Lukas Moodysson

Started by children with angels, May 21, 2003, 10:48:28 PM

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rustinglass

I meant "Together" was like the ice storm
"In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don't have experience of the west, they even believe that western shit is pie."
-Emir Kusturica

ono

Oops, my mistake.   :oops:

rustinglass

I just saw Lilja today. It's very well made but I'm depressed as hell.
I really like this director, I think that all the feelings are portrayed nicely in this film.
I thought the soudtrack was a little anoying, except for Rammstein, they kick ass.
"In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don't have experience of the west, they even believe that western shit is pie."
-Emir Kusturica

matt35mm

I FINALLY saw Lilja 4-Ever.  Tough getting ahold of it on DVD.  The only way I've found is to rent it off Netflix.  The DVD itself seems to be produced by Netflix, actually.  It's got the Netflix logo on the menu and on the DVD.  It seems to be otherwise unavailable in the US.

ANYWAY, I loved this movie.  I really want to see Together now, which I've always heard is good, and Fucking Amal (Show Me Love) is now on my list of movies to see.  You can really tell that the director was a poet before becoming a filmmaker; it shows through his style.

Oksana Akinshina is great in this movie.  You rarely get all that emotionally-involved within the first 10 minutes of a movie, but she sucks you in quick (Ono alluded to that on the previous page).  I know she had a bit part in The Borne Supremacy, but other than that, I'd like to see what else she does.

kotte

Quote from: matt35mmOksana Akinshina is great in this movie.  You rarely get all that emotionally-involved within the first 10 minutes of a movie, but she sucks you in quick

Seriously, when runs after her mother...fuck, that hurt me.

Alexandro

Lila4ever or wathever, I found it disturbing the first few minutes but then after that it was boring in it's attempts to be shocking and sad and dramatic. Everything is over the top and exagerated. Everyone is bad except for her.

It's a bunch of cliches thrown together to shock. I actually thought it was funny at some point.

mogwai

too bad it was based on a true story, right?

Alexandro

Quote from: mogwaitoo bad it was based on a true story, right?

That doesn't mean anything or take anything away to the unidimensional portrait of what happens in the story. Is like in Storytelling when the teacher says "once you put it on paper, it's all fiction"....It's not what happens, is the way in which it is shown, filmed, acted and put together. And after a while it became this masturbatury exercise in shock....to me at least....

matt35mm

Quote from: AlexandroAnd after a while it became this masturbatury exercise in shock....to me at least....
I don't think it was meant to be shocking at all.  The sex scenes are not graphic (there's hardly any nudity in the whole thing).  The events aren't shocking, because it's clear what's going to happen.  The whole movie shows basically what leads to these things that DO happen, and doesn't exaggerate or go over-the-top, I think.  You obviously weren't shocked since you said you were bored, and I wasn't shocked by anything in it either (except for that awesome bit of acting when she runs to her mother at the beginning).  I was emotionally involved throughout, but never shocked, nor did I ever feel that the movie was trying to provoke that reaction out of me.

And in response to the everyone's bad but her thing, I'll say that... she was bad, too.  She's not a fantastic person at all.  So I guess you can say that everyone is bad, period.  And if that weren't true to real life, then why would these girls be in this situation?

Alexandro

I didn't meant shocking in a john waters, let's make people feel like they're watching something so terrible is surprising, but in the sense of disgrace after disgrace after disgrace. I know these things do happen but this film is like a catalogue of bad experiences.

And the fact that she wasn't a perfect human being doesn't mean the rest of the characters don't behave like disney villains.

I think the whole treatment of the story is very superficial. It's engaging through making the main character have one bad experience after the next. The social and political problems the film presents are trivialized, and as a meditation on the human condition is pretty weak too. Soap operas can be emotionally engaging too, that doesn't mean they're automatically good.

It's kind of preachy in a way. What do you get form this film? The world is shit?

matt35mm

Quote from: AlexandroWhat do you get form this film? The world is shit?
I get the story of a girl.  That's all I get, and that's all I wanted.  Sometimes movies try to say stuff about the world, but I never really pay attention to that.

