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fascists or not fascists, if they made beautiful music I would give them 5. prudes.

beautiful, I believe I will get the record.

Hey blech, great review. But the album... I don't know, on Bone Machine he was so daring that this seems too conventional to me (I have to say I don't think he would have recorded an "in the colosseum" with his wife), too many tracks, even if beautiful, "in the Waits style." I prefer him more unsettling and croaky, caught in his ineffable mix of brutality and avant-garde.

At the risk of sounding unpleasant, I would say to put an end to this idolization of Husker Du musicians. This (which I really can't understand, I don't know why) for example seems to me much less impactful than Zen Arcade, on which I would generally agree on everything. However, "among the most beautiful I've ever heard" - referring to Norton's bass lines, just can't be taken seriously. Anyway, great review.

the boundary between masterpiece and colossal shit is thin, and that’s what prevents it from being trivial. cinema today, from my perspective, tends to be rather reassuring, while von Trier shakes things up. if critics get angry, it’s because they don’t want to be shaken; they want to maintain control over the situation, and the entire film feels like a big fuck you. it’s a exquisitely intellectual provocation, as Eletto rightly points out. but it’s not true that the viewer is kept at a distance; it’s actually far too easy to get irritated and tell the director to screw off for the tour de force he puts you through, positioning oneself above or to the side of the work. to me, he’s the only one who truly says something amidst the genuinely self-satisfied contemporary “author” films, which indeed uphold an oligarchic theater with rigid and respectful internal schemas. if we had a director like that in Italy, just imagine what would be said.

Yes, I think that's the point. And as you say, formally it is nothing more than a psychoanalytic session, or rather a visit to confession :) What I believe to be the crux of the matter, at this point, is the presence or absence of a kind of underlying sincerity amid the tangle of references and strong scenes. The balance of factors is not in its favor; "formally" it is not a great film. However, I don't think it's a joke (maybe I'm wrong), but undeniably it's not for everyone, (perhaps too much) on purpose :)

First of all, sorry if I’ve been aggressive, but the movie hit me really hard. The point, in your opinion, lies in the functionality of the symbolism, if I understood correctly: I believe the film is not functional at all. If the work of art is the product of the elements selected by the author, elements that "live inside him," then the matter here is quite different. Everything seems orchestrated on the surface, but in reality, it’s the result of an ideal autopsy on von Trier's "creative core," and there are even things he would rather not see. Like certain extreme scenes that are confessions, self-referentiality and creative anarchy taken to their utmost limits. Indeed, the film is not clear, lucid, but rather appears as a random moment from a nightmare portrayed with maximum fidelity to reality, which when dissected and reduced to its bare elements is not that frightening. You are right that it’s 100% von Trier; he is the sole protagonist of the film. That's how I see it. In any case, kudos for the intent; I’m not sure I would want to watch it again soon :)

In my opinion, you understood very little about the film, which is why I'm not voting. The work is disconcerting because it’s the elegy of irrationalism; it’s a shocking and visionary human snapshot. Here, the symbolisms are not at all an aesthetic whim, but the foundation of the representation of man according to von Trier: Eden refers back to Genesis, the man and the woman of the beginning merge with the empiricity of real ones, the sinners seeking redemption. But everything is upside down. She allows her son to throw himself out of the window, (after having unconsciously, by nature, tried to harm him: the shoes put on the wrong way, making the child's feet in the X-ray look goat-like, and all the references to medieval iconography) with the three magi witnessing death (a fall, in every sense) instead of the coming. The woman here, being controlled by nature, is the anti-man; the rational/divine man, opposed to the antichrist nature/woman. The hints at psychoanalysis are not merely sketched; indeed, the reversal of reason/nature in Freudian terms is masterful, when the two characters embody what they are compelled to fight against (by nature, indeed). But von Trier's biblical vision is suffering; man has fallen, devoid of meaning in a reality that is the opposite of the divinization of life in the scriptures. It’s all in the repulsion for sex, the references to the texts of the Inquisition (the wheel driven into the calf, representing the human motor artifact replaced by the divine, self-mutilation, the fox announcing chaos) to the rationality set aside in favor of a feverish glimpse into the human condition. In fact, the film is unresolved, disconcerting at all costs, deliberately anti-ethical. (Or is the ending a half-conciliation?) For me, it’s a great film, despite its horrific contradictions.

beautiful.

very beautiful recipe, congratulations. I'm downloading it.