” things, though there is the possibility of a terrible truth to them. She asserts that “human nature is evil,” that “women do not control their own bodies, nature does,” that a “crying woman is a scheming woman,” that “nature is satan’s church.” She also speaks the enigmatic “when the Three Beggars arrive someone must die,” which may refer to the three small statues that Nick knocks down on his way to the window, or to the three animal visitations that He sees. In response, He says that she has betrayed her own thesis that she has been working on for so long, and he also tells her somewhat less convincingly that “good and evil have nothing to do with therapy.”
There are three key points that will probably make an unsympathetic audience member laugh or jeer. There is the “talking fox” moment (in the husband’s hallucination, he is confronted by a fox who says “Chaos reigns”), the “leg iron” scene (von Trier seems drawn to imagery of men and women hobbled by some large impediment that restricts their movement, as in Dogville), and there is the self-mutilation (which has analogs with numerous films that lots of people like, such as Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, but apparently if von Trier does it, the moment is outrageous, cynical and provocative). But the whole movie will seem stupid to those who don’t want to think deeply about life, or prefer superficial films to adult examinations of psychology and tragedy. It isn’t as if the film isn’t thoroughly thought through, unlike so many other recent films. The credits include researchers on misogyny, mythology and evil, anxiety, horror films, music, and theology.
Antichrist is dedicated to Andre Tarkovsky, but a real, though probably unintentional, guiding spirit is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A. H. H., 1850” which refers to a man “Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law / Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.” But I guess if you don’t like von Trier you won’t like poetry, either.
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I didn’t start watching The Office until this summer. I’m really late to this party.
CHRISTOPHER STIPP: I apologize to you in advance. In doing research on this, trying to figure out how this compares to previous works I looked at your resume and it was like a scene out of SNEAKERS when they open a file and there’s nothing in it”¦
ACKER: It was really fun. I came from architecture school, so I have a strong design background as well as study in sculpture and painting and things like that. That’s why I love the animation medium because it combines all my interests together into one thing. When you see the film, I think you will see that the architecture influence on it. It’s really about world making and there is a sense of reality to this world and like the real world it’s pushed, it’s a little different. The industrial revolution was allowed to progress for 300 years and never got to digital. Always stayed in this analog space. So for me, that’s the fun stuff.
It’s just trusting the process and trusting the artist. You can’t do it all yourself. Empower and educate them in a way so they can make the right choices and solutions and understanding what the core idea is and the aesthetic that we are going with.  I think a lot of that is that I spent a lot of time as a teacher, as well. Design classes and 3D classes and it’s really about educating and empowering and playing to people’s strengths, lifting them up and giving them the best crib space and environment. So, I try to do that. As an artist myself, no artist likes to be told what to do. No one wants to paint by numbers. You are just trying to give them the creative space and give them the right direction and let them solve it. You are always going to get the best work that way. So, yea, for me it was difficult and challenging but I was always respectful to the artist to try and keep us all on the same playing field. Anyone could come in and see the film and offer criticism or suggestions. Because that’s how I did the short. I showed it to so many people and always solicited opinions and advice because you never know who is going to have a great idea. Everyone has a valid opinion.
It really is an Oppeheimer/Geppeto tale at the heart of it all. It’s about the scientist who was blinded by the pursuit of technology to create something that turned the wrong way. It ended up destroying the world and as sort of the lack act that he did as the world was collapsing was to create new creatures that was the opposite of that represent all the hope and humanity and they are vessels for soul and he sends them out after all the humans fall apart as the way of making up for the sins of his past. Much like Oppenheimer after inventing the bomb was full of regret. He knew what the thing was that he was doing, but it was that blind pursuit of technology. It’s an incredible thing, but yet a horrific thing that he made. It changed the landscape of the world. So that’s what’s at the core but the story of the rag dolls is them looking back and figuring out their father was the one who brought the world down. What does that make them and will they make the same mistake that the humans made or will they create a new world in the ashes of that.
