Believe it or not, I did spend a lot of time in deciding which movie I would use for this bonus review. Looking back on the movies that I have watched in our film class, I thought the movie Under the tree would be an excellent addition to the list of European films that have made me glad from watching it. Now, that isn’t to say the genre of this film was a happy one, in fact, its darkly funny slice of what I guess is Scandinavian humor (not even sure if there is one). The bleakness and the dark comedy twists surprised me when I found out that Icelanders are actually the fourth happiest people n in the world. Upon research, the director was quoted to have been inspired by Iceland’s high rate of “neighbour rage”, again surprised that they are still the 4th happiest. The increasing feud among neighbors are perhaps an inevitable problem for the Viking descendants, but the film encapsulates the ongoing issue in its part-thriller, part-intelligent relationship drama, topped with a juicy dollop of savage black comedy.

What I liked about this film, and actually a lot of the films we watched in class, is the sudden change of direction of the genre. This film took a quick reversal from being a drama movie about a family and their bickering neighbors to a much darker genre on porn, spy cameras, suicide, and a large tree that people are always fighting about. Whats there not to love?

As is the fate of all husbands, Atli gets caught watching porn by his wife. I do think that the fact that the porn video was of himself and another woman did make it far worse than the problem initially seemed to be. I wasn’t entirely surprised to see Atli getting kicked out of his house and moving back in with his parents. Despite having done what he did, Atli is able to convince the audience to feel for him. He seems miserable and pity living with his parents. What made it even sadder was his attempts to patch things up with his wife. Slowly, the film starts to unravel the pandora’s box and all its darkness to the audience when the quarrel between Atli’s parents and their next door neighbors began to take place over the fate of the giant tree.Under The Tree is very perceptive about family relationships – about bad faith between generations and between husbands and wives as well as over the garden fence.

The best part of this film has to be the moments when people ask of the genre a band named “Impaled Rektum” would do. If anyone had asked me prior to watching the film, I would have had no idea. To be completely honest, I don’t think I would have even be remotely interested in the genre of “Symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer grinding christ abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandian metal.” One thing this film has taught me however, is that when given the effort, even death metal could be used funny at times.

As most movies that belongs in the music-genre begins, the film starts off with a misfit riding down town to join a group of other misfits at a basement to seal covers of other metal bands. While the word misfits has become too ironic after Bohemian Rhapsody, and they were no where like Queen in any way except for the long hairstyles, it is really the only word that I can think of for the group of metal heads in a small town in Norway. While I’m not much of a singer myself, it wasn’t very difficult to know that the lead singer had talent, but they’ve only been performing for themselves in the basement and never for a proper crowd. They dream of becoming a band with a song of their own, and after a lot of happenings such as a stuck reindeer in the grinder and a certain promoted being showered with reindeer blood, they are finally able to produce a song and has a shot in making it to the big leagues. However, as it is the case with almost anyone who has to take that leap of faith and hope for the best in their pursuit of happiness, the reality was a lot harder than they had initially thought.

I think the message this film was trying to get across to the audience wasn’t only that heavy metal can be funny and tolerable, it was actually that the journey to happiness is actually a steep and almost an impossible journey. However, through determination and conviction that the job is really what you’re looking for, and if you’re lucky, just miraculously lucky enough to survive a cliff jump from about 15 stories high, then you may just make it. Oh the irony.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie as bloody, graphic, and as the movie suggests – “raw”. The film, which is clearly not meant for the squeamish nor the faint hearted, is a story of a young girl who develops a desire for raw meat and ventures on a journey to find out who she really is. From being grown up in a strict vegetarian family; Mom nearly freaks out after seeing a bit of beef along with the mash potatoes near her family. she quickly discovers her cravings for raw meat after being forced to eat a raw organ during a sorority night, and the selected meals become quickly off-the-menu and very very bloody.

At the start of the film, despite the warnings of the title of the film, I really had no idea where the movie was heading for. I should have taken the hint when the mother freaked out for having meat near the family, but I did not. To be honest, I found the scene where she was forced to eat a raw duck kidney bad enough, so when she ate her older sister’s finger, you could have imagined the horror. I thought the worst part had passed, but when the sisters get into an accident and sees the “course meal” that is laid in front of them, I realized that it was far from over.

Despite feeling half-sick most of the duration of the film, I found the underlying message of the film interesting enough to keep me going. Justine’s realization of the truth behind her diet happened as she started exploring her sexuality as well. I found that the timing of the awakening of her physical desires was a metaphor of how we tend to find out more about ourselves in a new environment such as in Justine’s case, a university. Universities are generally a place where we can do most of the exploring in our early adult lives, and it was clearly something that Justine was doing a plenty of as evident in her solo grind performance in front of the mirror. At home we have to live by certain rules that have been in place since we were little children. This all comes crashing down when we start to exercise our freedom in trying out new ideas.

