"I am an American, so that is why I make films about America. America is sitting on our world, I am making films that have to do with America (because) 60% of my life is America. So I am in fact an American, but I can't go there to vote, I can't change anything. We are a nation under influence and under a very bad influence… because Mr. Bush is an asshole and doing very idiotic things."
Lars Von Trier introduces his new film at the
Cannes Film Festival:
«Manderlay» picks up where «
Dogville» left off, with the character originated by Nicole Kidman -- now played by Bryce Dallas Howard --
stumbling onto
a plantation that time forgot, where slavery still operates in the 1930s.
The film (5 MB .pdf file, official pressbook) ends, as Dogville did, with David Bowie’s Young Americans played over a photomontage of images that range from a Ku Klux Klan meeting to the Rodney King beating, George Bush at prayer and Martin Luther King at his final rest, American soldiers in Vietnam and the Gulf, the Twin Towers. More inside.
posted by matteo
on May 16, 2005 -
69 comments
"Whadyawant, motherf*ck?" These are the first words
Charles Bukowski speaks in
John Dullaghan's
documentary about the
poet and
novelist,
famous for his writing and infamous for his
drinking and
brawling and
screwing. The audience member might respond, "To hear your story,
Hank, that's what I want."
The movie opens with friends (Sean Penn, Harry Dean Stanton, Bono) and colleagues and lovers and fans
recounting the myth; theirs are stories of blades pulled on the maitre d' of the swanky
Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills, of dangling dicks revealed in public, of
a drunk who'd just as soon crack his bottle over your head than share its contents.
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on May 28, 2004 -
26 comments
"The people of Dogville are proud, hypocritical and never more dangerous than when they are convinced of the righteousness of their actions" (NYT link) "
The movie is, of course, an attack on America—its innocence, its conformity, its savagery—though von Trier is interested not in the life of this country (he’s never been here) but in the ways he can exploit European disdain for it." (The New Yorker).
Lars Von Trier's new movie,
Dogville, is under attack from critics who consider it anti-American. Von Trier, of course, has never been to the US but
he counters that he knows more about U.S. culture through modern media than, say, the makers of "Casablanca' knew about Morocco. Kafka
hadn't been to Amerika either.
Should non US-ian artists leave America alone if they've never been there? Von Trier says that
"in my own country, I'm considered anti-Danish - again, that's more about politics than issues of nationality."
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on Mar 22, 2004 -
42 comments
