Dogville (2003)

As I've said the other day, my resolution for 2019 is to watch all those movies I've been meaning to watch since always but kept putting off for a reason or another. Dogville I put off because of the length and because, being honest, you have to be in the right mood to handle Lars von Trier. 

The film focuses on Grace Margaret Mulligan (Nicole Kidman), a beautiful young woman on the run from the mob who seeks refuge in Dogville, a small mountain town with a tight community of people who look after each other. The residents are reluctant at first, but, persuaded by the town’s philosopher, Tom Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), they agree to hide her. In return, Grace agrees to work for them but nothing comes without a price and soon the people of Dogville begin to abuse her.

It’s a very simple story that appears calm, harmless, almost boring at the beginning, but, little by little, if you have the patience to stick around, the plot begins to develop and it slowly turns into a cruel, often unbearable story —I should have seen it coming as to shock the audience is typical of von Trier but the dramatic turn the story took really caught me by surprise— with a brilliant, astonishing twist at the end that will take your breath away.

It is a story rich with themes of arrogance, indifference, hypocrisy, greed, desire, mistrust, punishment, death and love. It is a story about power, corruption and corruptibility —power corrupts and the more the power the greater the corruption, is the film’s statement—; it is about human nature and morality, a portrait of America, but also of the entire world. In other words, Dogville contains misanthropy towards all humans.

The characters aren’t particularly three-dimensional people and don’t have much personality as they all are symbols that represent the dark side of humanity, but the time von Trier takes to set them up allows them to be entirely credible. The town of Dogville can also be considered a character as it is its small area that really helps to convey the hostility between the human characters.

The cast does a wonderful job —Nicole Kidman is magnificent as Grace; she brings so much vulnerability and fragility to her young, naïve character. Great support is provided by the supporting cast, Paul Bettany and Patricia Clarkson delivering the most powerful performances of the bunch. John Hurt does a marvellous job narrating as the narration is amusing and very moving.

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What stuck with me the most about Dogville is the style. The film is void of any visual constituents of a film; it is indeed set on a theatre stage with almost no props. There are no buildings, no plants, no animals, only drawings on the floor. It has no backgrounds —it’s black or white depending on the time of the day. The characters open and close invisible doors, they talk about non-existent objects. This is what truly made Dogville work for me. The very minimalistic stage magnifies the town’s residents’ interactions with Grace, they make their emotions more palpable as it allows the camera to linger on the actors’ faces without any distraction whatsoever. It’s the style that allowed me to fully immerse into the story, to experience everything event as if I was part of the story.

Ultimately, Dogville is a very long film —a nearly three hours—, and it’s often difficult to watch but it’s worth the effort/time as it is one of the most brilliant and unique films I’ve seen. 

New in October, Pt. 2: Something for Everyone

Now that we've gotten all those Woody Allen titles out of the way, what about the rest of this month's arrivals? They're actually a pretty extensive�and diverse�group and include a number of welcome returnees, some of which snuck back onto Instant in the final days of September. Among those are 1994's tear-jerking basketball doc, Hoop Dreams; arguably the best of the Merchant-Ivory productions, A Room with a View (1986); and the less well-remembered (except by avid '80s cable watchers), The Wild Geese (1978), a satisfyingly virile action yarn from director Andrew McLaglen, starring the Stallone, Statham, and Schwarzenegger of their day: Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Roger Moore.

Harris, Burton, Moore

As fun as it violent and cool-headed, The Wild Geese is filled with real men doing manly things, and doing them the way God intended�without computer effects. See all those figures parachuting down into enemy territory? Those really are guys in parachutes, jumping out of real airplanes. And the explosions? Actual on-camera fireballs. I mean, yeesh, kids today with their fancy computer-generated men and airplanes and clouds and water that's never quite convincing. We're talkin' old school here, okay? Back when stars could actually be expendable. None of this mamby-pamby digital blood, or worse, fake animals (hire a deer wrangler already!) or talking dogs, or...

Sorry, um, where was I?