CHRISTOPHER STIPP: Thank you for talking to me. I am a huge fan of your work, from the early work to the work you’ve done in the last year. How did you become involved in this picture?
BECKMAMBETOV: Has to be delicate because we are directors too. It’s kind of unique. Two directors for a movie. That’s why we were trying to be very delicate.
BECKMAMBETOV: Yes, it’s the theme of the movie. What is soul for us? Can we transfer our soul to a machine? We really trust this machine and but people can make a mistake. And the moment you push a button, you stop the process. We take a picture and then we don’t remember because we know it’s there. It’s very dangerous because it can be broken, you can lose it, and we are losing. We are losing abilities. By Googling everyday, you don’t have to learn. Because you can Google all day long and our skills, our abilities to create everyday. And we make these machines and transfer our intellectual abilities, to remember, but there is no soul. And one day the star of the movie can try and explain this. I hope it will be not so soon.
PATTON OSWALT: Hi Chris.
OSWALT: It was the act of him coming to me to do the movie that gave me confidence that I could do it. He had written such a good script. He’s such a good writer. His instincts to be there for that meant a lot to me that he thought I could pull this off. It just gave me confidence.
CS: What kind of insecurities? You’ve got, not to put you over, but as I was getting prepared I didn’t realize how rich of a resume you now have.
OSWALT: Exactly. We had no idea. We didn’t know if we would have money to complete it let alone get distribution. I looked at it like this was just something I wanted to do for myself. The rest was secondary.
CHRISTOPHER STIPP: I love this movie. And it seems to be a real hit with those that have come in contact with it and I wanted to start off by talking about how close the grittiness feel the way the film looks like THE WRESTLER. It has that, I don’t want to say, dirty quality, but it’s so close to reality. Can you talk about that?
I don’t know if you are a fan of his stand up. He’s not a sports fan but understands the psychology of obsession. There’s not that big a difference is what the Giants did on 4th and goal vs. ranting about the comic book equivalent. From what I can tell Patton is a big comic book-phile, not a sports guy. I didn’t have him read for the part. I just hired him. It was something of a leap of faith. He’s such an intelligent guy. When I first met with him we had a long conversation about 70’s movies and people have different reactions to the script and people read it and think it’s a comedy. And it could have been.
SIEGEL: Sports radio is where the movie starts. Listening to sports radio, I used to listen to WFAN religiously and I still listen to sports radio but not religiously as I did back then and when you listen to it you hear these callers and you got to know them because they would call every night. And then you couldn’t help but wonder what their lives were like and where they were living. Most of those guys were the guys that populated the movies that I loved. The guys you would hear, Murray from Regal Park, or Joe from Flushing, calling on the FAN. Probably the kind of guys that wouldn’t hang out in the bar on Mean Street. They are just regular guys from outer burrow New York. So the movie is definitely a fusion of my level of listening to the radio, listening to sports radio but also these kinds of character studies that I got into when I was probably a teen-ager. It’s definitely a personal movie for me.
I really was a bad student in high school. Not horrible in the classical sense but I was absolutely a C student and I couldn’t grasp mathematical or scientific in ways that made me wonder if I was functionally retarded.
People will try and take pot shots at this series which has certainly had issues with trying to find its footing and voice but it still is trying to be something that geeks and nerds can call primetime goodness. This season finds itself marred in various storylines that seem to drag the series down a bit but it is still ballasted by its intriguing premise and the hope that they’ll actually listen to the fans who made this series last this long and get the train back on its proverbial course. There’s stuff to love and there’s stuff to, well, not love about this series but Season 3 still deserves a look see and what better offer out there today to do such a thing than with my contest to win Season 3 on DVD.
