Hey folks, Harry here... Father Death returns with some coverage from this year's Sundance. I haven't seen DOGVILLE, but I radically disagree with him regarding HAUTE TENSION, which I absolutely loved. The film is insane, working on the narrative logic of a homicidal schizophrenic killer... and it rules. Of course... ya kinda have to be open to letting yourself think that way for a bit, but if you do... man o man, this thing is a fucking ride. BEWARE OF SPOILERS in his HAUTE TENSION review. Here ya go...
Heya, long time no see...
Here is the report.
I arrived in Park City Friday noon to attend the first
screening of Lars Von Trier's opus DOGVILLE at Eccles
Center. I met a fellow moviegoer and New Yorker Jason
Schafer checking his new screenplay at the wait list
line for DOGVILLE (Jason and I were number 4 and 3,
respectively) and he turned out to be a producer of
Showtime TV series QUEER AS FOLK and screenwriter of
TRICK which was a hit at Sundance 1999. We had a nice
long chat about films in general and difficulties of
breaking into the Hollywood industry. He sat next to
me and we watched as DOGVILLE unrolled in nine chapters
and a prologue.
DOGVILLE
DOGVILLE is a breathtaking film with mindfucking aesthetics expected from the ingenuity of Lars Von Trier who whopped the audiences with emotional violence in BREAKING THE WAVES and DANCER IN THE DARK. Nicole Kidman is amazingly gracious and radiantly stunning as Grace, the young woman who is accepted in the 1930's American town for the laborious work as she runs away from the gangster thugs. She happens to hold deep, sinister secrets. The ensemble - too many names to mention here but you know who they are - acted quite exquisitely. Lars managed to pull off the aesthetics of a televised theatre flawlessly in less than three hours of the film and the result is almost as perfect as some of his previous efforts. I can't go into the intricate detail about the crucial plot points that read like a damned good book, because you have to take in the experience to let Lars' vision roll over you. The conclusion is sorrowful in both tragedy and cruel irony and it will leave you either pissed off or haunted. In my humble opinion it represents the inevitability of fascism that strikes in the heart of America and I'm sure it's already a controversial film regarding its tone and message (hear Roger Ebert's incredulous opinion in his Cannes '03 essay). Nicole should own a second Oscar for portraying an innocuous yet complex character with ugly secrets leading to the terrifying consequences not only on herself but also the residents of the town - it's a friggin' Greek tragedy play captured on film.
Truly, Lars' genius is on par with the contemporary filmmakers Terrence Malick, Stanley Kubrick, Neil LaBute and other gifted directors dissecting the psychological and emotional qualities of the characters for the audiences to interpret for themselves. If you don't like to think about the sociopolitical and sociopsychological ramifications of DOGVILLE and you might be offended with the terrible horror bestowed upon the "innocent" characters you care about, skip this film and you'll save yourself the pain and agony of this endurance test. Lars does not give a shit about the conventional method of filmmaking and he totally subverts that cliché to suit his one-of-a-kind unique yet marvelously twisted vision. If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences don't nominate this genius Danish director for Best Director, the joke is on them.
DOGVILLE is a must-see film but it may not be appropriate for the politically prudish or below-average IQ moviegoers who prefer the film spell out for them. It will blow your mind and haunt you long after the film ends. Lars is undeniably a professional mindraper and I gladly embrace that fact.
After the film ends, Jason and I bid farewell - we had a good time discussing the film for a brief time, given the fact he was too busy to continue the discussion. He thought DOGVILLE is masterfully done which I concur. He's a very nice and smart screenwriting fellow who have met and chatted with Edward Norton, though he should watch AMERICAN HISTORY X just once.
Next I walked to the location only to find out my car have been towed - I could have sworn I parked the car along the line of cars without "No Parking" barricades. After grouching and bitching about BS scam spun by Park City PD (I'm sure I'm not the only one to complain), I had to cough up 110 bucks to PD to retrieve my car, which burned a big hole in my checkbook. Finding legitimate parking spaces and not being paranoid about invisible "No Parking - Tow Zone Enforced" signs/barricades in Park City during SFF event is a real bitch for the visitors with holes in their pockets.
After I got back the car, I drove to the parking space
across the street from Park City Library and walked
uphill to Main Street crowded with skater punks,
jailbait babes, snotty bitches, barely recognizable
celebrities (did I see Al Gore walk past me on the
sidewalk?) and assorted people. I went to get in the
wait list line for the screening of a French horror
movie HAUTE TENSION at the Egyptian Theater. Due to a
misunderstanding, I got into the line of about a dozen
with a fellow SLC movie fan Chuck and I was surprised
to be given a wait list ticket # 1 by a wimpy
volunteer. Somehow # 2 Chuck let me slip in after I
asked where could I stand so we became fast friends
after that.
