While he may be a bit of a dick, what with his Hitler love and all, I've got to admit that after watching and really, really appreciating Melancholia last night I've had von Trier on the brain this morning. For the longest time I felt his filmography, or more specifically what I'd seen of it, was fairly useless outside of The Kingdom, which is super radtastic. Antichrist changed my mind. It affected me on a pretty heavy level the way few other films have, it was just so dark and sinister and completely terrifying to me that, alright, I started to wonder if maybe I'd written him off before giving his work a fair chance.
Melancholia kind of reinforced that. It's a beautiful, tragic, heartbreaking film with some really amazing visuals. Dunst is fantastic in here, never in a million years would I have expect a performance like this from her and that's probably because in my brain she's just the chick from Spider-Man, which isn't really fair to her. I can't imagine why she didn't get an Oscar nomination for her work here, because she really is amazing. Everyone else is great too though, Charlotte Gainsbourg turning in just as great a performance and Sutherland also really standing out. Even the supporting players like Skarsgard and Udo Kier (really the only comic relief in the film comes from him, and it's fleeting at best) are at the top of their game.
So I guess I've come around on him to a certain extent, or at least I've appreciated his last two movies. I haven't seen Dancer In The Dark and I know I should. I didn't like Dogville when I saw it and thought Epidemic kinda sucked. I didn't get wowed by his whole Dogma thing, I thought and still think that despite some good intentions it's kind of self righteous and pretentious but then maybe that's kind of the point and you just have to accept that aspect of his work and go with it.
Melancholia kind of reinforced that. It's a beautiful, tragic, heartbreaking film with some really amazing visuals. Dunst is fantastic in here, never in a million years would I have expect a performance like this from her and that's probably because in my brain she's just the chick from Spider-Man, which isn't really fair to her. I can't imagine why she didn't get an Oscar nomination for her work here, because she really is amazing. Everyone else is great too though, Charlotte Gainsbourg turning in just as great a performance and Sutherland also really standing out. Even the supporting players like Skarsgard and Udo Kier (really the only comic relief in the film comes from him, and it's fleeting at best) are at the top of their game.
So I guess I've come around on him to a certain extent, or at least I've appreciated his last two movies. I haven't seen Dancer In The Dark and I know I should. I didn't like Dogville when I saw it and thought Epidemic kinda sucked. I didn't get wowed by his whole Dogma thing, I thought and still think that despite some good intentions it's kind of self righteous and pretentious but then maybe that's kind of the point and you just have to accept that aspect of his work and go with it.
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