In OFFICE SPACE writer/director Mike Judge deconstructed the white collar workplace that has now become a classic in a way that some films never achieve on their own; the film has embedded itself underneath the collective experiences of those having to endure the pains of modern working life. IDIOCRACY explored the way in which our culture seems to be on a slow steady shuffle off the mortal coil of intelligent living. Who could disagree that the one of the more colorful choices of a future president of the United States was found in Terry Crews’ President Camacho? It was an honest examination of our descent into the banal, the bast and just plain stupid.
I am in love with this movie.
In two separate cars, four boys and three girls drive to a rendezvous in a Norwegian ski cabin. The girls are Hanna (Charlotte Frogner), her cousin, the squeaky voiced Chris (Jenny Skavlan), and Hanna’s friend Liv (Evy Kasseth Rosten). That’s all we know about them, though it helps to know that Norway is one of the richest countries in the world ““ as a general background to the kids’ leisure time activities ““ and that it is the Bethlehem of death metal. The boys are Martin (Vegar Hoel), a medical student with a problematic phobia of blood, Erlend (Jeppe Beck Laursen), the requisite horror movie buff, Roy (Stig Frode Henriksen), who is characterized as the “horniest guy north of the Arctic Circle” though we don’t really see much evidence of that character trait in the subsequent narrative, and who seems to speak a dialect different from the others, and Vegard (Lasse Valdal), the cute one, whose girlfriend Sara (Ane Dahl Torp) is skiing cross country to meet them all at the cabin. Unfortunately, as we the viewers know from the opening sequence but the characters don’t, Sara is already dead, having been attacked by some unknown assailants with apparent cannibalistic inclinations.
The nature of the horror is first alluded to by a lone traveller who comes into the cabin for a coffee. He is openly contemptuous of the youngsters, and also tells them a campfire story about the menace lurking in the mountains. It seems that during World War II, a German occupying force of 300 men called Einsatz controlled the village of Oksfjord, which was important to the war effort because of its conveniently placed harbor. These Nazis were unusually cruel to the villagers. As the war went against the Germans, the soldiers, led by a Colonel Herzog, raided the houses and stole as much gold and coins as they could find. Finally, the villagers rose up against their oppressors and, using various farm tools, attacked the Nazis, who fled to the mountains of Istind with their ill-gotten gains, and where they presumably froze to death. This narrative is told in that close slow-track-in trick that signifies to viewers that something of great or scary importance is being related. It’s also a story that sets up the classic “dangerous village” premise of so many horror films, An American Werewolf in London and Kill, Baby … Kill! being two varied examples. Not that we ever see any of the village.
These zombies are publicized as evil, but is that really the term? When they were alive, these Nazis would probably have been defined as evil, since they were exploiting others for personal gain, but on the other hand, they were probably ideologically driven people with a view of their Norwegian subjects as inferior beings, not a pleasant idea but from their own viewpoint not evil. The more I try to think about the term the more I wonder just what it is that is supposed to be “evil” in horror films. Help comes in the form of Cynthia Freeland’s book The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror, one of a handful of academic studies of the horror genre that tries to grapple with its psychological allure. Her discussion of the conflicting Whale and Branagh Frankensteins is intriguing, because it is clear that our notions of evil are played with by the filmmakers, as in the original novel, though differently. The doctor has hubris and the creature is a tortured being set on revenge. As newer horror movies have come along they have grown cruder, crueler, with “evil” presented unambiguously, and with those trick ending codas where the seemingly vanquished evil rises again to finally triumph. These codas probably got their started with Boorman’s Deliverance, where it was a dream sequence, and which was borrowed by De Palma for Carrie. But in later films, especially those of Wes Craven, the coda tends to undermine everything that has gone before. The filmmakers may think that they are portraying the face of evil, but the result is so freed of ambiguity as to be rendered a cartoon. The struggle against evil is revealed to be useless.
