The (Now-Overrated) ILX Top 100 Films of the 2000s Poll Results

I absolutely do not agree with the end conclusions NK's character makes in Dogville, and I think Lars Von Trier is irredeemable as a human being, but the whole thing radiates a glowing rongness I imagine some others (obviously terrible people) get from Haneke.

Also, Von Trier is usually aware of its own ridiculousness.

i was just gonna say that's how i feel abt haneke

xpost And if not, the payoff is the greatest closing credits sequence of. all. time.

o noes im a terrible person

Liked the comedy, knockout woman falling for socially impaired shlub not so much.

― Rage, Resentment, Spleen (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, February 3, 2010 7:06 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

pretty much what st peter said to me at the gates

i didn't vote so i have no right to complain but Sideways, guys?

Also, Von Trier is usually aware of its own ridiculousness.

― queen frostine (Eric H.), Wednesday, February 3, 2010 12:18 PM (43 seconds ago)

Exactly - a lot of it has to do with challenging the audience, and what the audience wants and expects from film - denying them the conventional pleasures. I actually think Von Trier is very clever, in that you can appreciate/read his films on different levels, and there are interesting formal/structural parallels with the theme and narrative - more so than Haneke, who I feel is a bit more heavy-handed.

over on the ilm tracks poll are people rolling their eyes and sighing loudly about every single entry?

Uh, yes?

ok, what were the photos behind the end-credits of Dogville? All I remember is "Young Americans."

My "anti-American" bonafides are fairly strong, but I don't need some shallow, glib Danish brat to ilm a sub-Brechtian, ugly pageant about it. (how about denying us ANY pleasures?)

I dunno, Cache didn't feel nearly as heavy-handed to me as Dogville

to film, lol

have you never read ilm before, slocki?

I absolutely do not agree with the end conclusions NK's character makes in Dogville

neither does von trier, which is where i think people get that movie backward.

pretty sure the photos were Walker Evans/Dorothea Lange WPA type photos from the Depression

i mean endless carping is wearying but i'll take the good doctor over, say, the lex any day because at least he attempts to explain what's irritated and way.

Exactly - a lot of it has to do with challenging the audience, and what the audience wants and expects from film - denying them the conventional pleasures. I actually think Von Trier is very clever, in that you can appreciate/read his films on different levels, and there are interesting formal/structural parallels with the theme and narrative - more so than Haneke, who I feel is a bit more heavy-handed.

This sounds wrong to me. I think Haneke is much more about denying the audience conventional pleasures (this is the whole point of Funny Games, isn't it?), whereas the von Trier movies I've seen are clearly more conventional and heavy-handed. DitD has all the conventional pleasures of a weepie movie, only taken to an (irritating) extreme. And I know a lot of people who like it a lot exactly because of that cathartic pleasure, even though it's built on nothing but catharsis itself. Whereas Haneke certainly avoids providing the viewer such an easy catharsis.

what's irritated and way is the new "dewey cheatham and howe"

von trier just strikes me as one of those trolls who is clever but not very clever, more momus than cankles for instance

― caek, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 3:16 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lool

Middlebrow indie has become such an easy target for so many critics - Anthony Lane and Peter Bradshaw, to name just two, love to use it as a punching bag. Most of the time I agree, but it can be done well - it's not de facto A Terrible Thing. Incredibly unfashionable to defend, obviously.

― Dorian (Dorianlynskey), Wednesday, February 3, 2010 7:19 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah but they're both feebs, and p-brads especially gets things REALLY wrong when he tries to go lowbrow. it's a punchbag for a reason tho.

'together' is moodysson's bestest film.

a lot of it has to do with challenging the audience, and what the audience wants and expects from film - denying them the conventional pleasures. I actually think Von Trier is very clever, in that you can appreciate/read his films on different levels, and there are interesting formal/structural parallels with the theme and narrative - more so than Haneke, who I feel is a bit more heavy-handed.

― sarahel, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 8:22 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

er, what? LVT viewers are not "challenged" in the least: they get exactly what they pay for, ie a woman slicing her clit or what-have-you. they don't WANT conventional pleasures, they want unconventional ones, because they are highly educated, sensitive people. haneke is more heavy-handed but they're both useless.

a lot of it has to do with challenging the audience, and what the audience wants and expects from film - denying them the conventional pleasures.

come on von trier gives his audience the greatest and most conventional pleasure of all - feeling superior

haneke has crazy skills, deployed in the service of utter obnoxiousness

<3 him btw

The model for yr well-crafted posts!

jeez, feel so conflicted when nrq is OTM.

lol

come on von trier gives his audience the greatest and most conventional pleasure of all - feeling superior

