the house that jack built

Started by Robyn, November 02, 2016, 01:26:53 PM

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Robyn

I can't wait to dramatically walk out my living room while watching this. like, I just watched maps to the stars, and could barely stomach the violence in that film.

Alethia

#16
Could not be more hyped for this. The ridiculous outrage that seems to accompany every von Trier release only intensifies my excitement!


Alethia

Okay, the apparent structural and tonal similarities to Nymphomaniac (especially Vol. 2) now have me checking my excitement a bit. Pretty lukewarm on those films.


Alethia


Just Withnail

I had a hard time with this, not really because of any of the supposedly shocking things (that are really only shocking in the context of an arthouse film), but mostly I was just bored. 80% of the film was pretty blandly constructed thriller scenes amounting to little more than "how will he do it this time?". It's at it's best when it's funny (and it's occasionally hilarious) and baroque, but mostly it consists of pretty worn out serial killer tropes. The contextualizing of these do add something, but not enough, I feel.

The film is basically a big confession from von Trier, "this is who I am and there's worth in portraying it". But it adds little new that he hasn't already shown in the other films, except pushing his imagery to new bombastic/pompous/ridiculous/funny heights towards the end, and a feeling that wanting to shock is really a compulsion for him. This both worked for the film (when the compulsion is so blatant it's just funny) and against it (when it wasn't bombastic enough to be interesting and ended up being merely trope'y).

At it's best it's von Trier at his best, at it's worst it's just boring.

Alethia

Kinda how I feel about Nymphomaniac. And the trailer makes the whole thing seem stylistically very much in that vein. It's kind of a shame - pre-Nymphomaniac, von Trier was really on a roll. He'd likely blame sobriety.

Alethia

What a buncha pearl-clutching pussies that stormed out of this at Cannes! This was not that bad, I feel like you see worse in your average Walking Dead episode. I really enjoyed this film, and so did the audience I saw it with. It's a very funny movie - self-depracating and reflexive, with a grandiose horror finale that stands as one of von Trier's great set pieces. Seriously, fuck anyone that rails against von Trier because he "hates women." You're clearly not watching closely enough if you come away from any of his films convinced he's anything but a humanist.

So yeah, I loved it.

wilder

Comedy masterpiece. Everything up until Virgil had me rolling, Riley Keough's bit exempted. Uma Thurman as a salmon that just won't stop rubbing herself with honey before a grizzly bear (to steal from Patrice) was an absurd stroke of genius: forget the tropey play on thriller/horror expectations, let's have Matt Dillon perform a clown inside our collective comic tragedy, making sherioush statements whilst wearing a red nose he can't see. Personally thought it was the funniest movie I've watched in years.

Alethia

Film Review: Lars von Trier Delivers His Divine Comedy With The House That Jack Built

Matt Dillon is stunning in this Dantesque meditation on art, life, and carnal desires

By Michael Roffman

SPOILERS WITHIN:

The Pitch: Tearing a page or two from Dante's Inferno — okay, a deliberate handful — Lars von Trier offers up an unnerving parable about an obsessive-compulsive architect-turned-serial killer named Jack (Matt Dillon), who torturously stalks the state of Washington during the '70s and '80s. Over the course of 12 years and through five harrowing incidents, we watch Jack spiral deeper into madness as he meticulously talks through his reasoning and carnal desires with an off-screen accomplice named Virge.

"See? It's OK. He Saw It On the Television": Originally, von Trier intended for The House That Jack Built to be a television series, and you can see the roots of that idea in this sprawling, 155-minute feature. (Mind you, this writer is reviewing the director's cut that was originally screened at Cannes and released for a single night on November 28th.) It's episodic by design as we pivot from one major incident in Jack's life to another, which affords new locales for each chapter — from hunting grounds to neighborhoods to skid row — that construct an expansive yet self-contained world.

In many ways, it's a spiritual descendent of his last film, 2013's two-part feature Nymphomaniac, which similarly focused on a character spiraling out of control in an episodic manner. Whereas that film absolutely needed to be broken down into two parts, The House That Jack Built feels completely at whole with itself, and von Trier never cracks the foundation that keeps the story together, no pun intended. Even when he shifts into tangential meditations on chaos and creation, it never feels as if he's veering off course. Like Jack, there's an obsessive finesse to the madness.

