Ahh, 2009. Like 08, and 07 before it, you were an odd year; filled with wonder, oddity, crude behaviour and surprises. Anyway, as I really can’t be bothered summarising the decade, let’s do some meaningless awards for the year!

Drum roll.

Failure of the Year: Farmville on Facebook

No, I don’t want to help you plough your imaginary fields, no I do not wish to become your neighbour and for God’s sake, start sending away some of these bloody lost animals that keep turing up ! Haven’t you ever heard of fencing??

Yes, so Farmville wins Failure of the Year. For those of you not in the know, it’s a simulation game that has you tending to your own virtual fields, doing a lot of boring stuff repeatedly and every Tom, Dick and Harry felt like they had to invite you to do it with them, too. Regardless of the amount of stupid requests it has brought on normal, sensible Facebook users, it has the audacity to convince people that they’re ‘gaming’, which is just a plain insult to actual ‘gamers’. Plus it’s the biggest waste of time I’ve ever seen, and is thus a worthy winner.

Upset of the Year: RATM Winning Christmas No.1

The excellent Facebook grass roots campaign to get Killing In The Name to the top of the UK charts started off as something of a novelty, then an exercise in audacity before turning into a serious contender for the xmas no.1 spot and then ended as an eventual winner. But just for a minute, forget the band and forget the song, because the real triumph is the fact that one couple managed to get over half a million people to unite over a mutual hatred of X-Factor, and to a larger extent, the whole culture of insipid reality television. Simply awesome.

Shock of the Year: Charlotte Gainsbourg + Scissors = WTF

Lars Von Trier walked away with this one thanks to his film Antichrist for showing us just what can be done when you combine scissors and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s nether regions. And they say he’s misogynistic(!)

Villain of the Year: Simon Cowell

An obvious choice, for sure. But even in 2009, Cowell has managed to excel beyond his usual levels of villainy and general tosserness. First, when he heard of the RATM campaign, he dismissed it as juvenile and branded it as a personal attack against him, yet was perfectly happy to offer a congratulatory phone call to the couple who came up with the campaign one Killing In The Name won. What Cowell doesn’t realise is that he’s actually the most entertaining part of his own media empire, and it’s the crap that he releases that people have a problem with.

Douche of the Year: TheWoman Who Knocked Over The Pope

It was a close run thing between her and the student caught urinating on the WW2  Memorial, but when you clamber over the barricades during one of the most important religious evenings on the calendar and knock an 82-year old man over, you, Madam have risen to another level of Douchedom unfathomable to most people. Well played!

Fox of the Year: Zooey Deschanel

Ok, so she might be an absolute cow in 500 Days Of Summer, but aren’t all women worthy of lusting after somewhat devilish? In reality, Zooey has the perfect combination of feeling like that amazing, fun girl next door and looking completely stunning in pretty much anything she wears. The thinking man’s woman of 2009.

That’s all I can think of for now, why not check back for the best music, films and games of the year? You know you want to.

“I am the best film director in the world,” Lars Von Trier told reporters at the Cannes Film Festival, “all the others are overrated” (Hernandez).  The Danish director, long infamous in international cinema for his bravado and courtship of controversy, provided these remarks in defense against the critical firestorm launched over the premier of his latest film, Antichrist (2009).  Despite its title, the film has drawn unique ire not for blasphemous content (at least in a Christian sense), but for several instances of shocking violence and perceived undertones of misogyny.  The Cannes jury awarded Von Trier a special prize for his work, an “Anti-award” for misogyny, and against such charges the director says simply “I can’t justify myself,” neither confirming nor denying the claims while clarifying his intention to do no such thing (Hernandez).  Many artists have claimed that explaining the meaning of their work detracts from the art, but Von Trier’s film is one of few works to stir an audience so much as to demand in rage an explanation.  Does the violent response to Antichrist indicate a meanness or evilness inherent in the film, or is it simply indicative of the work’s rare cinematic power? While Antichrist contains elements that can be construed as misogynistic, the film does not condone such beliefs and should be respected as an individual’s artistic expression.

Antichrist tells the story of a married couple suffering in the wake of their young son’s death.  While this scenario may resemble the basic outline of many of cinema’s most boring and depressing adult dramas, Von Trier establishes his unique intentions by opening the film with an explicit black and white love scene between the two parents (Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) as their child wanders slowly towards and open window.  The director juxtaposes shots of sexual ecstasy with the child’s slow motion descent through the air to the snow covered ground below.  The first critical accusations of misogyny against the film come in response to this opening sequence, with claims that, “the creepy implication is that somehow she and her child are being punished for her taking pleasure in sex” (Tookey).  This response to the sequence seems not only entirely subjective and personal, but also selective in its use of the text to support the specific reading.  Yes, Von Trier does show the child’s mother enraptured in pleasure as her son dies, but he also shows the father in shots depicting a similar state during the sequence.  “This is the first hint of misogyny,” the critic Tookey writes, but the scene is only misogynistic when analyzed through his selective memory.  Perhaps Tookey is right that the mother (known as She) is receiving punishment for her pleasure, but this can only be read as misogynistic when one ignores the equal punishment inflicted on the father (He), who took part in the same sexual act and who has an equally dead son.  Tookey’s reading itself seems more misogynistic than the sequence it critiques, singling out the female’s enjoyment of sex as somehow more wrong or notable than her husband’s in the exact same scene.  It seems here that Von Trier attempts not to associate female sexuality with evil, but the act of sex in general with images of death, a thematic linking that the film returns to repeatedly.

