Although critically acclaimed do not see Irreversible..

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And your point? Even reviews mention that it is gross, disgusting, and violent.

I think that people who see it should be prepared for an utterly revolting film (i.e., graphic rape scenes, for instance), and if you cannot stomach graphic scenes like that, then do not fool yourself: this film is at the top of the heap.

I want to see it, though, once I am finished with my semester.

Melon
 
As a woman, I could never watch anything that had a graphic rape scene in it. Too many of my friends have dealt with rape personally and told me about it. :sad:
 
well db3 you had to read subtitles, i know you don't like that

i saw it and even though i have a wide tolerance for films,

i felt diminished for seeing it and told a few friends who like foreign language and art films to stay away.


like momento it is played backwards.

the violent death scene is early on,

the characters have not been well developed yet.

because it is a hand held camera, dark, and foreign language I did not understand who died, at who?s hand, and what it meant.

it was only after reading about it i realized what happened. i liked it a little better, after that.

i may watch it again sometime because I know when to look away now.

the actress,Monica Bellucci is terrific, she is in the new bruce willis movie. it is not very good. i will look for her work in other films. she is in the matrix 2,3 i think

the same week end i saw 'irreversible' i saw ?chaos? it is a much better film and it has a woman who gets butally attacked also.
 
:angry:i was getting mad because i couldnt read those sentences fast enough,
plus the camera was jerky too:huh:

i thought i could stomach it all, i found i could not.
6 ppl left the theater outta 30.

I did not sneek in:angry:

db3
 
I ceased being scared or revolted by movies after studying production for as many years as I have. Now all I see are actors, camera / special effects, scenes, and edits.

The more "graphic" it is, the more appreciation I have for the actors / actresses whose effort made it as "realistic" emotionally as possible.

Melon
 
meggie,

i always prefer the big screen to tv.

the dark theater, no distractions, etc.
if you watch this film, small screen might be better, as YOU have some control.


here is a review of "Chaos" it is a great film, esp. for feminine empowerment.

Summary: Definitely Not a French "Thelma and Louise": Feminism With a Jolt!

"Chaos" has been described by some reviewers as a French "Thelma and Louise." Not so. "Chaos" is that rare film seamlessly and believably meshing extreme violence and brutality with wry comedy. Its two female protagonists are winners in the great Game of Life (Thelma and Louise lost out on that score, big time).

Helene (Catherine Frot) has a successful career and is married to a business-obsessed, vacuous, philandering fool, Paul (Vincent Landon). Their twenty year or so marriage has produced ample material comforts and a son, Fabrice (Aurelian Wiile), who's living proof that a kid can turn out to have less sensitivity and intelligence than your average Parisian poodle. If my son turned out like Fabrice...well, I can't even contemplate the possibility.

On an evening out, Paul and Helene encounter a young woman desperately fleeing from three rabid pursuers. Paul locks the car doors leaving the hapless victim to endure a horrific beating, shown in all its gory. Paul's prime concern is to get his vehicle into a car wash (a pretty spiffy one at that) so the spattered blood on his windshield won't be noticed by police). A great citizen is he.

Deeply disturbed by Paul's detached callousness, Helene seeks out the woman who is near death in an intensive care unit. Noemie (Rachida Brakni) is a prostitute who tried to run away from the gang of thugs who pimped her first on the street and then to high-income but low-class businessmen. Brakni's portrayal as a determined woman fighting death and the threat of lifelong disability is intense, involving and believable. She isn't The Happy Hooker - she's the surviving woman, her strength coming from a deep interior that even drug addiction can not erase.

Helene plays an increasingly important role in helping Noemie to recover from her grievous wounds. It's neither a spoiler nor a surprise that they form a bond of trust and friendship and embark on a mission of ...what? Justice? Vengeance? Reparations? Director Coline Serreau unfolds the story in a well-filmed series of scenes that never lose the viewer's attention (at least I couldn't take my eyes off the screen).

Paul and Fabrice could be seen as stereotypes of fatuous, self-indulgent, essentially helpless-without-women men except that they are soooo real. Helene is no victim - she understands her menfolk's foibles and her decisions are her own, not the product of male manipulation and dominance. Ms. Frot plays her role beautifully with slight facial expressions telling much.

Yes, this is a film where most of the women (including Paul's neglected mom) are the Good Gals and the male characters start at jerks and work their way down the food chain to abusers and rapists. But the interplay between the domestic and romantic comedy and the abyss of forced prostitution and exploitation comes across as simply different sides of women's life experience. In that regard "Chaos" is quietly compelling.

Noemi is from an Algerian family and the film swats at Islamic customs that demean women and control their destinies. I don't expect this movie to be a hit in Islamic countries. "Chaos" pulls few punches in depicting the reality of the bleak futures in store for girls raised in the ultra-materialistic and wholly bigoted families exemplified by Noemi's family.