― Lamp, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 12:31 PM (1 minute ago)

-- Do you feel superior when you see Von Trier films? I don't. I feel like I'm implicated in them - that's part of what I meant by challenging the audience.

xp Tuomas - Dancer in the Dark is the one Von Trier film I disliked.

loved dancer in the dark, courteney cox is v cute in that

lol

Okay, like I said I've refused to watch any von Trier movies after DitD, but this "suffering women" trilogy (Breaking the Waves, Idiots, Dancer in the Dark) is certainly much more about conventional pleasures than any Haneke movie I've seen. Like I said, they're all about catharsis, which is as conventional as a cinematic pleasure can be, and Haneke certainly doesn't want to provide the audience anything like that.

(x-post to Sarah)

Do you feel superior when you see Von Trier films? I don't. I feel like I'm implicated in them - that's part of what I meant by challenging the audience.

lol sux 2 be u. i know you're *supposed to be* implicated, because that's what brechtian dramturgy is *supposed* to do. but does it? not ime.

feel so conflicted when tuomas is otm.

picking it up again, taking it down to #86 and then continuing with 85-71 tomorrow...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/etienne_saint/lives-1.jpg

I wasn't really that fussed about it until the epilogue section, and then I found it very affecting. But the final scene went over my schmaltz limits, yes.

Before all that, there was a good sense of claustrophobic paranoia evoked, I guess, and it did sort of make me see how a man could get into the mindset of justifying torture to himself, but other than that, yes, the main body of the film I found a bit disappointing, given the hype.

― Alba

I think a bigger influence on his change of heart was supposed to be him realising that his colleagues were corrupt. He was an idealist who believed in the communist project and had come to justify brutality in its defence. When he saw others being cynical andd using the party system for personal gain, the whole thing started to unravel for him, and that allowed him to start to see his victims as real humans rather than counter-revolutionaries.

― Alba

Sure, I think that's definitely true - maybe my issue was more that I was never truly convinced of Spacey's absolute faith in the Stasi project. I wanted to understand why this guy had total faith in the system that was keeping him living in a shitty apartment, eating gnarly frozen dinners, and ordering mega-boobed prostitutes.

― Ben Boyerrr

i thought this was pretty great.

my favorite detail was the naievete of the GDR writers when they got serious about being defiant -- it was the editor from the West that knew more about what their government can do and will do and is doing.

― gff

#89

The Lives of Others
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
2006
Germany
(221 points, 12 votes, 1 first place)

suckd fat commie dik

Watching vt films, I get the impression I'm watching someone who thinks he's clever by being outrageous and saying nothing at all. "look at these half-assed ideas I've got aren't they challenging and provocative? Jokes bruv I didn't really mean any of it or did I?" thanks for wasting my time, asswipe.

TLoO maybe the worst yet.

i hope morbs is going to do a worst 10 of these 100

The Lives of Others is one of my favorites - it wasn't my #1 pick - the people that disliked it, why do you think it's awful?

xpost I can see how Haneke tries (and fails) to implicate bourgeois viewers in Cache but I can't see how Von Trier's doing that. BTW and DID are just absurd, sadistic rituals which leave me completely estranged. Haven't seen Dogville though, so maybe he gets implicatin' there, but I can't imagine ever wanting to see one of his movies again.

the words "yeah you like that doncha" should flash on the screen at the end of every von trier movie

― 鬼の手 (Edward III), Wednesday, February 3, 2010 1:24 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^ I'm gonna make this every 10th post in the thread if you ppl don't stop talking about lvt

Lives is sentimental twaddle, but i'm sure the film's thread has my contemporary thoughts.

my contemporary thoughts by dr morbius

http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumb_370/1235758790ZmJX78.jpg

it's the sequel to my antediluvian thoughts

lol

lives was utterly ponderous, leaned heavy on the lol art house tactic of using inert pacing and gloomy lighting as a proxy for gravitas

Not seen Lives. Probably should, but foreign film oscars tend to be red flags.

Breaking the Waves (and probably Dancer in the Dark - which I feel asleep halfway through, so I won't pretend that I really "saw" it) - I read in relation to traditional melodrama, as well as all sorts of films where you sit in the comfort of the theater or your home and watch people suffer. It's just taken to extremes. The Idiots is less about suffering, and more about performance and in a sense, avant-garde-ness and art. But I could be finding things in these films that are idiosyncratic and weird.

"a bit schmaltzy," you bet.

If only more playwrights and actresses had introduced Stasi loners to Brecht, the Wall woulda been down in 1970.

― Dr Morbius, Wednesday, February 13, 2008 11:48 AM (1 year ago