Results tagged “Reflexivity”

The temptation when writing about Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is to try something really clever.

You might, as Roger Ebert did, file a review that attempts to mimic the movie’s shambling way. (It’s a half-assed effort, basically consisting of the addition of the sentence “But I digress.”) Ebert accurately describes A Cock and Bull Story as “a film about the making of a film based on a novel about the writing of a novel.”

Oh, the concept is even less appealing than it sounds.

The true subject of Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is that fact that most people don’t find Albert Brooks funny.

That sounds sour, and it sells the movie short, but it’s fundamentally true. While The Aristocrats endlessly repeated a single dirty joke to expose the gears and springs of comedy, Brooks uses a single comedian — himself — to explore the often fragile bond between a performer and the audience. The issue: Why do some people laugh at a joke that leaves other people cold? Disguised as a narrative fiction, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is an essay on the nature of humor.

Plus: V for Vendetta.

Werner Herzog once ate his shoe, so why wouldn’t he chase the Loch Ness monster?

What’s a little harder to swallow is that the famously idiosyncratic German director — who pulled a boat over a mountain for 1982’s Fitzcarraldo — would team up with Zak Penn, a Hollywood hack who has written such gems as PCU, Inspector Gadget, and Elektra. Yet that’s what happens in Incident at Loch Ness, a 2004 movie that documents their collaboration.

The easy, conventional reading of Lars von Trier’s Dogville casts it as an anti-American screed. Yet that interpretation exists almost completely outside of the movie itself. In other words, many of von Trier’s critics are full of shit.

The premise of The Five Obstructions is simple, elegant, and gloriously artificial. A pupil gives his teacher under-any-circumstances-difficult assignments with absurd conditions, and the mentor complies — with no agreed-upon goal beyond the completion of the tasks. Through the assignments, the movie emerges as a portrait of a submissive relationship that’s not at all one-sided.

The level of self-reference in American Splendor should be too cute and modern for words or patience, but it has the strange effect of being more honest than either a straight documentary or drama.

No good movie in recent memory has made me feel as perfectly awful and unsettled as David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. The movie is beautifully made, engaging, and sometimes even funny, but it’s also repulsive and disturbing, and not just because of the director’s now-standard disfigurement fetish.

Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible is such a formal accomplishment that its already repellant content becomes even more so.

There is the sneaking suspicion reading The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster’s collection of short novels, that the works are related. The hunch is not only that the stories are related thematically or in their ultimate message or outcomes — they most certainly are — but that they represent a single, cohesive work rather than three repetitive novellas.

If you think the subject of Atom Egoyan’s Ararat is the genocide in 1915 of 1.5 million Armenians by Turks (as most critics seem to believe), you’ll find the movie a confused mess. But reducing the film to that summary is akin to saying the director’s The Sweet Hereafter was about a bus accident, or that his Exotica was about strippers.