That's the only happy in this post. If you're easily offended or have strong morals...give up now.

~~~~~

"Le temps d�truit tout - Time destructs everything."

Irreversible, a French film by Gaspar Noe. Good Christ. I just sat thru the worst. movie. ever. And I've seen some bad ones before. I'm not sure what exactly made it the most miserable two hours of my movie-viewing life, but I've narrowed it down to one of three things. Either the camera work, the violence, or the language caused me to experience nausea three times within the first 20 minutes. Help me decide the culprit, will you?

The cinematographer took it into his head to imitate the rotating sprinker in the final shot, and therefore rotate the camera in a continual 360 (and then reversing it, turning on an angle and *then* 360ing). Then he mixes it up with some shakey-cam work and wild swings in case your inner ear finally catches on and settles down. See, I don't normally get motion-sick (I leave that to Dark & Fudgy), and in fact I don't believe my inner ear and I have ever disagreed before this moment in time. Of course, it could have been all the violence upsetting my delicate constitution.

This movie is set up like Memento, where the end comes first and we reverse thru time in scenes created to heighten tension. This means that the hideous, awful ending slaps you in the face in the first 20 minutes. I'm not used to having a character's head systematically broken until dead by a fire extingusher-wielding madman, and neither are you. But if that's your cup of tea, you won't mind the graphic (and I really have no questions left at this point about what it's like) anal rape of a woman in a pedway/tunnel. (Yeah, I'll be avoiding most of the Lakefront at night for a while, bike or not) I could close my eyes, but the sounds... the sounds. The sounds, the muffled screams, the horror of it all was still there. Luckily for me, I don't actually understand French, which means I could edit out the language spewed here.

The script was, I'm told, very sketchy and allowed for a lot of improv by the actors. If that's the case... let's just say that these actors either have small vocabularies or are just crazy. This language was honestly the most offensive I've ever been subjected to IN MY LIFE. Any single line of dialogue was more hideous and awful than any...any. I don't use those workds, NO ONE uses those words, I refuse to even acknowlege those words as part of the human language...and there I sat, subjected to the barrage in a Clockwork Orange nightmare.

**Someone asked me why I didn't walk out, joining all the others who walked out...but I can't. It's like quitting a book in the middle. I just can't do it, I have to see it thru to the bitter end. Let me tell you, the bitter end came first this time.**

Personally, I think it was the violence that did it. The foley artists were more than enthusiastic in their attempts to make the experience fully real and immediate. I don't go to fights, I don't know what it sounds like to have somebody's face beat in. My only connection to this are shows like Buffy (shut. up. We've discussed this already) and Alias, where both the sounds and repercussions are TVized. But Christ Almighty...it's now recorded indelibly on my brain until Alzheimer's sets in, and I'm sure I'll lose the valuable knowlege before I forget what bones sound like when repeatedly met with a forceful fire extingisher. It might be celery, but it SOUNDS like cartilage.

Let's talk about the film, to prove I actually watched it after such a beginning. There's really only a cast of 3 main characters, 2 whom you may remember from last year's Brotherhood of the Wolf. A classic story: two guys love the same girl, she loves the one and the other wants to protect her from him; she leaves a party where everybody's drunk/high/whatever, she gets raped and beaten into a coma, and retaliation is never good when people aren't in a rational state of mind to begin with. The boyfriend is on a nice drink/drug cocktail, with the other guy caught up in his maelstrom of deadly focus: kill the rapist. It's all downhill after that, with the mild-mannered, calm guy going psycho and beating the rapist to death. Noe, in a flash of brilliance, mirrored the E and R in every credit, creating a very difficult thing to look at; he also runs the credits backwards (and first) to comment on time. I was just grateful because we could run out of the theater as soon as the movie ended. The film seemed to be trying to make a point, but it was was murky and miserable, and the ending didn't balance out the beginning in any way.

It's a weird bad place and I never want to return. I soothed myself with classic X-Files episodes (the penultimate series finale, actually) and I think I'll be ok.

~~~~~