Change Your Image
Alexey-Bogoslavsky
Reviews
Manderlay (2005)
Big, big disappointment
I was so enchanted by Dogville when I saw it for the first time a couple of days ago, that I could barely control my emotions when I found out there existed a sequel. I went as far as upgrading my DVD in order to make sure nothing stood in the way of the refined delight I was expecting to feel. Yet, the movie turned out to be so incomparably worse than Dogville, or Dancer in the Dark for that matter, that my disappointment was huge.
Still, I believe I wouldn't have rated the movie that low (4) if it hadn't been for the concluding series of images. It somehow made me feel that all those accusing Lars von Trier of some sort of sick and distorted hatred towards the States might not be too wrong.
21 Grams (2003)
Not too bad, but there's something extremely irritating about it
The strange thing about the movie is that I can't decide whether I liked it or not, and that doesn't happen often to me. On the one hand, I enjoyed every moment of Penn's brilliant performance. I liked Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts very much, too. The plot is original but consistent and doesn't seem artificial at all.
But on the other hand, I can't think of words strong enough to describe the irritation I felt because of the wildly distorted chronology in the movie. From the very beginning and all the way through the movie, scenes related to the middle and the end of the film are interspersed randomly between other scenes, developing in what distantly resembles the natural chronological order. The technique is disturbing, disappointing and above all - unjustified. It serves no artistic purpose whatsoever. In my case, at least, this has taken out most of the potential pleasure and damaged the overall experience gravely. And, naturally, I couldn't resist the sneaky suspicion the whole thing was merely designed to add to the movie's uniqueness, a goal that by itself I don't consider legitimate.
Yet, when you've seen all of the movie, it is not too tricky to figure out the intended order of events. Well, at least that.