Enter The Void by Gaspar Noé

list thread?

He isn't alive at this point, he is a voyueristic eye that is incapable of any kind of interaction with the living world other than watching it. But I suppose a film like this can be interprated in many ways because of its hallucinatory style. Surely you cant fuck your sister when your dead?

The point I was trying to make rather badly was that I didn't think it was a depiction of overt incest. Yes some unsavoury stuff but no sex between them. It is alluded to but is just background stuff really.

For me if this film was character driven it would be a fail. Linda is just a standard tragic hooker character. It still doesn't detract from the film that you dont buy their interaction and are not convinced that they are siblings. For me this is a film about what goes on when you are out of your mind. The plot and dialogue are just the obligatory components of a wafer thin story in this case. That is what excited me about this film, it has been made with little regard for rational movie structure. In my opinion it is a genuine attempt at creating something that is a new way of depicting how life is sometimes experienced.

love the shit book of the dead dialogue sequence down the stairs to the club

yes, we do not see them committing the act of incest, but the film makes it clear that they have a rather sexually charged brother/sister relationship. describing it as "incestual" isn't off the mark. anyway, silly details. xpost.

I guess my real gripe was the manipulation Noé takes at every given turn - DEAD PARENTS! INCEST! CAR CRASH! - where the premise alone was really cool and unique. I wanted this transcendent experience, but the exploitative trickery just kind of ruined it for me. That said, it was visually stunning and I won't forget it any time soon.

really wish Noe would get someone to write him something cool. there's a lot of talent there, it's just weighed down by so much dumb.

by the time he was smash cutting from the naked mother in the bathtub to fucking the friend's mom i just wanted it to be over. i mean hoo boy.

If nothing else I've got to hand it to a film where the camera emerging from the womb is the most predictable ending

I thought this movie peaked at the Love Hotel sequence toward the end.

Just finished watching a #$%^ torrent of it on my %$*@ Acer but DAMN. Loved it.

If nothing else I've got to hand it to a film where the camera emerging from the womb is the most predictable ending

― Bangelo, Saturday, February 5, 2011 9:59 AM (5 months ago) Bookmark

lol

finally got around to watching this on netflix. really liked it. didn't drag for me at all.

funny how this and The Tree of Life are essentially bizarro anti-versions of each other.

I wanted this transcendent experience, but the exploitative trickery just kind of ruined it for me.

this movie isn't reaching for transcendence. it's really thumbing its nose at the idea of transcendence. it's about regression, if anything.

it's a big flashy dumb trip through a dying idiot's psyche.

One good thing about watching this at home is that at least you only have the back of one guy's head getting in the way the whole time.

Haha

this film is basically tree of life w more dmt and less dinosaurs

I've watched the opening credits like ten times but never made it more than 5 minutes into the movie itself.

Early discussion here Irreversible: C/D but now it seems this film will make its debut at Cannes next week. I reckon it'll be one of the cinematic events of the decade, and to say I'm excited is an understatement.

― sorry for british (country matters), Friday, May 8, 2009 11:15 PM (2 years ago)

lj was right

you do realise I still haven't seen it, nor do I particularly want to

no film's worth has travelled with such exquisite inversity to my advancing months as Irreversible's

hey elge

yah i remember u recanting on noé

ive not seen irreversible, i saw seul contre tous years ago and dont remember a lot about it other than it being a fairly impressive first feature with neat godardian intertitles and the glowering visage of the poujadist psycho protag

enter the void tho, is something else

the discourse around his films is dreadful, he alienates the right ppl but typecasts himself as a korine level idiot-visionary in the process

how do you make the credits -- is it in after effects?

couldn't get on board w enter the void. extremely impressive and well-crafted, a hell of a drug, but whether you take it as an embrace or a repudiation of mystical transcendentalism, it struck me as drivel. perhaps that just makes me "the right people"...

no, i would prefer that u liked it

dang

all of those boorish anglo empiricist EMPERORS NEW CLOTHES, PRETENTIOUS BLOODY OLD RUBBISH critics who insist on getting upset by trier haneke dumont etc are just the worst most tiresome idiots tho

i think there is some value to this film and i really liked parts but i was glad to watch it at home on netflix because i really liked being able to FF through some really drawn-out parts (for example, the interminable crane shots over the model of tokyo)

it felt like an undeserved and overlong directors cut of a better movie

i really liked being able to FF through some really drawn-out parts (for example, the interminable crane shots over the model of tokyo)

i could watch these shots for hours

yeah, tbh the crane shots were one of my favorite things about the film. photography and design were great pretty much all the way through. was the story & characters i got tired of.

really? they were too fake-looking for me, though i really did enjoy the ones at the end where the city was all lit up and "psychedelicized".