Following this opening chapter, She, an academic, enters a debilitating depression that He, a therapist by trade, seeks to draw her out of through the technique of recognition and exposure to her deepest fears.  Her greatest fear turns out to be Eden, the provocatively named cabin in the woods where she had previously retreated with her son in attempt to complete her thesis work.  The subject of her research comes to light when She and He return to Eden in attempt to confront her fear of the place, and that very subject becomes the next lightning rod for critical cries of misogyny.  She’s research delves into the history of witchcraft and the accompanying “gynocide” of countless innocent women during the middle-ages up to modernity.  While the expected conclusion of such research (and that which that audience likely draws) is the overwhelming proof of centuries of violent male oppression towards women, She concludes that perhaps all women are agents of Evil, deserving the violent fates they have historically met.  Another critic, Dana Stevens, selectively misreads this subplot, suggesting that “He and She convince themselves and each other that women are at fault for all this,” implying that (were this what actually happens in the film), the characters’ general acceptance of this thesis indicates a validated and shared belief by the director. Firstly, the plot as Stevens describes it does not even happen in the film, as He in fact tries to convince his wife that the self loathing feelings of which she has convinced herself stem from her overwhelming grief and depression, not from any truth to the theories.  Secondly, even if the characters in the film really do come to believe in the idea that all women are inherently evil (which they don’t), this does not make the film or its director misogynistic.

“A line of dialogue is not a manifesto,” writes Jessica Winter in the film’s defense, pointing out an all too common problem in the reading of Antichrist and its creator.  A film about racism is not (necessarily) a racist film, and neither is a film dealing directly and uniquely with misogynistic notions necessarily misogynistic.  And finally, even if one somehow reads this passage of Antichrist as a whole-hearted endorsement of truth in natural feminine evil, one would be foolish and naïve to pin this belief on the director’s lapel.  Von Trier himself says, “one of my techniques is to defend an idea or view that is not mine,” a claim exemplified by his interest in making a film about “the human side of Hitler” (O’Hagan).  As this statement came during Von Trier’s press promotion for Antichrist, one could interpret it as a backtracking from his vow not to defend the merits of the film against its critics.  However, coming from the man who proclaimed himself the world’s best director in the Holy Land of international cinema (Cannes), the filmmaker’s statement rings louder as truth than an attempt to save face.  Even if the discourse on screen is 100 percent thoroughbred misogyny (which it is not), that cannot responsibly be used to conclusively condemn the film or its director.

While the above examples from the film have drawn high levels of criticism, the greatest controversy surrounding Antichrist circles around a graphic and now notorious scene of sexual mutilation in which the enraged She smashes He’s penis and testicles before clipping off her own clitoris with a pair of scissors.  Charges of excess, tastelessness, and sadism towards the audience are impossible to refute, as those lay squarely in the domain of personal preference.  The sequence is undeniably extreme, likely to ignite a firestorm of controversy regardless of which film is was attached to.  As a part of Antichrist, however, it inspires increasingly redundant cries of misogyny.

Certainly, female “circumcision” through removal of the clitoris has long been decried in the global community as an act of chauvinistic barbarism with little purpose but cruelty and sexual oppression of women at the hands of a ruling class of males.  Critics must realize, though, that no matter how real the act appears through special effects, Von Trier did not actually ask Charlotte Gainsbourg (courageous as her performance is) to mutilate her own genitals.  Once again, the presence of the image is not a ringing endorsement from Von Trier for the procedure as an effective treatment for the inherent evil of women, but instead an intentional catalyst for the contemplation and discussion of a challenging issue.  Additionally, the critics either forget the fact that He endures a similar act of debilitating violence or choose to focus on the role of a woman as the perpetrator.  To suggest that the acts shown in the film criticize women suggests that these are the unspeakable actions of an average everyday woman.  She is a mentally unstable and grief stricken individual, goaded on by her husband’s invasive “therapy” and forced through traumatic experiences to associate sex with death.  Von Trier does not suggest that she acts violently because of her sex (despite the complicating element of her thesis research), but instead because of her grief and emotional abuse at the hands of her self-interested husband.

If the labeling of the film’s elements as misogynistic can be so simply discredited or the elements themselves explained as intentionally provocative ambiguity, it might seem strange that the cries have come so loudly and maintained ever since the film first screened in May 2009.  Perhaps, more so than declaring Antichrist a misogynist work, the critics seek to certify the film’s director as a consummate woman hater.  One would think, given the director’s pedigree for serious and quality filmmaking (he took home Cannes’ top prize for 2000’s Dancer in the Dark), that the usually progressive international film critics would seek to give such a prominent figure the benefit of the doubt.  However, when Antichrist stands next to its maker’s other works, it seems to continue a pattern in the director’s treatment of women.  In Dancer in the Dark, a benevolent blind woman is framed for robbery, forced into murder, and ultimately executed by hanging.  Like Antichrist, the film on its own seems to illicit sympathy for the female lead and her apparent martyrdom.  However, its predecessor, Breaking the Waves (1996), features another sympathetic female lead forced into prostitution before being gang raped to death.  The emerging pattern seems obvious.