I also found this film to be very feminist and empowering. While the director chose to use a rather bloody approach, it still is a story about a girl who found out what she wanted, and despite the repercussions she might face from those around her and the society, she still decided to embrace who she was and went for it. To be completely clear, I do not endorse cannibalism. But, I do advocate continuously challenging oppressive social norms, and if that is what the director truly intended the audience to feel, then this is a bloody good film.

Inspired by the vestige of the idealism that fueled the unsatisfied workers in the 40’s, two anti-capitalistic rebels Jan and Peter do what they can do go against those that have succeeded in capitalism. They call themselves the Edukators and break into the homes of the affluent and shift around the furniture. They leave taunting messages on top of their centerpiece that instill fear and regret to the house owners for amassing such wealth for themselves. Putting the morality of their actions aside, what appealed to me was how Jan and Peter had ideologies, something that served as their basis of action and that motivated them to do what they believed in. Would I do such thing if I were in their shoes? – probably not. However their ideology is something worth respecting, for its getting rarer to find ideologically driven individual these days.

As their “Edukating” continues, a dark horse appears to put everything that they had worked for at a risk – the beautiful Jule, Peter’s girlfriend, gets a tad too close to Jan during Peter’s vacation in Barcelona. Drawn by Jule’s attractions, Jan reveals to her the Edukators and eventually gives in to Jule’s request to break into the guy who she is indebted to. One mistake after another, this leads to the kidnapping of a man who turns out to a former member of the radical vintage, who once shared the same ideologies and sentiments as Peter and Jan.

Should they face up to their destinies as radicals and execute him – or are they just too softcore? It’s well acted, especially by Brühl (known for Good Bye Lenin!); the break-in scenes will leave fingernails pretty closely bitten, and the political and generational rancour between jailers and captive is nicely managed too. I couldn’t help feeling, though, that if the Austrian director Michael Haneke had been in charge, he would have done something a lot more extreme with the ending.

If I were to describe the film with one word, I would say that Timecrimes is best characterized as a paradox. Watching the film, I was weirdly reminded of the mind games, such as chess, that I used to play when I was younger. The plot of the film seduced the minds of the audience as we tried to keep up with the twists and turns of the story line. While in other classes it would rather be inappropriate comparison, Timescrimes was very much like a game of chess, only with more nudity and violence.

The start of the film was a sign of the things to come – it began by showing us a Spanish man named Hector, sitting on the lawn of his vacation house, who spots a lady stripping in the woods. While it is hardly for Hector to decide to investigate this mysterious stripping of a pretty lady in the deep part of the woods, while his wife was only a few steps away inside their house, it serves as an important decision for the film. He was about to participate in the reality that he had already lived in through time travel.

I have always found the topic of time travelling fascinating. Because there are no rules that has been set on such topic, I suppose that every story could have its own unique set of rules. However, there is a common fundamental concept that I perceive to be crucial – consequence of ripping through the fabric of space-time continuum. The reason we don’t get more warnings of this danger, is that travelers into the past tend to do things which unalterably change the future, so that their present no longer exists for them to return to. I love this stuff.

Time travelling has been discussed and explored in numerous attempts. Because the matter of whether time travelling is possible or not has yet to be decided, it is not a surprise to see that the rules of time travelling differ from movie to movie. One common understanding that most of the time travelling genres have in common however, is the “butterfly effect” – there has to be dire consequences when a mere mortal rips the fabric of the space-time continuum. The reason we don’t get more warnings of this danger, you understand, is that travelers into the past tend to do things which change the future, so that their present no longer exists for them to return to.

I was impressed how the film was able to use the elements that were unique to the time travelling genre in relaying its thrilling scenario to the audience. It revealed important scenes in the beginning of the plot and allowed the rest of the plot to take the audience in its journey to solve the presented mysteries. The thrilling death of a stranger on the roof of their house, the bravery mustered to save the woman one of them loves, or the love of all three, was wrapped and packaged in an entertaining way that left the audience searching for understanding even after the credits have rolled.

To be a troll or not to be a troll? Well, trolls have traditionally been told in the Scandinavian folklore as mischievous leprechaun-like beings that live and hide in the woods and mountainous caves. In this Blair Witch Project-meets- Men in Black movie, the trolls are depicted less appealingly, not quite as scary as initially promised, and not quite charming as the folklore led us to believe. Therefore my answer to the “dilemma”, based on how trolls were depicted in the film, would sadly have to be a no. I would most likely not want to be haunted and attacked with weapons, live exclusively in the cold, gloomy, and often deserted forests of Norway. Most importantly however, I think my Christian values would contrast with the fundamental being of a troll, which lives to hunt Christians.

