A Beautiful Movie About the End of the World

After reading the reviews, I decided not to see Lars von Trier's 2009 film, Antichrist; even though I admit to loving the darkness of Dogville and Dancer in the Dark, the prospect of watching a horror film that coheres around scenes of genital mutilation struck me as, well, not my cup of tea.


So I'm pleased to read that his new film takes him to a happier place (relatively speaking).  Melancholia will debut at Cannes in May.


Melancholia from Zentropa on Vimeo.

Anti-Antichrist

A. O. Scott pans Lars von Trier's newest, Antichrist:

Women: intrinsically evil or tragically misunderstood? If this strikes you as a fruitful topic of discussion, then you may wish to see — or perhaps I should say endure — Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” a film that has already set off carefully orchestrated frissons of disturbance at film festivals around the world. It starts with a slow-motion, black-and-white sequence, scored to a Handel aria, of graphic sex (with a snippet of hard core thrown in just for fun) and climaxes with two vivid scenes of genital mutilation.

Mr. von Trier has said that making the movie helped him overcome a crippling depression. I’m glad he feels better. He has certainly lost none of the impish, assaultive sensationalism that has made him both a darling and a scapegoat of film critics. But the formal rigor and intellectual brio that made his best films — “Breaking the Waves” and “Dogville” — as hard to dismiss as they were easy to loathe seems to have abandoned him. The scandal of “Antichrist” is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.

I'm feeling less and less certain that I want to see this movie. Considering how much I've been enjoying Charlie Chaplin of late, it hardly seems like the time for me.

Plus, I'm not certain I could convince anyone to come see this with me.

Trailers!

Willem Defoe is getting busy.

Here's a trailer for Lars von Trier's new film, Antichrist.

Lars von Trier's Antichrist - Official Trailer from Zentropa on Vimeo.

Does this look good? Hopefully it will at least be a departure for him.

And here's a trailer for the David Lynch-produced Werner Herzog film, My Son, My Son, What Have You Done?



Again, does this look good? I think I might prefer Herzog as a documentarian -- c.f. Encounters at the End of the World.