Von Trier admits that he repeats the same film over and again, a “melodrama in which a passive, vulnerable, often mentally unstable woman is gradually driven crazy, and sometimes killed, by the gaslighting of a sadistic man,” an apt summary of Antichrist (Stevens).   For critical viewers, then, the question must be, “which one of these characters is Von Trier himself?”  Bjork, star of Dancer in the Dark, had an infamous on-set bust up with her director and later denigrated him as an “emotional pornographer” (Winter).  Von Trier’s Dogville (2003) star Nicole Kidman allegedly shared similar sentiments with Bjork, asking the director, “Why are you so evil to women?” and refusing to reprise her roll in the sequel (ibid).  These women, both of whom worked closely with the director over a period of months, seem to have felt on set like the characters they were playing, goaded to extremes by this “sadistic man” behind the camera. In the unlikely case that either Bjork or Kidman watched Antichrist, one might easily guess which camp they would come down in.  Von Trier’s reputation for misogyny, as supported by these two actresses, seems to have precipitated the response to Antichrist, whose critics see the director himself on screen behind the guise of the callous He.

However, Von Trier’s latest leading lady, Charlotte Gainsbourg, paints a very different portrait of the filmmaker.  “I find it unjust when people say he hates women,” she says in an interview, “I really have the impression that I was playing him, that he was the woman, that he was going through that misery” (O’Hagan).  Indeed, Von Trier’s depression when creating the film has been well documented, himself calling the process “a kind of therapy… filmed without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half my physical and intellectual capacity” (Hernandez).  In those words, the filmmaking experience sounds very much like She’s journey’s to Eden, unable to finish her thesis and diminished to self-loathing under the crushing pressure of her grief.  Perhaps, then, She’s violent outbursts act not as a criticism of the woman or women in general, but as a kind of visceral release for the director on film.  Like Von Trier’s previous heroines, She’s journey concludes in death at the hands of man, but unlike the others she gives the man a dose of his own debilitating medicine on the way.  Why then, if She represents Von Trier, does he write the roll as a woman rather than a man?  “My main characters are built on my own person,” Von Trier says, “I think women are better, more understanding” (Winter).  Despite these words coming from a known woman-hater, they somehow imply a profound respect and identification with femininity and the female gender.  If he does hate women then maybe, like She, it results from his own self-loathing.

All too frequently, the critical community breaks controversy down into oversimplifying binaries.  A piece of art must, more often than not, fit into one category or another.  Good or bad, right or wrong, true or false, the systemized grouping essential to the critic’s job frequently hinders any thoughtful discussion of a work.  In the case of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, the film must be misogynist or not, bad or good respectively, and pornographic or artistic as respective to the judged quality.  The truth, as it usually prefers, lies in none of these simplified labels.  Perhaps Antichrist contains elements critical of or hateful towards women, but in likelihood Von Trier seeks rather to exorcise his own demons and prod the minds of his viewers than to provide audiences with a didactic treatise on his own views of gender politics.  An assessment of the man’s oeuvre certainly indicates some possible issues with women, but maybe they result more from personal issues of self-identification and corresponding depression than any true prejudice.  “I am an American woman,” the male Danish director once said (Winter).  Clearly we deal here with a complicated man who produces complicated art, deserving of discussion not over what ill fitting critical umbrella it can be stuffed under, hateful or not, but over what unique box its creator has made for it himself and where exactly its bizarre boundaries could have come from.

This post isn’t intended to be a definitive list of the most important music videos this year. It’s simply five videos that I posted in 2009 that I like more than the rest.

From the creative claymation of Grizzly Bear’s Ready, Able to the quirky Heaven Can Wait by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck, these videos are my favorites.

I love the farce of Jay Reatard’s It Ain’t Gonna Save Me and the simplicity of the Vivian Girls’ Moped Girls. Finally, the best mash-up of the year was Phoenix’s Lisztomania with the images of Brat Pack movies from the ’80s. See all five videos after the jump.

Ready, Able – Grizzly Bear

Heaven Can Wait – Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck

It Ain’t Gonna Save Me – Jay Reatard

Tell The World – Vivian Girls

Lisztomania – Phoenix

I’ve fallen for the video release of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Heaven Can Wait. You can listen to excerpts of all the songs from her upcoming album IRM on her official site.

I like what I hear and wanted to share some Monday morning listening with you.

**UPDATE** The Heaven Can Wait video is a free download on iTunes right now. Not sure how long those downloads last…

Charlotte Gainsbourg – “IRM”

Typically I loathe the actor turned singer/songwriter schtick. But Charlotte Gainsbourg is the exception. The arbiter of everything cool and indie, the woman can do no wrong.  At least in my eyes, but I admittedly have a crush. So let me break it down for you and see if you agree.

She’s the daughter of British actress, singer and style icon Jane Birkin and French actor/singer Serge Gainsbourg. (That pedigree alone is enough cool quotient to last a lifetime.) Is a critically acclaimed, award winning actress in her own right with an impressive roster of cool indie films under her belt – like La Bûche, Jane Eyre, Lemming. This year she won Cannes Film Festival Best Actress for her role in Antichrist. Musically, she’s turned out two albums and has worked with the likes of her father Serge, Madonna and French pop star Etienne Daho. And her upcoming album, IRM, was produced by non other than Beck himself.

Due out January 26, the minimalist album title, IRM, (French for MRI) was inspired by Gainsbourg’s frequent MRI’s she endured after suffering a brain hemorrhage from a water-skiing accident in 2007. ”I had to do so many [MRIs] and every time I was in that tube I was thinking it would make great music,” she’s quoted as saying. And great music it did make. Her lyrics on the album’s single, “IRM”, offer a detailed, psychedelic journey into her experience and sets the tone for the album. Which, you can hear, is amazing.

Only Charlotte can make an MRI cool and straddle the realms of indie film and music with credibility and aplomb.  She’s effing rad. If I could be half as cool as her I’d be so happy.