HAUTE TENSION [HIGH TENSION]
I don't know what to make of what the hell this movie is about. The plot goes like this: a college-age girl accompanied by a friend embarks on a road trip to visit her family while the fat trucker receives a blowjob from a girl then he beheads her and drops the head in the grass field as he drives a vintage truck into the distance. The night the fat trucker (a psychotic serial killer - you might recognize Phillipe Nahon from Gasper Noe's I STAND ALONE) breaks into the house and murders the family in the most gruesome fashion with a sling blade and a drawer. The girls are captured alive by the killer to be trapped in a vintage truck and one of the girls escape by chance. Killer wreak havoc by pulling more gruesome murders and the characters interchange between the killer and one of the girls and...never mind.
Sweet Christ, this is one hell of an incoherent film. Maxime Alexandre's nicely textured cinematography looks mighty good for a supposedly moody and dark film, but there's no atmosphere and no tension whatsoever for me as a jaded horror fan. Not even the most graphically violent and gory scenes impress me - gore FX (obscenely realistic depiction of throat slashing, limb and decapitation bleeding and spurting some obvious CG blood) is well-done and should be admired by FX masters Rob Bottin, Stan Winston and Tom Savini...if they've got the stomach, of course. What aggravates me the most is the utter lack of character motivation - no background of a serial killer, no exposition, nada - in the film amid gallons of splattering blood and severed limbs. This film tried too hard to be a scary horror film but ends up a miserable failure like TCM 2003. The audience partons jumped at the scares with gratingly annoying music and rumbling and pounding sound effects that sound like French rock stars grunting, thrashing and puking up the theater speakers.
I made predictions what will happen to specific "tension" scenes with the victims wandering about as the killer stalks them and most of my bets are fulfilled. There were a bunch of poor teenage girls and a few older women who sat in the front row of Chuck and me who were so disturbed and *totally* grossed out by the film's amazingly realistic gore FX effects that they walked out well into 30 minutes of the film - and one girl came back later (very late) to retrieve her purse at the moment of another gore scene. Chuck told me this film prompted as many walkouts as hardcore gay porno/action hybrid RASPBERRY REICH which he said sucked big time.
The last third of the film borders on the insanely implausible and laughably ridiculous with the interchangeable characters set in a fantasy world where the screenwriters conjure up the imagination as fabulously ludicrous as the floating Earth physics in ARMAGEDDON. Did the 25-year old director Alexandre Aja dedicate his life to masturbatory David Fincher worship by watching SE7EN and FIGHT CLUB several times a week? HAUTE TENSION may be a homage to the great horror films of the 70's and maybe 80's, particularly HALLOWEEN, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, et cetera, but an intensely creepy and atmospheric horror film it isn't as compared to the classic and well-staged horror films mentioned above. Showing overwhelming array of gores is its primary shock factor and that wears out so quickly it becomes mind-numbingly tedious. I suppose HAUTE TENSION proved so popular in South Korea (home of the fish-hook saga THE ISLE) it was re-released last year. Which speaks for Alexandre's creative brilliance in creating a hardcore pornography on the tenet of sadistic violence.
HAUTE TENSION is the most reprehensible, gloriously repulsive, repugnant and hackneyed piece of shit horror film I've seen in a long time along the line of American horror crap and remakes. It would be an ideal film to break up the relationship with a girlfriend or instantly divorce an estranged wife. It might even induce abortions in pregnant women who inadvertently watch this film. Hell, it could be a terrific film to show at frat parties where movie-induced mass puking should recollect STAND BY ME sequence. Only dedicated FANGORIA gorehounds, Rotten and Ogrish fans and horror movie aficionados who prefer massive doses of violence over character development and atmosphere should be pleased.
If you were to ask me about the rating I give to this movie, it would be an F or Zero star. It's so hardcore in excess gore it might not see the release in the U.S. anytime soon thanks to the censor-happy MPAA, even though Lion's Gate Entertainment distributes the film uncut in Canada (if I'm not mistaken), so I dare you to check out the DVD in its uncut glory. Even Chunk - a fan of macabre movies and Takeshi Kitano films - concedes HAUTE TENSION blow big chunks of flesh because he found the film lame and absurd as well. And the kid director said he's working on developing a remake with Wes Craven (doesn't specify the title, though) in Q&A session after the movie's end. Well, good luck with the endeavor, you're gonna need it...
Adios,
