Monday, June 27, 2005

Review - I Stand Alone

Example

What the hell is going on in France? I mean, I guess I could understand the existential disturbance of a country that is host to The Unholiest Union, but good god, I had no idea.

I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous) is a miserable gut-punch of a movie, and I feel nothing for having watched it, beesides regret at prioritizing it in my Netflix queue. It was unelightening, uneducational... I just did not appreciate watching it at all. My tone, if you can't tell, is a little bit hostile. The movie's trying to show us the point of view of a man whose POV we don't usually get to see, and I frankly miss not having seen it.

Don't get me wrong - this is not me saying I couldn't handle the oh-so-revelatory graphic nature of the film with its violence and incest. I love Takashi Miike, so those are two subjects I can deal just fine with. What I can't deal with is two hours of unremitting boredom punctuated by flashy title cards with astonishingly stupid philosophizing and punchy rapid cuts leading to a pointless melange of sadism. God.

Ol' Bill Shakespeare must've had a premonition of Gaspar Noe when he mentioned that tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Well... Noe or Michael Bay. Or Catherine Breillat, that other French philosopher of empty air.

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