“Heaven Can Wait” is the first single from IRM, the third studio album from French singer/actress Charlotte Gainsbourg.  All of the songs on the CD, which was released December 9th, were written and produced by Beck, and he duets with Charlotte on this song.

You can definitely hear Beck’s influence on “Heaven Can Wait.” It sounds like it could have easily been included on any of his past few CD’s. This is currently the free music video of the week on iTunes, if you act before Monday, December 21st, so go grab it for your computer or portable device if you enjoy the song as much as we do.

My tendency of spending my time trying to find things to waste my time and have a zero result is a guilty pleasure. It’s that eagerness and probably jealousy towards plants that I would like to share the same hobbies with them.

There are a whole bunch of people who will satisfy that particular need of mine. One of them is Saam Farahmand. If he doesn’t ring you a bell, well, he is a known music video director who has collaborated with Simian Mobile Disco and Hercules and Love Affair, to name a few.

Now here is this project of his. You need sound and no brain cells to watch. Everytime you refresh the page there is a different video.

Click and 15 minutes of your life (at least) will be gone forever. Hurrayyy

Now the three things I’ve learned because I didn’t have more time:

1. When you are interviewing experimental bands such as Mars Volta, you don’t need to sound as an experimental journalist. Nobody understands you and nobody likes you either. And that’s not cool. Go drink some latte and forget the rock and roll liquor.
2. Sesame street helped the Streets singer, Mike Skinner, pass the 3rd grade. And he is showing his appreciation in every single song of his. Or he just might not have got through the rest of elementary school.
3. Serge Gainsbourg is the devil and Jane Birkin is Jesus. That’s why Lars Von Trier made their daughter, Charlotte, suffer.

Antichrist
Directed and written by Lars Von Trier
Starring Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg
2009, Zentropa, 104 minutes

***

Lars Von Trier puts on his Haneke-helmet, and winks at Ingmar Bergman’s Vargtimmen and Persona in the rear-view mirror, giving his own charming little nightmare production a critical spin on modern western psychology as religion (plus how people, mostly males, continually fuck up the earth in trying to understand it when there’s nothing to understand).

I have to admire that the movie was able to take something graphically sexual, and remove it from being sexually intoxicating or in any way erotic or enticing. Furthermore it did so via building up the sexual tension and increasing the power of sexuality on the main characters. The theater I went to was an indie, liberal theater in a city known for its liberal social scenes, and yet even this place came with a warning that tickets were not going to be refunded because viewers were offended by the pornographic imagery therein.

The sexual intimacy in the beginning is portrayed as a poetic, romantic act — a beautiful affair of the sensual world, the animal kingdom’s complimentary embrace to the tranquil snowy paradise taking place outside. But the couple’s sexual encounters become progressively more animated, vivid, tangible, strange and finally disgusting. However, the passion itself is expansive, as emotional heights and tension improve the dynamic of the sexual act, and make it more powerful, until it is likened to an occult force of exaggerated natural drives.

The path of love is fraught with negative emotions and the error of mainstream, puritanical religious thinking is to assume that sex is bad because it suggests sex — which is exciting and dangerous, when the error is actually that sex is questionable because people see it as something beautiful to begin with. Nature’s laws are raw and callous and sexual desire is the beast of burden.

Although Eve was created out of Adam’s limb in the western biblical creation story, is that an idealized male narrative, absolved of responsibility? The Antichrist figure — the intentional weaver of illusion who brings stark malicious truths, exposes that man specifically creates woman as a vessel for his desire. Woman is the Victorian “angel in the house”, a symbol for male romantic illusions of linear purpose, which are nothing but a self-made path through existence. But as a charming CGI fox sez* 2 Dafoe, da antichrist in question: Chaos reigns! Linear desire is somehow illogical! And true dat, fox, for what could be more bullshit than the belief that some kind of male-imposed illusory narrative can overwhelm the eye of the tempest? Existence is a black hole, brah!

And this is all a good time to be had in the theater! In the modern urban garden of eden where man and woman are being reborn into new social roles (being pulled together, inverted, combined) what is sacred and inspires awe? Lush, gorgeous aesthetics and depictions of idealized domestic retreat (think resort advertisements and New Agers — the whole movie is set in a deceivingly romantic getaway, which as is the traditional horror motif, quickly becomes dangerously isolated for all its rustic splendor), sexual intercourse and offspring, and Freudian-Jungian psychology. Freudian psychology is properly expressed to be dead, quite literally, in the film, and the rest plays out to the Jungian stereotypes, a la the visions of divine messengers and the breathing visualization/hypnosis exercises Dafoe keeps tossing out to his beloved (Jung is still pretty hip, or so I’ve heard from my crazy friends who have psychiatrists that double as meditation teachers). I should also add that the couple from the movie kept me thinking of how relevant the whole deal was to the yuppie/yoga types I see everywhere near the theater in my city, who are getting ready to raise a family with a partner.

Ah, raising a family! In some ways, isn’t it a malicious act — an abuse of power — to have a child? To have a little being to mold to your whim (to say nothing of the impending environmental calamity or social decay taking place in the world). And that’s the symbolism I saw in that opening scene before it was put in context to the rest of the film: the self-absorbed pleasures of parents who create offspring to fulfill a personal need that is bequeathed to their child, as it climbs through pain, grief and despair to fling open the doors to the world, which is revealed to be a beautiful but cold, callous place, where you’ll likely fall before you fly. Death comes from life.

But hey, we haven’t even talked about The Road yet. Oh boy oh boy ohboyohboyohboy….