My first encounter with the found-footage genre was in the Blair Witch Project, which was also assembled from the found video recordings of a group of students. One reason I perceive the Blair Witch Project to have done so well was because it was able to maintain a high tension of suspense throughout the whole film. They never revealed the face of the demonic being, they kept signs of its existence in the periphery, and it installed the fear in the audience. In the case of the Troll Hunters, whilst the thought of encountering a Christian-blood lusting Troll was scary, the scenes revealing the trolls weren’t that scary, in fact it looked too fake to be scary. Perhaps what instills the biggest fear within us are from the unknown and the unseen – where they are hidden invisible deep within the forest of Norwegian forests, or it was simply the lack of budget for computer graphics that seemed to be far inferior then the first series of Jurassic Park movies.

It was nonetheless an enjoyable film however, and one element I really enjoyed in this film was its usage of the Norwegian landscape into the story – power lines, animal herds, and vast forests turns out to be part of a vast government secret attempt to keep the trolls from being revealed to the public. The misty Norwegian landscape of mountains and fjords reminded me of the documentaries on the mysterious existence of Loch Ness – briefly making me wonder if Loch Ness is being hidden by the Scottish government or not.

The movie had my attention from the very first moment when the man asleep in bed wakes up to approach a wall or the room that resembles a forest. He seemed to have played the “Find Waldo” version of opening the door often, as he knew just where to look to unlock the door using a key growing from his finger. This is when I knew that I was in for a ride.

He gets into the waiting limo, driven by a taciturn woman, and we see that the back of the limousine is significantly larger than it seems on the outside, similarly resembling the tents in Harry Potter. The back of the limousine is filled with costumes and props with even a dressing mirror installed. The first transformation, the first of many to come in the day, takes place as he dresses up as an old lady begging for money in the streets. When he gets out the first time, he has transformed himself into a wretched beggar woman. His performance was nothing short of superb, fooling everyone that walks past him in the street, or perhaps it was because no one ever really cares for the poor. His succeeding performances or embodiment get even more bizarre, with him embodying the spirit of his characters as if it were himself. His “appointments” take him into personas so diverse, it would be futile to try to link them, or find a thread of narrative or symbolism. If there is a message here, Walt Whitman once put it into words: “I am large. I contain multitudes.”

One of the more memorable moments in the film was shortly after when Oscar bit the finger off of the famous fashion designer and kidnapped the model to an underground tunnel. It was there that Oscar ripped her clothes to change her to look like a Muslim woman. The model doesn’t flinch much in the process, as she stays in character of her job as a model – staying posed and not reflecting any emotions. Her job as a model preceded her emotions as a person, a statement that this movie seem to make of how our society has forced us to embrace our jobs as a large part of our self identity. Sometimes it constitutes our entire self.

The film “The Five Obstructions” shows the making and the breaking of works of art, as the producer von Trier challenges eccentric documentary filmmaker Jorgen Leth to remake his 1967 12-minute short “The Perfect Human” five times. With each remake, von Trier imposes seemingly arbitrary sets of conditions on the filmmaker, the “five obstructions” of the title. For one project, Leth is sent to Cuba to make a film with (among other constraints) no sets and no shot longer than 12 frames. For another, von Trier sends him to “the most miserable place on Earth” and orders him not to show it on screen, to put Leth’s “ethics to the test.”

Part documentary and part high-concept art project, “The Five Obstructions” follows the yearlong experiment as von Trier tries to stump Leth. “The trouble is everything I give to you inspires you,” smiles von Trier devilishly as he watches one finished project. “I can’t help it,” apologizes Leth as he transforms constraints into possibilities.

The documentary portion of the film, ostensibly about the creative process, is dominated by the personality of self-satisfied prankster muse von Trier. It all feels like a performance for the camera: von Trier as madman producer taunting the elder filmmaker. Leth is the modest, restrained artist, unfazed by von Trier in their production meetings but given to moments of creative panic on location while he struggles with the rules.

Leth lets his work speak for him, and the glimpses we see are so rich, so inventive and so intriguing that we want to see more. That’s the film’s big weakness: we only see bits and pieces of each film as the filmmakers choose different sequences to contrast each remake to the original. “The Five Obstructions” may never really engage with the creative process — we see little of Leth’s working method — but it is full of vivid examples of the finished product that even von Trier can’t help but fall in love with.

