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Platypus_Bill
Reviews
C'est arrivé près de chez vous (1992)
A work of evil genius
Your reaction to this film, I can promise you, will be one of two: 1. I find it completely unwatchable; 2. It is darkly-funniest movie ever made. Another promise I can make without hesitation is that you won't be able to watch this movie without cringing. This film makes Reservoir Dogs look like Bambi. Sure, there are more cringeworthy movies (Audition, Ai No Corrida), but these set out to merely shock, not entertain. And Man Bites Dog almost dares you not to laugh. In this way, it is very much like a Bill Hicks sketch: take an uncomfortable premise like abortion (or, in the film, rape, robbery and murder) and see if you can get the audience to laugh at it, then turn up the violence a notch, and make you feel uncomfortable and guilty for having laughed in the first place. The story is of a low-ranking, no-good-for-anyone, semi-intelligent self-taught philosopher, whom we join somewhere along his killing spree. We, the viewers, do this by looking through the lens of a camera crew, who are following the killer's every move. The killer has a dubious moral conscience: he sees himself as a modern-day Robin Hood, except that his justifications for his acts ring hollow and arbitrary, and he is not exactly kind to those to whom he redistributes his ill-gain wealth (which, hilariously, includes the film crew, who have run out of money to buy more film stock; the killer thus becomes the financier of the movie). As the film crew become more and more involved, they implicate themselves, and you start asking yourself how it is that this movie is ever going to be released (which it must have been, since we are watching it). It draws on the same kind of paranoia as, say, Dostoevky or Kafka. As the whole project comes off the rails, we witness a brutal rape scene, and even I found myself thinking - was this really necessary? Then I realize that I have been caught out by the film: I am editorializing, and have become the fourth member of the film crew, thereby giving up any last semblance of distance from the events, and becoming more than a voyeur - a participant in the acts the film portrays. And herein lies the film's true genius: it is exactly what it is, nothing more, nothing less. It looks shaky and grainy, because it was made by a bunch of film students with no money. The sound is crappy because of the same reason. You feel you are following a murderer, because you are (oh, no, of course not, he is an actor, I have to keep reminding myself). In a way, it is reminiscent of the Blair With Project, but whereas there was no point to that film, there is to this one. Namely, it questions our voyeuristic nature, in the process blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, good and bad, complicity and responsibility, and does this by getting under your skin, reaming some gashes, and then dare you not to pick at the scabs.
Amsterdamned (1988)
Worst movie ever, turned into hilarious comedy by the English dub-job
I am actually on one of the takes of this movie, the bit where the speedboat launches off the half-submerged house boat. If that take had ended up in the finished product, I might have given this film two stars. So, what's wrong with it? Well, the film might have many redeeming features (any film featuring Turkish Delight's Monique vd Ven can't be all bad), and to be sure, some of the camera-work hovering over the Amsterdam canals (although some of these were shot in Utrecht) is very atmospheric, but all is undone by the deus ex vacuum ending. The story, or maybe I should say premise, is that there is a killer lurking in the Amsterdam (see caveat above) canals. Eric Visser (whose name is a pun: it means fisherman) is the police detective charged with finding him, or her, or it (we can't tell, since the killer wears full scuba gear). The film goes through all the usual twists and turns, in order to make you first think and then doubt that X, Y or Z is the killer. But, huge spoiler and even bigger undoing, guess what? The killer, when he is finally unmasked, is someone who wasn't ever in the movie. Haha, had you fooled! It's like a Scooby Doo episode where they tear off the face mask, to find it out it was you. And you had no recollection of featuring in a Scooby Doo episode. I had seen the film in the original Dutch version, anxiously looking if I was in it, and when I lived in the States I convinced some of my friend to rent this movie. I kept a straight face when I told them just how good it was. I guess it was my way of vindicating myself for having had to sit through this movie in the first place. What made the film even worse, was that they used the original cast, some of whom had obviously never spoken a word of English before, and were obviously reading off phonetic cue cards, for the dub, except, wait for it, a young boy, whose English must've been really bad considering the other performances that were left in. HE was dubbed by an English actor with a very deep gravelly voice. Oh, and the title must be the worst pun in the name of a movie ever. To paraphrase the title track - I'll be damned damned damned before I ever again watch Amsterdamned.
New Port South (2001)
High school rebellion movie with more loose ends than an Abba jacket
About five minutes in, and I saw where this was heading. Bunch of high school kids get annoyed by the school's administration and thoughts of rebellion start fomenting. I said to my girlfriend: if it gets below a 5 on IMDb, I'll go and read a book. It got 5.0, so she persuaded me to go on watching. What are the good things? Well, it is a good thing this film does not have a story, because you would surely be distracted from it by the editing. It's like the student's drawing that was torn up by one of the teachers, all the footage for this film was cut up in a freak accident involving a meat-grinder, and left half the stock destroyed, with the other half spliced into two-second bits. Even in a ten-second scene of the local TV news, there are about six cuts and three different angles. And then there are the montages. These are all set to electronic music, which forewarns you of yet another montage, so that like Pavlov's dog you start cringing every time you hear it, which is about every three minutes. Oh, I was supposed to say what's good about this film. Well, the film was shot very well, with a nice color palette, that nicely matched the emotional content - such as there was - of the scenes. Okay, now with the film's major flaw, and it wasn't the story, or lack thereof. The director made that fatal mistake of leading you astray about people and situations, not by clever storytelling, but by being highly selective about what to show about the main characters. That's just cheating. I guess he did it in order to make the central character more likable. But it just became plain annoying. If the story is full of holes, it's no good trying to patch it up by misdirecting the viewer. And often there wasn't even any point to it. And then the ending. Basically, the main villain of the peace turns out be an okay guy, if a coward. Plus it turns what seemed to be the whole point of the movie, that you should stand up for a just cause on its head, by the already mentioned misdirection, and makes it into a point about the nature of revolutions, that was already made, and much better, by animal farm. It also committed what I call the Bill Cosby sin: no matter how things may seem at first, in the end adults are always right, and children always wrong. And let's face it: unless you're me, that's just not true.