***

In other news… Ann Hornaday reviewed this one and tried to set it straight for us in The Washington Post: “Von Trier fails to elevate torture porn”

“A horror film tricked out in the trappings of psycho-sexual dynamics and exegetical musings, this latest provocation from Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier qualifies as torture porn for art-house fans.”

Exegeminal what-now? *drool* Durr…. I like movies!

Hornaday’s review may be readable and way less insane in-depth, but her description sounds lazy or inaccurate to me. With regards to the above quote: that’s sort of what Haneke did with his Funny Games remake a couple years back, mocking the viewer in the classic Clockwork fashion and also deliberately emulating the actual sad state of modern Hollywood “horror” flicks; an industry that now relies on shitty horror/action remakes by music video directors, and torture porn scripted by video store clerks. Pop culture totalitarianism: you give the companies the power to enslave you.

While calling it “torture porn for art-house fans” might describe the tale’s aesthetic quality to the layman (it is gorgeous, has a lot of brilliantly crafted haunting scenes taken from the landscape and various abstract tricks — and there is hard-to-watch brutality at certain segments) but is actually an incorrect assessment. What Hornaday diagnoses as torture porn has always been a staple of art-house or cult fans, but as a separate genre entirely. Torture porn actually refers to lucrative mainstream perversions of cult and art-house cinema, like giallo or sexploitation films. Torture porn doesn’t actually have an artistic foundation; it is mired in more nihilistic sexual catharsis than sexual repulsion (and making ze moneys!). The fundamental aspect of Von Trier’s film is how it subverts that — it builds up the sexual elements and tension until sex becomes disgusting and is identified as the causal drive of the brutality in question. Putting Hanneke and Von Trier (and hell, even Argento) in the same camp as Roth and Tarantino is the same thing as mistaking love for lust, or integrity and substance for the medium they manifest through. They have similar aesthetic manifestations, but they ain’t the same.

@ IMDb

______

* I couldn’t help but laugh at that scene, not because of its over-emphasis, but because I simultaneously heard the Gecko muse that “greed is good” a la Wall Street. I can’t wait for Wall Street 2! Sike.

What combines, tennis, a strange creature in a bathtub, a skateboard on hamburger stacks, spongebob, a pancake monster, and a baby dressed as a hot dog?! Your random video of the day. Charlotte Gainsbourg featuring Beck, “Heaven Can Wait.”

John Deere Tractor Product Placement Fail

Were You Aware Of It? The largest investment fraud in Wall Street history was as we all know perpetuated by the former Chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. But what most people don’t realize is that Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was the indirect result of, ummm, inadequacy issues! Freudian theory FTW!

Fact! Director Alexander Payne of “Citizen Ruth” and “Election” fame’s latest project is HBO’s “Hung.” The new show tells the heartwarming story of a washed out high school sports basketball legend trying to juggle two part time jobs: sports coach and gigolo. As you can probably surmise from the title, the program focuses hella more on the hookin’ and not so much on the jump shot drills per se.  I’m going to keep an open mind about this one since Payne has already accomplished the impossible before: making me care about wine.

Did you know? Thankfully cooler heads prevailed in the end and plans for Topps “Watchmen” trading cards were ultimately shelved shortly before the film was released. Wrapped in cellophane with bubble gum inside, the original idea was for the cards to ultimately form a puzzle which pictured the original Giant Alien Squid Destroying New York City ending. But somehow, someway, official Dr. Manhattan condoms were given the go ahead in its stead. This is wrong on like 37 different levels.

Whodofthunkit? The new Sam Rockwell/Kevin Spacey flick “Moon” is directed by David Bowie’s son Duncan. Which is of course a perfect fit considering his dad’s famous obsession with all things space travel related. I really want to see this because it looks like an unholy mash-up of “Silent Running” and “Mystery Science Theatre 3000.” Well, without a Joan Baez soundtrack and any jokes whatsoever. Er, never mind.

Item! Lars Von Trier (Dancer In The Dark) has teamed up with Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man) and Charlotte “I’m Serge’s Daughter” Gainsbourg for what looks like the feel good rom com hit of the decade: Antichrist! Peep this: the plot concerns a couple who lose their young son when he falls out of a window while they have sex in the other room. Hilarious, right? But wait, it gets better! The husband is a therapist who’s writing a thesis paper on genocide. Hubby decides post-funeral this would be a great excuse to head out to the cabin for a little weekend R&R. And before you know it, they run into some wild and wacky animal antics like a still-born deer calf and a self-disembowling fox. Uh oh! Spoiler Alert! So, naturally, the wife blames himself for her son’s death and becomes convinced all women are inherently evil. I don’t wanna give the whole thing away, but let’s just say you’ll never think about crushing a man’s genitals with a block of wood the same way ever again! Or drilling a hole in someone’s calf in order to bolt a millstone to their leg, for that matter. Oh, I almost forgot! The widower beats a crow and buries it alive while the widow performs an amateur clitorectodomy on herself. So, if you like a lot of wife strangling and funeral pyres and animalist religion, then have I got the perfect date night/family event for you! I recommend you watch it together with someone you want to murder.  *sigh*

This just in! The inevitable re-makes of “The Prisoner” and “V” are out now and I was pleasantly surprised that nothing was permanently ruined in the process. (For you younguns out there, “V” has nothing do with “V For Vendetta” in any way, shape or form.) What I truly love about stories like “The Prisoner” is that much like any classic timeless epic (Lord Of The Rings, Star Wars, Chronicles Of Narnia, His Dark Materials, etc.) conservatives and liberals alike identify with it. Both sides of the political/philosophical coin take completely different things away from the same identical package. That, to me at least, is the mark of truly great writing. This is love, as the kids say nowadays.

