Charlotte Gainsbourg

REVIEW: ‘Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1’ Explores the Meaning of Feelings

I divide feature-length motion pictures into three categories: movies, which are what the studios make for the most part; film, which is David O. Russell, PT Anderson, Woody Allen, et al., and just about everything at festivals like Sundance; cinema, which is the more transcendent work of auteurs like Won Kar Wai and Terrence Malick, which breaks convention with a singular vision but still retains the cohesiveness of narrative entertainment. Lars von Trier falls into the cinema category, and his Nymphomaniac is an instant-classic example of my definition.

(There is a fourth category, fine-art film, which is long-form filmed art made by the likes of Peter Greenaway and Matthew Barney; Greenaway used to make cinema, which is to say his films once had some form of cohesive narrative structure, but he seems to have abandoned that altogether recently.

You Don’t Make Crap

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | THE INDIA FILES

by James Killough

Flipping mindlessly, sleepily through the chattering polyglot channels of Indian TV last night in my hotel room, I landed on a station that screens Hollywood films, the kind I would never ordinarily watch, i.e., the majority of films that are made.  Ivan Reitman’s My Super Ex-Girlfriend was on.  Wow, what a crock of shit.  Unwatchable.  I cannot imagine how Uma Thurman must have made it through a single day of shooting that clownish cack without taking her eye off her mortgage payments.

Uma Thurman rocking the widest, longest red carpet in the whole wild world at Cannes in a damned fine gown. And taking a photo call ass-first.

During a showdown between Uma Thurman’s ex-girlfriend character and Anna Faris’s current girlfriend character, the word “bitch” was bleeped so as not to offend sensitive Indian ears.  The subtitles, which translated American into standard English, substituted “bitch” with “witch.”  That blip of stringent censorship helps to understand why studios are so relentlessly inclined toward making nothing more rattling than a PG-13 film. Even the anodyne The King’s Speech has been modified to take out the whole “fuck” sequence with a view to broadening the film’s marketability, as if an Oscar sweep weren’t enough.  As a result, it has made over four hundred million worldwide, and will continuing pumping money for years to come.