i think my favorite parts where the rave/nightclub scene, especially "coming up" part and the part where they're coming down in that glittery underground room full of twinkly crystal stuff and mirrors. that and the abrupt cut from the rollercoaster ride to the *big traumatic event* (trying not to spoil this one though i think it already happened upthread)

my favorite part is how he floats in to his sister's vagina

dude you could not pay me to float into paz de la huerta's greasy vagina

jesus fucking christ

sorry, took me aback [/loi]. i mean, uh, i agree that the flying/floating "crane shot" parts were fakey looking, but in a way that didn't bother me, especially when they started to get all psychedelically glowy in the second half.

paz de la huerta's greasy vagina

^ dn's up for grabs

^ thread ideas

the crane shots of tokyo / the 'wow...tokyo on acid' scale model thereof were great

really it isn't a film whose rarified qualities are best appreciated by describing scenes diagramatically any more than attempting to convey the greatness of 'mirror' might be helped by describing the scenes where tarkovsky's mother runs around a deserted dreamscape and washes her hair in a room full of falling plasterwork and then there's a shot of some grass blowing in the wind etc etc

even when you try to recollect it, one wonders how it is that loads of seamless crane shots in and through buildings didn't look like a trailer for the sims as filmed by jodorowsky, but really it doesn't seem at all like that whilst watching

the soundtrack is notweworthy too...lfo, karkowski, lucier....

i guess i just wasn't as absorbed by those long shots as i was by tarkovsky's long shots ... another example would be at the beginning when he was watching his DMT hallucination against the ceiling, very slow

i guess i don't really care for diegetic time in movies, esp when imo he's already covered that base via the POV, but yeah, maybe i just have a short attention span because though i enjoy stalker and solaris enough to own copies i still find myself checking my watch a lot during those

i'm a johnny-come-lately, but i've just seen this and irreversible ... and for once, Morbz's bitchy dismissiveness is totally 100% OTM. i can get w/ stylized, disturbing ultraviolence (i.e., i like Takashi Miike films). Gaspar Noe, however, is just pretentious & repulsive nonsense.

also, i wonder if any epileptics have sued Noe (or the theaters that showed this) yet -- they might have a case!

dunno if there's a thread for this but I would definitely nominate this for "film that's way more fun to talk about than it is to actually watch"

i love the harsh ambient qualities of noe's stuff, esp the last ten minutes of irreversible and at least the first half of void - he really nails that white light floaty rush of gd mdma like no other filmmaker imho - and i absolutely can't think of anything that's pretentious abt his movies - some of the verry long take shots passing over tokyo streets at the start of void are a considered and sincere technical exercise in spatial/temporary fuckery - it's also quite a hopeful film, too (we have been here before and we will be here again)

noe and dumont ftw!

co-sign 100% of that post

"gd MDMA"

feel the LOVE, morbs

not to pick on you, ward, but this:

it's also quite a hopeful film, too (we have been here before and we will be here again)

contradicts this:

i absolutely can't think of anything that's pretentious abt his movies

at least in my mind.

to wit: bullshit metaphysical posturing (which Noe himself doesn't even subscribe to, in his own words) and puerile camera tricks (i.e., the PussyCam, complete w/ thrusting cock, sperm and ova).

it's better than irreversible, i'll give it that much. and Noe has good taste in the (better) directors from whom he steals (e.g., Lynch, Kubrick, Tarantino, Kalatozov).

x-post

i dunno, it's not an original idea - it's kind of a buddhist sentiment, isn't it? - but pretentious how? i mean, noe makes it p clear in irreversible that TIME - real time - drug time - eternal time - is a v big interest of his - and imho it's a good subject to investigate in a durational medium like film (and i don't think you have to be a believer - apart from IN CINEMA lol - in any sense to also be interested in this subject)

Every Noé film has some amazing technical tricks, and foregrounds them in the service of misanthropy, sophomoric chin stroking and flat characters. Still there aren't many directors doing art cinema carnival rides, and that's enough reason for me to like his films.

I've heard a lot of talk about this film and I'm starting to think I might have found this film sadder than anyone else who'd seen it. Nodody told me it was sad but I think I might get weepy if I see it again; I was a little bit upset in bed after seeing this. The music at the last sex scene is gorgeous, need to find out who did that.

It was too long but it didn't drag nearly as bad as I was told.

I couldn't find many cheap and decent DVD versions of this and I'm not sure if the copy I got was poor or if my DVD player wasn't good enough for it, because the picture wasn't great, so I feel like I haven't experienced the film properly yet. Reluctant to get a bluray machine (are there multi-region players yet?)

pretty posi you can easily score or make Blu-Ray players region free these days? Though I don't know for sure. I'm sure Oppo makes some.

Michael Gira posted about this on the Swans Facebook page just the other day:

this is a great film, and apparently a disaster for all concerned (except the lucky ones who have seen it). i met gaspar noe in paris recently. we hung out and drank a bit. i started talking about God, and i think i either scared him or repelled him or disgusted him. anyway, it was nice to meet such a true genius....

Better than those lousy fake geniuses eh Mike