Finally, I will leave you with the role Tracy Morgan’s obituary is most likely to skip over: Brian Fellow’s Safari Planet!

Drinking, Smoking, Adultery and Being An A-Hole: It's what I do best.

I decided to watch Antichrist despite I’m not very fond of Lars Von Trier’s work, for being too dense, symbolic and dramatic.

Today, I haven’t yet decided whether I liked it much or not, for there are many things which didn’t convince me at all. Some aspects and details in the film are outstanding but some others aren’t well sorted out, in my humble opinion of course.

Antichrist  starts with an amazing and visual prologue, with the tragic death of the baby, helped by many coincidences, which cause him to jump throw the window while his parents are making love without noticing anything around.

Thus the first act starts, with She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) collapsing during the funeral. Admitted to hospital, she gets plenty of drugs prescribed, something He (Willem Dafoe), as a therapist, does not agree with, as is in human nature common to feel  grief after such loss and the circumstances involved.

Soon arguments follow, He wants to start an intense therapy for her relief although she doesn’t feel well about it, She reproaches they never got his attention before and now he wants to know about her, now that she’s sick. Anyway, eventually she accepts and the starting point to clarify is to find out what she fears most.

She starts to develop a maniac behavior very close to bipolar disorder: sometimes she’s in pain and feels weak, others she starts self-inflicting pain, and sometimes she harasses him until she gets quick and wild sex. He starts worrying about this interest conflict in therapy, as he’s not able to get her under control and constantly sex is interrupting therapy, and pushes for finding a fear. She confesses something very contradictory, she fears the woods, however she was always trying  to spend time in the old cabin hey own in the middle of the woods, thus He decides it’s time to spend some time there and work out on her fears and focus on therapy there.

At the cabin things will get worse gradually, He will soon realize something is going wrong, not only with his wife, but with Nature itself, which seems to be aggressive and hostile.

Antichrist is not a movie about Satan, but about the evil, not as possession either, but as how evil can make its place into humans, how evil can influence and transform people, and how evil can be disguised into insanity as well.

The characters are performed amazingly by Dafoe and Gainsbourg, and the way situation change as to confront them in a tough duel is amazing.

One of Lars Von Trier’s most remarkable features is to be able to raise controversy among audience and as far as I remember, Antichrist was very criticized for adult content and hard scenes. Well, sexual content is very present during the footage, but it adds meaning to the story, the way sex develops is significant in terms of the couple sickening relationship, but yes, I must admit is way far from enough.

On the other hand regarding hard scenes, by know you’ve probably heard already about genital mutilation, seems that people only focuses on the morbid aspects, same as when I saw La Pianiste, by Michael Haneke, nobody was able to tell me something about the plot, just about the razor scene…This self-mutilation occurs for some reasons you will find about, and it’s just an addition to the story and to the chaos of the moment.

The end and the epilogue, are the weakest parts in the film, some of the facts He discovers of her wife are very sudden, seems that she had in fact been a stranger to him as not being able to notice several sings of madness in her before, and the very last scene, it’s not my intention to spoil at all, the two of us we were watching the movie, understood different messages.

Antichrist honestly, is not a masterpiece, but a crap either. Guess is one of these movies I should review from time to time as to discover many details to help my understanding of the story. 

Continuing last week’s amazingly, wonderfully weird theme, this time with a budget:

Beck & Charlotte Gainsbourg – Heaven Can Wait

© Arina Orlova, 2009

List time is upon us on The Movie Overdose! Tom and Sam kick it off with their favourite actors, actresses, supporting performances, directors and sequences of the year. Not before, however, they whisk themselves back to the Mercury in 1937 for Me and Orson Welles, talk about a live-action Nutcracker, what the future holds for Spiderman 4, Jennifer’s Body, The Barbarian Invasions and Steven Seagal: Lawman.

Download The Movie Overdose Episode 45

Email us, tweet us, Facebook us, subscribe to us… do anything you want to us with the links on the left.

List time is upon us on The Movie Overdose! Tom and Sam kick it off with their favourite actors, actresses, supporting performances, directors and sequences of the year. Not before, however, they whisk themselves back to the Mercury in 1937 for Me and Orson Welles, talk about a live-action Nutcracker, what the future holds for Spiderman 4, Jennifer’s Body, The Barbarian Invasions and Steven Seagal: Lawman.

Download The Movie Overdose Episode 45

Email us, tweet us, Facebook us, subscribe to us… do anything you want to us with the links on the left.

What a year it’s been! We released our first record on 27th July 2009 – Krakatoa’s debut single ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Revolution’ on limited edition 7” single and digital download. This was quickly followed by The Supernovas’ debut single, ‘Ace Face’, once more as a 7” single and download. Roses Kings Castles, the side project of Babyshambles drummer Adam Ficek, was next with the ‘Apples And Engines’ EP, issued on CD and download. Liverpool’s merry pranksters, The Know delivered their debut single The Jackal as a download shortly after.

The second Krakatoa single, ‘Fat Cats’ was released in November, as the lads headed out on an eighteen date tour supporting Alabama 3, which was a roaring success, with the boys winning fans everywhere they went. The Supernovas have just been added to the bill for three Babyshambles gigs next week, and the following week Gaoler’s Daughter take up two slots. In the past few weeks we have released singles and EP’s by London’s raggle taggle popsters Gaoler’s Daughter; ten piece indie pop soul groovers White Collar Weapons; Swedish psych shoegazers Mono Stereo, and hotly tipped Dubliners Reader’s Wives.