Also, I can think of girls who have one bad thing after another happen to them.  It's largely their fault; they bring it on themselves, and Lilja does that to at least some extent, I'd say.  SHE instigated the movement into the seedy side of things.  SHE went to a seedy club where she was obviously in a desperate situation since she was selling sex to old dudes for cash, where she met a seedy guy who naturally took advantage of her obvious desperation, and led her to more seedy things.  And nobody except for the young boy saw her as anything but a nuisance or as a whore, so whatever interactions she had with people would be because they're using her, and you can see that as a two-dimensional motivation on the parts of all the "bad people," but it makes realistic sense to me that that's all they're in her life for.  For girls like this, yes, I can believe that things would play out like a checklist of bad things happening to them.  And again, I wonder how else BUT a succession of terrible things happening to a Russian girl would have her be a sex slave in Sweeden.

But this is one of those agree to disagree situations, because we're pointing at the same things and seeing them differently.  We each had a different experience watching it.  I was entertained, involved and entranced, and that, to me, yes, does make it a good movie.  For me.

cron

Quote from: matt35mmSometimes movies try to say stuff about the world, but I never really pay attention to that.

you're missing some of the good ones, pal.

why the shit are my posts firsts and lasts in the pages lately? is it you, admins? :elitist:
context, context, context.

matt35mm

Quote from: cronopio
Quote from: matt35mmSometimes movies try to say stuff about the world, but I never really pay attention to that.

you're missing some of the good ones, pal.

why the shit are my posts firsts and lasts in the pages lately? is it you, admins? :elitist:
I didn't mean I didn't watch those movies.  I meant that I don't judge the worth of a movie based on what it has to say about the world... it's not what I watch movies for.

Alexandro


w/o horse

Thanks to matt's hot tip I was able to finally see Lilja 4-ever, which I would like to announce as my favorite of his films.  Also I would like to announce that Moodysson has become a director whose favorite film of mine seems to be whichever I watched last.  It's fair to say that the narrative structure of Together has effected everything I've written since the experience of first seeing the movie.  Blah blah backstory about Moodysson being an early impression on me and causing me to delve into the lesser known filmmakers out there.

Spoilers galore.

Anyway, Lilja 4-ever hasn't left my head since I watched it Friday night.  It was a story about one girl's lost childhood, but I also connected to it as a story of my lost childhood, my lost innocence, and a statement on the purity of happiness.  The tiny moments again and again of Lilja and Volodya finding bliss in simple things like each other's company, eating bread, a basketball, talking, sniffing glue, etc.  Lilja and Andrei before you knew what was coming. . .or, more exactly, back when you were comfortable blocking out what you knew was coming.  I really connected to the film in these ways, and in that sense it wasn't an entirely depressing movie for me, because it has affected my perception of my daily activities since then.  Does that sound stupid?  I don't feel that it should.  I watched it with my roommate and a friend, and afterwards we drove down to Laguna Beach and climbed up on a rock structure to had a nice long conversation, even though before the movie we had all talked about how the next day we were to wake up early.  That is clearly a positive reaction to the film.

The room was silent as the credits rolled as well, which is unusual.  It took me back.  It felt honest and poetic at the same time.  Although I knew it wouldn't end well, I kept hoping it would, I became very emotionally involved, and by the time she killed herself I was relieved, I was happy for her release.  For a movie to take me to the point in which I feel that the main character's suicide was justified is tremendous.  I felt her hopelessness.  I felt the pain of her mistakes, the agony of not being able to go backwards.  Under different circumstances, traveling down different paths, things might have ended up much better for Lilja.  That constant fear of making the wrong decision, coupled with the grueling reality of fate, was very real in the film.  When she was playing basketball with Volodya I felt she had won.  Which is provocative, which is daring, to say that indeed some people are perhaps better off dead.  That the quality of human life can be so terrible as to negate the sanctification of being alive.  It is very much what the American dream would try and tell you is impossible.  And, yet, there it was.  Playing out right in front of me.  Does this paragraph contradict the previous paragraph?  It seems to thematically, but it somehow co-existed inside of me during and after the film.

A+.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.