Anyone here seen the movie Dogville?

Just finished watching this for the first time. It was required for one of my classes. I thought it was a pretty weird and messed up movie, and I'm still trying to process it. For anyone here that has seen it, what did you think?

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Oh lord, I could go on and on about Lars Von Trier.

I have a love/hate relationship with his work, but everything he does requires discussion.

Dogville and Manderlay (the sequel) make use of the rules from a movement he championed called "Dogme95" which basically eschews any and all production values placing the emphasis solely on content and characterization.

As an experimental film I think Dogville fails. It's too long and too minimalist to have a lasting impact.

But thematically it's definitely a discussion starter.

Is it anti-American? Who knows for sure. But if you look at it in context of his body of work, I think it becomes clear that Von Trier is more of a provocateur than a polemicist.

His intention seems to be to start conversations, not to espouse a definitive opinion. As such I think Dogville ends up being a bit self-indulgent in that it just goes on too long.

Nicole was amazing though.

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Updated On: 9/10/12 at 02:58 PM

Btw, have any of you guys been following his latest? It's going to be about pornography (big shock!) and apparently Shia LaBeouf will not just be simulating sex.

Taking the method approach I guess.

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I hate LaBeouf. He skeeves me out for some reason. And he can't act. At all.



And your comment about using LeBeouf as a joke without ever really acknowledging that it's a dig is classic LVT.

I don't know if you were being serious Roscoe, but it's absolutely possible, and more than likely probable.

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Updated On: 9/10/12 at 03:27 PM

Well, if it's really about porn as the trades are reporting then bad acting may be something he will address. So casting a bad actor is just a meta joke.

Total shot in the dark there (pun intended) though.

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Btw, have any of you guys been following his latest? It's going to be about pornography (big shock!) and apparently Shia LaBeouf will not just be simulating sex.

The sex scenes will be unsimulated, but they're using body doubles, so it won't really be Shia et al. fvcking.

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Huh, interesting.

It's been all over that he's doing it himself. He even sent in an sex audition tape to LVT.

Fans who are used to seeing Shia in boy-next-door roles may well be shocked by his new direction. He will next star in Lars von Trier’s erotic drama Nymphomaniac, for which he may have to shoot real sex scenes.

“We’re doing it for real. I’m so terrified,” he says.
Link

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Nope. I remember LVT saying from the get-go that body doubles would be used, just as he had in Antichrist. I think Shia was just confused or misinformed when he initially made that statement. I haven't heard about a sex audition tape, but Shia was asked to send photos of his genitals to the casting department so they can find an exact match when casting the body doubles:

http://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/969867/shia-labeouf-gets-email-request-for-private-parts-photos

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The Kingdom is *great* (ignore the Stephen King US TV remake--everyone else has).

I'm extremely mixed on LVT as well--I love some of his work, hate others, but I guess at least I find his films almost always interesting. I saw Dogville in a near empty theatre with a good friend, and I admit both of us were in hysterics with ,laughter by the end of the film. That was the only way I could really react to it (it probably was good the theatre had maybe two other people, or else I'm sure we would have gotten some angry looks from fans). I admit LVT's whole take on America frustrates me--I'm all for trashing the US, trust me, but when the man refuses to even visit the country...

Ugh, Shia really needs to stop doing interviews. After his nude appearance in that recent music video, I'm glad they'll be using doubles...

Dogville and Anti-Christ are his best films, I think, because they best illustrate his main theme (the breakdown of moral systems that are fallacies to begin with).

I don't think Lars von Trier is a misogynist. I don't think he cares enough about people to focus his hate just on women. He proves that point in the documentary The Five Obstructions. Who spends months torturing their favorite filmmaker just because they can? Someone who hates people.

I also think that he's very heavily influenced by Ancient Greek tragedies. He has this need in his films to punish everyone for even the most minor social missteps. Melancholia makes that approach quite clear (only Lars would make his sci-fi debut by promising the destruction of Earth in the logline), though I think The Idiots is his most successful use of the concept. Those people embrace their own destruction as a game and von Trier pushes it to such a moment of absurd tension that everything has to crumble.

I like to think he uses female protagonists because he's able to use their emotions more freely on film. People expect a tearjerker to be the leading lady to be the one crying in pain. Then again, I think if anyone could make the leading man miserable in a gutting way, it would be von Trier. He pushed that a lot in Antichrist. I just don't care enough for that film to revisit it. It's so plodding and unpleasant for so long that the return to shock value near the end didn't really hit me like it should.

I admit, I kinda even forgot The Kingdom was LvT until this thread, even though I own it. Back then he seemed more interested in his actual characters and stories, in his twisted soap opera, than how many of his recent films are focused. And yes, some of it is oddly touching.

It *does* lose its way in the second season. I think it may suffer a bit in the same way, say, Twin Peaks did. Brilliant directors (though I personally am a much bigger Lynch fan than LvT), who probably just didn't have the attention span or scope to really make a long term serial--even if in both cases they did have help from TV vets co-writing with them.

"I would love to see his take on a ghost story"

I'm gonna assume then that you never saw The Kingdom?

I've always been curious to see Medea, partly because he used Carl Theodore Dreyer's un-produced script. I think the earliest film I've seen of his is Europa (I haven't seen the earlier installments in his Europe trilogy).