A 25 track compilation album of the work of Liverpudlian legend Dean Johnson was released last week, and his entire catalogue of sixteen albums will be released by 360 in 2010. Next year also sees the release of the second Roses Kings Castles album; the debut album by the magnificent Ben Sommers; the second singles by The Supernovas, Reader’s Wives and Mono Stereo; debut releases from The Savants and Inwits; An EP of five new songs by Sunderland song writing sensation Paul Liddell, and a whole host more!

We here at 360 love music, so it’s not just about what we do, it’s about the amazing array of worldwide talent who defy the naysayers by producing great artistic work in times of supposed darkness. So here’s a big shout out to all the artists who made great albums in 2009:

A Camp, Air, Alberta Cross, Alessi’s Ark, Amazing Baby, Animal Collective, Asobi Seksu, Blitzen Trapper, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Sarah Blasko, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Brakes, The Cave Singers, Coconut Records, Marshall Crenshaw, Crocodiles, Crystal Antlers, Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse, Dead Man’s Bones, The Decemberists, Alela Diane, The Drums, The Duke & The King, Thomas Dybdahl, Eels, Empire Of The Sun, Forest Fire, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Ghoststory, Girls, Great Lake Swimmers, Grizzly Bear, The Handsome Family, Hatcham Social, Imogen Heap, Peter Holsapple & Chris Stamey, Ida Maria, The Leisure Society, Local Natives, Madness, Metric, Miike Snow, Rhett Miller, Okkervil River, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Papercuts, Phoenix, Pink Mountaintops, Jay Reatard, Reverend & The Makers, Rodrigo Y Gabriela, Hope Sandoval, 7 Worlds Collide, The Shivers, Soap & Skin, The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, Mindy Smith, St. Vincent, Jamie T, Theoretical Girl, Tim Ten Yen, Tinariwen, The Trinity, Vetiver, Vivian Girls, M. Ward, Wavves, White Denim, Wilco, Wooden Shjips, The XX, Yves Klein Blue and PROBABLY A LOAD MORE WE HAVEN’T DISCOVERED YET.

‘360′

It’s a horror film. It’s a battle-of-the-sexes drama. It’s a cabin-in-the-woods supernatural thriller. It’s shocking, controversial, provocative, explicit etc. Lars von Trier is just messing with you. Don’t get so worked up. He likes to poke (figurative) wild animals with (metaphorical) sticks to see what bites. Of course, the sense that he’s provoking his audiences shouldn’t be an excuse to dismiss his movies out of hand – they clearly get a lot of attention, and so he must be pushing just the right combination of buttons to incite so much reaction. Since the film so deftly elicits a set of stock reactions, I thought I’d withhold my own thoughts on the film and instead invite you to build your own review to the film based on the multiple choices below. Save yourself some time, and your knees some jerking, and select your responses in each of the categories most commonly used to talk about Antichrist:

Lars von Trier:

1. He’s seriously interested in investigating the mechanics of film genre, breaking up the horror film into its component parts to show how it plays out simplistic cultural preoccupations with sex and death. Playful they may be, but his films are as entitled to thoughtful consideration as anyone else’s. Just because he’s interested in extreme emotions doesn’t make him exploitative – he makes difficult subjects accessible, and there’s a sense that his critics are just upset about critical attention being lavished upon something that smells populist.
2. He’s a charlatan who has somehow managed to trick film critics into thinking he’s a serious artist rather than a skilful manipulator of the critical establishment. He hates you. He thinks you’re an idiot. You deserve this kind of schlock, and the proof of your idiocy is the way you rise to the bait and get all annoyed about it. He stands back to watch the fuss, safe in the arms of the old and untrue adage that a bad reaction is better than no reaction at all. You can’t win – if you don’t see the film, you can’t complain about it, which means he gets your money regardless of whether you like his work or not.
3. He’s playing games. But the games themselves are interesting and rather gripping, so as long as you can take a step back and see how those games are played, rather than falling into the trap of getting emotionally involved in the lives of 2-dimensional characters. The prominence he gives to his own name (the “von” is an affected nickname retained in homage to Josef von Sternberg) is a good indicator to how he perceives himself as a pastiche of the notion of the monstrous, egotistical auteur.
4. Other.

Sex and violence:

1. Needlessly explicit, spoiling what might otherwise have been another wry tale of middle-class holiday-makers who cope badly when taken outdoors. I’d much rather have been watching Nuts in May.
2. Graphic, porny sex with close-up genital shots is a lazy shortcut to tabloid frenzy and the free publicity that goes along with it. It’s the quickest way for so-called art cinema to turn the heads of mainstream audiences or the kinds of people who wouldn’t normally be distracted from the latest Saw film, which is at least honest in inviting you to enjoy, rather than feel guilty about, spectacular displays of gore.
3. The explicitness of the sex, violence and sexual violence is calculated to critique the ways in which women are frequently constructed as sexual accessories on film. She’s sexuality is a monstrous excess – she embodies the end product of repetitive projections that have been imposed upon her: since women have been expected to remain pliant, willing, masochistic and available sexual partners, the film shows what happens when she takes all that on board and internalises all of that violence, objectification and pornographic expectation. i.e. She becomes a monster.
4. Ewww.