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New in June: Go Big or Go Home (2014)

Netflix continues to bolster its back catalog of important directors. There are new additions this month from Woody Allen (Annie Hall), Jim Jarmusch (Coffee and Cigarettes), Howard Hawks (El Dorado), Steven Spielberg (1941), and three more from Robert Altman, not to mention the return of those itinerant Francis Ford Coppola films that never seem to stick around for more than a month or two. And in the No News Is Good News department, the handful of James Bond movies that showed up last month remain available�a first in the year-plus since this blog began. Bond titles, as many of you know, usually vanish after 30 days. But one of the bigger stories in June is the streaming debut of a movie as infamous as it was unavailable (at least in the U.S.), and as underrated as it was underseen�the one, the only:

Ishtar (1987)

"Honest and popular don't go hand in hand"

An early example of a movie reviewed for its budget rather than its quality, Ishtar sits only a notch below Heaven's Gate in terms of the critical scorn and audience indifference hurled its way. It may not have ruined a studio, but it certainly helped ruin the directorial career of Elaine May (who also wrote it), and long served as one of a handful of poster children symbolizing Hollywood excess prior to today's Tentpole Era. Me, I've always thought the movie got a bum rap. Having seen it during its initial�extremely brief�theatrical run, I remember being puzzled by the critical pummeling. Certainly it wasn't The Greatest Comedy Ever, but it was clever, entertaining, and silly in equal portions. Essentially a big-budget homage to the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road pictures (anyone remember those?), it revels in the absurdity of Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, as two of the world's worst songwriters, getting dragged into an international crisis involving the CIA, gunrunners, and Middle Eastern revolutionaries. Hoffman and Beatty have a blast playing against type (Beatty is hopeless with the ladies), bringing real zest to their off-key interpretations of the deliberately awful Paul Williams songs they're meant to have written. Some of it may be dragged out and, at times (yes), excessive, but like the characters in a Will Ferrell or Farrelly Brothers movie, these are very smart people playing stupid, and most of the time they get it right�especially Charles Grodin, whose sly underplaying steals every scene he's in.

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Expiration Watch: What's New Is Old

Netflix giveth, and Netflix taketh away. Passing into Instant exile�if not downright oblivion�are a number of significant titles, including a couple of Oscar winners and a handful of movies previously spotlighted here. Taking the hit are such stalwart directors as Howard Hawks, John Carpenter, Barry Levinson and Mike Figgis, as well as stars Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, Dustin Hoffman, Ashley Judd, Burt Reynolds and Nicolas Cage. Not to mention James Caan and those pesky Bond films...

Speaking of Caan, it seems the original Rollerball�reviewed here as a new title only last week�was simply on a one-month streaming loan. As of August 31 at midnight, it will once again be skating off into the distance. Thanks for the tease, Netflix.

Also on loan were those eternally recurring James Bond films, which arrived on 8/1 and will be departing on 9/2. At this rate I suppose we can hope for another return in the near future? I've only been tracking these titles since April, so I'm not sure how regularly such shenanigans occur.

Other titles previously recommended are the dark, fictionalized(?) biopic of game show producer/assassin Chuck Barris, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (review)�written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by George Clooney�and the wonderful coming-of-age comedy, Slums of Beverly Hills (review), with Natasha Lyonne as a brashly curious teen growing up with her nomadic family in 1970s Los Angeles. (10/1 Update: Confessions is now back!)

That brings us to this month's new expiring entries, starting with a couple of notable Oscar winners.

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New August Titles (2013)

Among the notable titles joining Netflix Instant this month are a stellar example of '70s sci-fi, the Spike Lee joint of Spike Lee joints, an underrated drama from the writer-director of personal fave The Fabulous Baker Boys, Christopher Nolan in his more forgetful, pre-Dark Knight days, and a bit of unabashed filth from the mind (and groin) of Kevin Smith.

Rollerball (1975) - EXPIRED 9/1/13

Once upon a time, in a decade far, far away, science-fiction movies were built on ideas, not special effects. Before Star Wars changed the rules (and box-office expectations), all you needed to make a sci-fi flick were a respectable actor (say, Sean Connery or Charlton Heston or Robert Duvall), a script with some cautionary message reflecting the day's concerns, a newly built, futuristic-looking mall or campus as your setting, a few cool-looking props and/or model space ships, and maybe a miniature of a domed city. Presto�big-screen dystopian future. Those were the days of Zardoz, Logan's Run, Soylent Green, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and THX-1138, among others. Granted, most are not what you'd call "great" films, but they're all provocative and idiosyncratic (and flawed) in ways that give them an organic charm�something sorely missing from today's machine-stamped blockbusters. Even Rollerball�which posits a future run by benevolent corporations who keep the peace by pitting nations against each other in an internationally sanctioned blood sport�alternates its bursts of violence with hushed, meditative talks about free will and human nature (as well as the random burning of trees as party trick).

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