Cannes Stop the Feeling: The House That Jack Built marked von Trier's epic return to the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, and the film certainly anticipates that comeback. If you recall, the festival declared von Trier a "persona non grata" in 2011 after he made some controversial remarks about his German heritage and the Nazi party while promoting Melancholia. True to his rebellious heart, von Trier punches even harder on that subject, chewing loudly on the artistic merits of fascist iconography and their wartime efforts, while also calling his own works into question.

Yes, there's an entire meta-digression that involves his entire oeuvre — Dogville, Antichrist, Melancholia, it's all there — as Jack and Virge continue to break down the divisive nature of art. Depending on where you stand, it can be seen as either repentance for his own work, or a major fuck you to his critics, the latter of which wouldn't be too surprising given the Dantesque parallels and allusions. After all, Dante Alighieri was hardly above the idea of throwing his enemies into his own picturesque hell, and one could argue that's exactly what von Trier does with The House That Jack Built.

So, it's not surprising he was both derided and applauded this year.

The House of Dillon: After toiling away in bad comedies and forgettable dramas, Dillon has finally returned, delivering a performance that topples over his string of greatest hits, from The Outsiders to Drugstore Cowboy to Singles to The Saint of Fort Washington. This is tough work, too, as Dillon shoulders von Trier's entire vision by being tasked to narrate and lead each scene through a range of personalities.

Dillon never falters, not once, indulging in his own eclectic palette by thumbing through his rich back catalogue. From reclusive creeps to would-be drill sergeants, dickhead boyfriends to ticking time bombs, Dillon nails every turn, exuding an energy that's at once both addictive and revolting. It's easy to hate a killer, but it's harder to love one, and while he doesn't warrant Valentines, Dillon's Jack demands your heart. And that's exactly what von Trier needs from you.

The Jack That We Built: It's a strange world we live in, where murderers, rapists, and predators are a source of entertainment. Blame it on Thomas Harris, blame it on a 24-hour news cycle, or simply blame it on the human condition, but murder-death-kill is something that tickles everyone's fancy. Yes, even those who cluck their tongues at the subject and say, "It's not for me" We're human; life and death are a universal virtues that fascinate us from our first breath in this world to our very last dying gasp. And really, nobody knows this better than von Trier.

Prior to production, von Trier spent years researching the psychology of serial killers, and his work is all over The House That Jack Built. While some may dismiss the back and forths between Jack and Virge as pedantic and too scholastic, they would be writing off some of the most compelling rhetoric on the topic to ever hit the screen. The dialogue that von Trier wields between the incidents is not only deeply fascinating, but downright stunning in its comprehension of the source material, particularly the psychology of killers in the context of obsession and ego.

It helps that von Trier knows his audience too well, as evidenced by his framing device of the five incidents. It's essentially a "one for you, one for me" compromise that has the film oscillating between Jack's violent exploits and von Trier's visual essays, the latter of which eventually take on a sinister tone that might make Herzog blush. On paper this might sound quite exhausting, but onscreen, von Trier glides through each medium with an enticing scrapbook of historical artifacts and a dizzying array of animation that all flows with sophistication and grace.

Of course, this all feeds into the unnerving notion that what we're seeing is what we want to be seeing. So much of the film centers around the divide between lions and sheep in the context of predators and victims, but in the end, we're the sheep to von Trier's salivating lion. Again, we're a society preternaturally intrigued by the macabre, whether we want to admit it or not, and von Trier capitalizes on those feeling by subverting our relationships to them, flicking on the lights to the dark rooms inside our minds that we traditionally keep locked and bordered up.

It's in that sense that the film is deeply disturbing.

The Verdict: The House That Jack Built is an audacious and divisive film, sure, but only because of the context surrounding the film. The gore! The violence! The subject material! Oh my! At its core, though, von Trier has actually assembled his most accessible work to date. It's a digestible watch at 155 minutes that doesn't fuss around with what it wants to say, getting from point A to point Hell without having to make any sacrifices on the creative front. No, this is peak von Trier — von Trier at his most von Trieriest, if you will — and yet it's downright enjoyable.

