Own the rights?
Sigh, well, I don't know what the hell to make of this. I think I'd read so much about it beforehand that I had trouble separating my expectations and everyone else's opinion from what I was actually watching.One thing's for sure. The prologue is really good. I can't think of a better sequence from all of von Trier's work at the moment, everything about its composition is so precise and skillful, he's working on 3 or 4 emotional levels at the same time and he sustains it beautifully without words, it's masterful stuff.The following hour or so then is just a long torrent of sub-Persona depression and psychobabble. The two leads are committed but their characters are essentially ideas during this part (man=reason, woman=chaos (I'd love to see a feminist really take down this film and what it eventually says though I suspect so would von Trier)). I didn't believe they were real people, they were too polarising so I tired of the theatrical analysing way before the point we reached the messed-up stuff.Which WAS good and visceral and suspenseful and atmospheric and ultimately worth sticking around for. There are some images (not just the most brutal ones: see the slow-mo deer in labour, wow) that will stick around with me for a while and conveyed better in a single frame the ideas swirling about here than half an hour of chat.A bit of a mixed bag then but its best bits make it worth sitting through the drudge.It's also crazy the outrage over this movie, the gore is no worse than I've seen in other recent horror movies and it's much less sustained. Presumably folk are upset more when these things crop up in an art film than in a piece of trash. I don't think I've ever been offended by anything in my life so I struggle to see peoples' point of view in these things anyway. Again, von Trier must have lapped it all up.
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