Freeland raises the question of why people would willingly want to be scared, but the Craven Coda also raises the issue of why people would enjoy a movie that preaches the unconquerability of evil. In daily life, “evil” ranges across everything from the engineers of the Holocaust to bad bosses or the guy who steals your girl. In movies, or at least bad movies, evil is simply something that scares you or is presented as a monster. To me, Sigourney Weaver is civilization personified; to the Alien she is baby food. Most stories put goals in opposition, and there is the good goal and there is the bad goal and we are encouraged in commercial cinema to root for the person with the good goal. But there is a perverse part of us that seems to like evil. Some horror films are explicit about their alignment with evil, such as the Hellraiser series, a precursor to the so called “torture porn” genre in which the leather gear of the villains links them with a playacting S&M take on good versus evil. It was kind of cool in the ’70s to like the suave, confident bad guys better than the milquetoast good guys in thrillers, and Hitchcock exploited that impulse. But since then there has been a rise in villainy or evil to the point that in recent G. I. Joe movie the bad guys “win” through about 90 per cent of the movie and then again in the last sequel-whoring 30 seconds. It’s a story structure borrowed from professional wrestling ““Â don’t let the good guys win too often. The popular culture’s enlarged interest in evil almost seems to be sexual, especially when manifested in the technically unnecessary leather outfit Sienna Miller wears in G. I. Joe.
In its 5th season, 
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For a last look at what an amazing talent she was, and what we lost with her unexpected death, look no further than 
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Sad that the nicely pleasant Chrstina Applegate series 
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Would you be surprised to find out that a movie with the title 
For those of us who love Bruce Lee’s influence on modern Asian cinema you’ve probably seen many incarnations of program in some form or another. Like an 80’s DJ who is ultimately limited by the fact that there is a finite number of tracks they can play, there seems to have been so much overlap with footage we’ve seen with regard to the man who was wickedly charismatic and destined for far more than we were given.
Some of you may know of Sun Tzu’s Art of War from its many incarnations from how it plunder’s Tzu’s theories on warfare and misappropriated them for self-help books all the way to manuals on how to get ahead in business. These derivative works are appallingly poor interpretations for what is, really, a how-to on using philosophy and intelligence to win battle.
Who here wants to win a movie?
I could stay awake for days on end watching clips from World War II.
When I bought Bobcat Goldthwait’s “Meat Bob” back in 1988 on cassette it was one the very first comedy albums I owned. I put Bobcat up there with Eddie Murphy and George Carlin but, here’s the funny part, I never bought Bob’s shtick. Yeah, he absolutely used that voice that made him famous as Zed in those POLICE ACADEMY and plundered that character for all it was worth but his comedy was brutally funny and honest. To wit, he has a bit in his set where he gives a glimpse of what it’s like to be a comedian. It’s subtle but you can hear how people’s perceptions of him shapes his comedy and it leads into a wicked joke that concerns a monkey, an alcoholic beverage and genitalia. You can hear his honesty, you can feel his true self and it’s what attracted to me to the guy’s work for over two decades.
CHRISTOPHER STIPP: Thanks for doing this interview. I’m going to go out on a geek limb and tell you that I dug out my cassette of Meat Bob that I’ve had since the 80’s and revisited that and your old HBO comedy special which I still had on VHS tape”¦
CS: And Robin, himself, he’s a sympathetic character. I felt downright sorry for the guy. He’s trying to make good decisions, do the right thing. Explain to me the idea of the character, the twists of the film come in later, but what launched his character. Was it Robin himself? Or was it the twist that came and you thought that would be a good premise for a movie so let’s build around that?
GOLDTHWAIT: I think it’s what we are talking about ““ the sense of entitlement and the inability that their actions affect other people. They are just exposed to everything. We are becoming a culture with no consideration of couth.
GOLDTHWAIT: There were two different companies came to me and said we were trying to make changes and I actually walked away from these two deals that were in place. They proceeded to tell people in LA that I was crazy and that the movie wasn’t going to get made but honestly it was nothing I was ashamed of. I already have plenty of that.
Oh no! Just when you thought it was safe to hang out at the Quick Stop…