If anything, that's perhaps the most disturbing takeaway from the entire experience. With all due respect to von Trier, he isn't exactly a comedic mastermind, and yet somehow The House That Jack Built is one of the funniest films of 2018. No kidding! From the film's stark, humble beginnings to its fiery, hellish end, von Trier always has his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, as if he's standing in the corner giggling from behind a marked-up copy of either The Canterbury Tales or Dante's Inferno.

It's darkly comical stuff that gets in your bones, which, of course, is the point. It's all part of von Trier's rich subversion, stemming from the conceit that this is entertainment, that these awful atrocities are as equally eternal as anything we may put in museums or celebrate in history books. How you respectively stomach those thoughts and feelings is where the terror truly begins, and where the power of The House That Jack Built ultimately takes over. Because in the end, we're all spiraling out of control.

Such is life.

Alethia


Ravi

https://www.slashfilm.com/house-that-jack-built-directors-cut-release/?fbclid=IwAR08OEx8PL2HwKop4mDKepmT2mAy1v-eZ4muKNppWP0dXVeqBBOO81z1iWQ

'House That Jack Built' Director's Cut Release Pushed to 2019 Because IFC Dared to Defy the MPAA
Posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2018 by Chris Evangelista

Oh, IFC Films. Now you've gone and done it. After failing to get the appropriate waiver to screen the unrated The House That Jack Built director's cut last week, IFC Films is now pushing the official release date back a few months. The House That Jack Built director's cut release was originally set for next week, but this MPAA kerfuffle has bumped Lars von Trier's controversial serial killer flick into June of 2019.

A quick recap: last week, IFC Films made headlines by screening the unrated director's cut of Lars von Trier's The House That Jack Built in select theaters for one night only. IFC then planned to release the director's cut, along with an R-rated cut, On-Demand next week, December 14. The R-rated cut would also play in select theaters. Here's the problem: the MPAA doesn't take kindly to screening an unrated cut of a movie so close to an R-rated cut. IFC could have done this smoothly had they acquired an appropriate waiver from the MPAA. But they didn't. And the MPAA wasn't happy.

The MPAA threatened sanctions against IFC if they went ahead with their planned release, leading to IFC to change course. Now, The House That Jack Built director's cut won't arrive until June 2019. That date is tentative, so it might change. But if you managed to catch the director's cut in theaters last week, you're among a privileged few to witness it long before most people will have the chance.

The R-rated cut release will continue as planned, arriving in select theaters and On-Demand December 14, 2018. For what it's worth, I've heard from credible sources that the unrated cut and R-rated cut are almost identical. Indeed, the different in runtime between the two is only about four minutes. Sure, a lot could happen in four minutes, but nothing too detrimental. In other words, the version you'll be able to watch next week won't be much different than the version that arrives in June of 2019.

In The House That Jack Built, director Lars von Trier follows Jack (Matt Dillon), a "failed architect and vicious sociopath" through five acts as he "recounts his elaborately orchestrated murders — each, as he views them, a towering work of art that defines his life's work as a serial killer in the Pacific Northwest." Also starring Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Sofie Gråbøl, Riley Keough, and Jeremy Davies, the film premiered at Cannes, where it was met with a negative reaction (although since then, many have praised the film).

Alethia

Fuck the MPAA. Seeing the R-Rated cut Thursday night, will let y'all know what the differences are.

Alethia

Saw the R-Rated version (it played very well with the IFC audience) and the changes were predictably cosmetic:

SPOILERS

After Uma Thurman's murder, they cut to a CU of her severely battered face - the R-Rated version shows a portion of her face still intact, whereas in the unrated cut it's pretty much smashed all the way through.

In the scene where he shoots the kids and their mother, in the unrated cut you see the children's injuries (a leg blown off, a bullet-pierced forehead) inflicted in detail, whereas in the r-rated version they cut away right at the moment of impact.

The Riley Keough scene, in the unrated cut we see the first slash of the now notorious mastectomy, whereas in the r-rated version they just cut to a CU of Riley Keough screaming in agony (more effective, I thought).



END SPOILERS

If there were any other differences, I either didn't notice or have forgotten. Was great to see it a second time, and Matt Dillon made an appearance beforehand, spouting the same answers to the same general questions he's been asked in all the other publicity bits that are out there.

Eager to see how you guys respond now that it's out.