I watched this last night, prepared for (as it was described to me) 'an attack on societal rituals and storytelling itself'.
Instead, I found myself falling asleep.
I'm someone who likes a wide variety of movies. Foreign films, surreal films, transgressive films: love 'em. But they have to be done well. The Phantom Of Liberty isn't. If it's an attack on anything, it's the most timid, polite attack I've ever seen. It doesn't say anything original and it doesn't even say it loudly enough to cover up that fact.
Also, its supposed themes don't come across. There's not enough happening in the movie to hang them on! The content of this film is stretched nylon-thin. Scenes are padded out to agonizing length; either taking too long with the setup or belaboring the point to new frontiers in redundancy. Supposedly, Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière wrote the film by telling each other last night's dreams. Someone should have informed them that nothing in the world is more boring to have to sit through. If this movie meant a lot to Buñuel, that's great. But he failed at conveying why these ideas should be important to me also.
But there are bright spots. A few good ideas and punchlines. But as I was watching, I realized exactly what this movie really is: IT'S A MONTY PYTHON EPISODE WITH GLACIAL PACING. Am I wrong? Think of all the movie's cleverest, most surreal ideas; aren't they exactly the sort of things the Pythons would think up? The dirty photos, the gambling monks, the toilet table, the missing girl, the celebrity sniper? The difference is, they would have either added more material instead of just presenting the premise and then doing nothing clever with it, or they'd have made the joke without lingering on the punchline until it was dead and buried. And the kicker is, they were doing this same material four years earlier!
Is this what it takes to make art-house critics fawn over lowbrow humor? Add eighty minutes of tedium?
There's a certain class of films which I detest: ones that coast by on name recognition. If you watch a boring movie and assume that there must have been some deep, deep meaning going on that you didn't catch, because obviously the director is such a genius, you're letting them get away with a lazy film. They might indeed have had deep layers of meaning, sure. But if the cues to them are so vague that the audience has to go sift through books and articles to have someone else explain it to them, it's the same as if the director had said nothing at all. Because if a movie is vague enough that the audience can't hope to even get a *feel* for the meaning as they're watching it, then that's a movie so vague that anyone can slap their own intellectual-sounding analysis onto it and look real smart. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a movie with indecipherable meaning just isn't made very well. If you think I'm wrong then why aren't you defending Zak Snyder's Sucker Punch?
Luis Buñuel, I accuse you of the worst crime a surrealist can commit: being dull.
Instead, I found myself falling asleep.
I'm someone who likes a wide variety of movies. Foreign films, surreal films, transgressive films: love 'em. But they have to be done well. The Phantom Of Liberty isn't. If it's an attack on anything, it's the most timid, polite attack I've ever seen. It doesn't say anything original and it doesn't even say it loudly enough to cover up that fact.
Also, its supposed themes don't come across. There's not enough happening in the movie to hang them on! The content of this film is stretched nylon-thin. Scenes are padded out to agonizing length; either taking too long with the setup or belaboring the point to new frontiers in redundancy. Supposedly, Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière wrote the film by telling each other last night's dreams. Someone should have informed them that nothing in the world is more boring to have to sit through. If this movie meant a lot to Buñuel, that's great. But he failed at conveying why these ideas should be important to me also.
But there are bright spots. A few good ideas and punchlines. But as I was watching, I realized exactly what this movie really is: IT'S A MONTY PYTHON EPISODE WITH GLACIAL PACING. Am I wrong? Think of all the movie's cleverest, most surreal ideas; aren't they exactly the sort of things the Pythons would think up? The dirty photos, the gambling monks, the toilet table, the missing girl, the celebrity sniper? The difference is, they would have either added more material instead of just presenting the premise and then doing nothing clever with it, or they'd have made the joke without lingering on the punchline until it was dead and buried. And the kicker is, they were doing this same material four years earlier!
Is this what it takes to make art-house critics fawn over lowbrow humor? Add eighty minutes of tedium?
There's a certain class of films which I detest: ones that coast by on name recognition. If you watch a boring movie and assume that there must have been some deep, deep meaning going on that you didn't catch, because obviously the director is such a genius, you're letting them get away with a lazy film. They might indeed have had deep layers of meaning, sure. But if the cues to them are so vague that the audience has to go sift through books and articles to have someone else explain it to them, it's the same as if the director had said nothing at all. Because if a movie is vague enough that the audience can't hope to even get a *feel* for the meaning as they're watching it, then that's a movie so vague that anyone can slap their own intellectual-sounding analysis onto it and look real smart. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a movie with indecipherable meaning just isn't made very well. If you think I'm wrong then why aren't you defending Zak Snyder's Sucker Punch?
Luis Buñuel, I accuse you of the worst crime a surrealist can commit: being dull.