mikl, on 20 May 2014 - 6:15 AM, said:
Oh my gawd, don't get me started on Lars Von Trier!! Somehow I've managed to see a fair amount of his work, including that Das Kingdom show from way back forever ago.
He loathes his audience and I find his style to be so tedious, yet... so engrossing. Like a slow motion train wreck you cannot fix your eyes from. Or escape said train wreck's flying debris, for that matter.
The last Lars Von Trier film I saw was Melancholia. Which is strange, because I told myself after I watched Dogville that I would never, ever, ever subject myself to another Lars Von Trier film. Yet there I was one evening, watching Melancholia. It was horrible. But so peculiarly engaging was the cinematography, along with the bizarre story arch and the way in which two of the main characters transposed in their emotional development over the course of the film. I hated it. But liked it. And I hated myself for it.
My husband is a big fan of Lars Von Trier and I think he gets off on watching me squirm or loudly protest whenever he so much as whispers the suggestion of settling in and taking a viewing. There's an art house theater in my city that was showing Nymphomaniac. He wanted to go, I told him to have fun without me. He didn't go. But I know the score though. A few months from now we're going to be bored one night sitting on our couch with nothing to watch, and I will submit once again, to the husband's suggestion "hey let's watch Lars Von Trier... come on, I know you really want to watch Nymphomaniac." Maybe I'm just a sadist.
Oddly, I liked Dancer In The Dark (the one Lars Von Trier film my husband didn't really care for).