Enter The Void by Gaspar Noé

"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

We watched this last night because my 17-yr-old son is kind of a Noe fan. He'd watched Climax and Irreversible, I'd only seen Climax, which I mostly enjoyed for its energy but also found a bit tedious. "A bit tedious" is a big understatement for Enter the Void, which imo is much too long and mostly focused on all the wrong things.

It was not nearly as freaky or psychedelic as I was expecting. The idea of rendering the experience of death and reincarnation in a movie is nervy enough, and I was ready for Noe to really run with it. But it stays disappointingly earthbound, wrapped up in a boring narrative about dumb unlikable people. The only parts I really liked were the ones with FX and CGI and crazy swooping filmmaking, but those were interspersed with long scenes about uninteresting characters. Bleah.