Misogyny:

1. Antichrist is thoroughly misogynist because it shows a woman doing terrible things to her husband: she is  the proverbial “ball-breaker”, yet another daft pun that von Trier loves to make literal. All of the husband’s suspicions about his wife prove to be true. Her violence is a result not of self-defence or self-preservation, but a natural outgrowth of her emotional instability. It even turns out that the death of her son is the fault of her neglect, and that she was tormenting him long before he died: her tendency to “hobble” the men in her life makes her a full-blown psycho whose irrational jealousy is enacted as physical mutilation. To build an entire film around the inherent danger of trying to understand and interact with women reveals a deep-seated hatred at worst, a simplistic misunderstanding at best.
2. It’s an anti-male fantasy in which a psychiatrist arrogantly believes he is uniquely skilled in diagnosing and treating his wife’s fears and anxieties, little realising that he is creating and awakening them in the first place. Her violence is  the equal and opposite reaction to his unfeeling pragmatism. He may even be trying to deliberately drive her over the edge or reduce her to a compliant sexual object. We see almost no evidence that he grieves for the death of his child at all. Men are rubbish, women their victims.
3. It’s a film about misogyny, in which von Trier imagines satirically what it would look like if a woman really did embody all of the hysterical, irrational and deadly attributes which have historically been suspected of her. The unhinged viciousness of it all is supposed to point to the ridiculousness of folkloric associations of women with nature, mystery, witchcraft and hysteria.
4. (M)other.

Symbolism:

1. The symbolism is a bit “sledgehammer”, sometimes literally.It’s all pretty obvious – the setting is called “Eden”, the leads have no names, setting them up as archetypes of masculinity and femininity. It is built on simple binaries of male/female, rational/hysterical, nature/science, mother/whore, doctor/patient, etc. von Trier can only seem to imagine them in extreme opposition to one another, but the film achieves its clarity and its visual poetry by its careful arrangement of signs. It might seem to be about “chaos”, but it’s very carefully ordered.
2. Everything seems to be invested with a symbolic value, even if it’s not clear what we’re expected to conclude about it – the closer you watch, the more you notice the repetitions of certain visual motifs such as feet, necks (and other body parts), grass/hair, earth, animals. None of these are difficult to miss, especially since von Trier is keen to label everything and divide it up into sections with titles on a chalkboard.
3. Other. And isn’t the Other terrifying!?

The talking fox:

1. I’m sure von Trier is chuckling to himself that everyone feels like they have to pass comment on something that was thrown in to tease us. It’s a joke that should clue you in to what he’s up to – he courts outrage by refusing to be consistent.
2. A badly judged moment. It’s not even consistent with other events in the film. Is it in Willem Dafoe’s head? Why does he have all the visions if she’s the one who’s crazy? Are the animals just a manifestation of Her true nature? It doesn’t matter, because it’s a silly idea. There’s a time and a place for talking animals, and an intense horror movie is not one of them. Von Trier should’ve known that keeping viewers engaged in a fictional world requires a delicate balance between heightened expression and adherence to plausibility – talking animals cross a line into a different generic heritage (cartoons and kids-stuff), so it was to be expected that people would get distracted and laugh at it.
3. It’s all part of the film’s heightened sense of magical possibility. As with the final shot of Breaking the Waves, von Trier loves to throw in those moments that confound expectation or interpretation – you might think you’re watching something that has a good explanation (it’s all in her mind!), and then with a little bit of CGI, the director can show that you couldn’t have been right all along; in this case it’s a blow to Dafoe’s rationalised sense of self. It’s worth noting that, despite the conglomeration of creepy portents, and a talking fox, his character never questions his own sanity.
4. It’s a pre-emptive attack on Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl movie. This fox is far from fantastic.

See more stills from Antichrist in the slideshow below, and add comments below if you feel like none of these reviews represent your position on the film.

She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and He (Willem Dafoe)

The Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) is a true cinematic experimentalist and agent provocateur with Antichirst being the most comprehensive encapsulation of all his ideas and stylistic approaches to date. Antichrist opens with a stunning black-and-white, slow motion prologue where the film’s leads, known simply as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), make love in the shower while their unattended child crawls out of his crib, climbs out an open window and falls to his death. Antichrist then unfolds over four chapters where He and She travel to an isolated forest cabin named Eden in order to reconcile their loss. She is consumed with grief, guilt, anxiety and self-loathing, using sex as a masochistic distraction from her pain. He is a therapist so takes it upon himself to heal her by making her confront the source of her deepest fear – the Eden cabin they have gone to where she had previously worked on a thesis about misogynist murder.

Von Trier uses a mixture of visual approaches in Antichrist to maximum effect. To portray the destructive dynamic between He and She von Trier utilises a very raw, handheld-camera filming style. To capture many of the hypnotic outdoor scenes, often filled with images of death in the natural world, von Trier radically uses sound, cinematography and editing to create some of the most beautiful yet nightmarish imagery ever created on screen. The eerie beauty of such scenes contrasts dramatically to the extremely violent brutality that occurs later in the film and very few people will be able to sit through key moments in Antichrist without physically recoiling in horror and disbelief at what they’ve just witnessed.

Von Trier has explored misogyny before and, similarly to David Lynch, he has been accused of being a misogynist as a result. While Antichrist does not contain any single fixed meaning as such, it does depict the misogyny of men who cast women as victims so that they can wield power as authoritative experts. Furthermore, it depicts female self-hatred, which is arguably the most destructive form of misogyny. The self-disgust that She develops towards her own sexuality is represented in Antichrist through its imagery of the natural world as Hell. Functioning as the inverse of the Biblical creation story, Antichrist is the most unique and divisive ‘horror’ film you are ever likely to see.

Originally appeared in The Big Issue, No. 343, 2009

© Thomas Caldwell, 2009

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