For an unknown reason, Elizabeth the actress, stops speaking in the middle of her theater performance and hasn’t muttered a word ever since. The only time she mutters a word during the entire film is when Alma, her newly assigned nurse, threatens to throw boiling water at her face.

The film Persona is a film that needs to be watched more than a couple of times, not only for its use of colors and sensible imagery, but also in hopes to understand the meanings behind the ever confusing film. The first time I watched it in class, I spent half the time confused and the other half wandering if what I was understanding was correct. I tried a second time through online streaming, and unfortunately did not have much success in grasping the meaning behind the film. However, looking back on it now, instead of trying to derive meaning out of a piece of art I do not understand, it may be best to take the literal road in understanding it. That is – to take it in literally as it is.

Elizabeth stops speaking in the middle of her theater performance, as if she had suddenly realized the vanity in speaking, she seems determined not to ever mutter a word again. Through the recommendation of a psychiatrist, Elizabeth spends the summer at the doctor’s summer house with her nurse Elizabeth. Naturally, spending the summer together, the two women seem to establish a bond and Alma begins to open up about her life to Elizabeth. Elizabeth says nothing, and Alma talks and talks, confessing her plans and her fears, and eventually, in a great and daring monologue, confessing an erotic episode during which she was, for a time, completely happy.

An element I found amusing in this film was the reverse in the roles of the characters. Elizabeth, the supposed patient, seemed stronger than Alma, the nurse that was assigned to take care of her. The scene where Alma lays down a sharp shard of glass on the floor for Elizabeth to step on to is an example of this. Elizabeth cuts her food and gets hurt, but it is in fact Alma that has abandoned her duty as a nurse and a caretaker.

This film also delves with our fear in facing the challenges in our lives and in the world around us. In the earlier segment of the film, the film shows a scene of a Buddhist monk burning himself in the street as protest for the injustice in Vietnam, later, there are photographs from the Warsaw ghetto, of Jews being rounded up; the film lingers on the face of a small boy. Perhaps the tragic horrors of this world is what has made Elizabeth to stop talking. Because no matter how we try to rephrase our opinions, we’re always bound to hurt someone’s feelings. For Alma, these horrors seem to be somewhere closer to home. She is uncertain of the man that she is planning to marry, afraid of being incompetent as a nurse, and her lack of ability to help Elizabeth. .

The movie “A woman Is a Woman” is by far the most bizarre movie that I have watched in recent years. Sudden starts and cuts to background music, the dialogue between the characters, and the plot all contributed to the uniqueness of this movie. As bizarre as the movie was however, it sent across several socio-political messages to the audience which were a pleasant surprise amidst the spectrum of colors, and music.

Angela, the female character who works as an exotic dancer at what seems to be a 60’s strip club, desires to bear a child with her lover Emile. Emile however, is not as keen on the idea of being a father as he feels that he isn’t quite ready to take on the responsibilities. Angela is depicted as a character with great conviction and the capabilities to push through with her decisions, which is something quite outstanding given the sociopolitical atmosphere of the 1960s in France. The growing conflict of interest serves as the basis of the plot; at one point they decide to stop communication with one another and instead point to the titles of the books for their means of communication. This was one of the more interesting parts of the film for a couple of reasons. Firstly it reminded me of Chaplin’s silent comedies where he uses various settings and environments to communicate and get across to the audience. The second reason is a little more political, for it sent the message that Knowledge was Power. In the silent argument between the couple, Angela was able to continue communicating her anger across to Emile through the titles of her collection of novels. It not only deepened her character as a witty and clever woman, but also an empowering figure of the feminist movement in the 1960s in France.

The second element that I really enjoyed identifying in the film was Angela’s inquisitive characteristics. She questioned everything around her from the existence of herself to inequality (“why is it always women that suffer?“). This set the broader theme of the movie for me, while the film was labeled as a comedy, it certainly sent across the message of the need to question the status quo of not just regarding one’s individual identity, but also the social injustices and inequalities that were present in those times.

Mischief was the third element which contributed to the weirdness of this film. Unlike the social norms of the 60s in France, Angela was quite the mischievous individual. Her actions were often comedic and motives were at times hard to understand. This element may be connected to her inquisitive characteristics as she decides to defy the norms of society and push the boundaries of what is accepted as normal. As the conflict between Emile intensifies, Angela resorts to an alternative reason to achieve what she desires – to sleep with Emile’s best friend, Alfred. While infidelity is not necessarily an important component in bringing equality within out societies, it showed that women were also capable of pushing through with their convictions. It was truly an interesting turn of events as it
reminded me that not all people’s priorities were aligned and that some people would simply to whatever is required to get something done.