8/10.
 
deep said:
the actress,Monica Bellucci is terrific, she is in the new bruce willis movie. it is not very good. i will look for her work in other films. she is in the matrix 2,3 i think

She is. She's also going to be in Mel Gibson's movie about Christ--she's playing Mary Magdalene if I remember right.
 
monica is beautiful

irreversible.jpg

irreversible_2.jpg

never take the underpass

irreversible_3.jpg

utter despair

E online review, they DID NOT like it
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some spoiling here
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If you feel sick watching Irr?versible, it won't be because of stale popcorn. That's because director Gaspar Noe manages to disgust his audience in two gut-churning ways. First, his backwards, Memento-style, day-in-the-life story of a young couple is constantly off balance due to his ever-moving handheld camerawork (which he flips upside down a half-dozen times). Then, we're witnesses to both a clubgoer getting his skull crushed during a brawl and a brutal rape in an underground tunnel. Okay, so Noe's telling us that life can change in one, horrifying moment, but his movie feels more like a stunt to stir up chatter than a revolutionary work of art. By the end--or is that the beginning?--you'll wish you could turn back time to slightly before you walked into the theater.



Roger Ebert liked it??



BY ROGER EBERT


"Irreversible" is a movie so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable.

The camera looks on unflinchingly as a woman is raped and beaten for several long, unrelenting minutes, and as a man has his face pounded in with a fire extinguisher, in an attack that continues until after he is apparently dead. That the movie has a serious purpose is to its credit but makes it no more bearable. Some of the critics at the screening walked out, but I stayed, sometimes closing my eyes, and now I will try to tell you why I think the writer and director, Gaspar Noe, made the film in this way.

First, above all, and crucially, the story is told backward. Two other films have famously used that chronology: Harold Pinter's "Betrayal," the story of a love affair that ends (begins) in treachery, and Christopher Nolan's "Memento" (2000), which begins with the solution to a murder and tracks backward to its origin. Of "Betrayal," I wrote that a sad love story would be even more tragic if you could see into the future, so that even this joyous moment, this kiss, was in the shadow of eventual despair.

Now consider "Irreversible." If it were told in chronological order, we would meet a couple very much in love: Alex (Monica Bellucci) and Marcus (Vincent Cassel). In a movie that is frank and free about nudity and sex, we see them relaxed and playful in bed, having sex and sharing time. Bellucci and Cassel were married in real life at the time the film was made and are at ease with each other.

Then we would see them at a party, Alex wearing a dress that makes little mystery of her perfect breasts. We would see a man hitting on her. We would hear it asked how a man could let his lover go out in public dressed like that: Does he like to watch as men grow interested? We would meet Marcus' best friend, Pierre (Albert Dupontel), who himself was once a lover of Alex.

Then we would follow Alex as she walks alone into a subway tunnel, on a quick errand that turns tragic when she is accosted by Le Tenia (Jo Prestia), a pimp who brutally and mercilessly rapes and beats her for what seems like an eternity, in a stationary-camera shot that goes on and on and never cuts away.



And then we would follow Marcus and Pierre in a search for La Tenia, which leads to a s&m club named the Rectum, where a man mistaken for La Tenia is discovered and beaten brutally, again in a shot that continues mercilessly, this time with a hand-held camera that seems to participate in the beating.

As I said, for most people, unwatchable. Now consider what happens if you reverse the chronology, so that the film begins with shots of the body being removed from the night club and tracks back through time to the warm and playful romance of the bedroom scenes. There are several ways in which this technique produces a fundamentally different film:

1. The film doesn't build up to violence and sex as its payoff, as pornography would. It begins with its two violent scenes, showing us the very worst immediately and then tracking back into lives that are about to be forever altered.

2. It creates a different kind of interest in those earlier scenes, which are foreshadowed for us but not for the characters. When Alex and Marcus caress and talk, we realize what a slender thread all happiness depends on. To know the future would not be a blessing but a curse. Life would be unlivable without the innocence of our ignorance.

3. Revenge precedes violation. The rapist is savagely punished before he commits his crime. At the same time, and this is significant, Marcus is the violent monster of the opening scenes, and the crime has not yet been seen; it is double ironic later that Marcus assaulted the wrong man.

4. The party scenes, and the revealing dress, are seen in hindsight as a risk that should not have been taken. Instead of making Alex look sexy and attractive, they make her look vulnerable and in danger. While it is true that a woman should be able to dress as she pleases, it is not always wise.

5. We know by the time we see Alex at the party, and earlier in bed, that she is not simply a sex object or a romantic partner, but a fierce woman who fights the rapist for every second of the rape. Who uses every tactic at her command to stop him. Who loses but does not surrender. It makes her sweetness and warmth much richer when we realize what darker weathers she harbors. This woman is not simply a sensuous being, as women so often simply are in the movies, but a fighter with a fierce survival instinct.

The fact is, the reverse chronology makes "Irreversible" a film that structurally argues against rape and violence, while ordinary chronology would lead us down a seductive narrative path toward a shocking, exploitative payoff. By placing the ugliness at the beginning, Gaspar Noe forces us to think seriously about the sexual violence involved. The movie does not end with rape as its climax and send us out of the theater as if something had been communicated. It starts with it, and asks us to sit there for another hour and process our thoughts. It is therefore moral - at a structural level.

As I said twice and will repeat again, most people will not want to see the film at all. It is so violent, it shows such cruelty, that it is a test most people will not want to endure. But it is unflinchingly honest about the crime of rape. It does not exploit. It does not pander. It has been said that no matter what it pretends, pornography argues for what it shows. "Irreversible" is not pornography.






Copyright ? Chicago Sun-Times Inc.
 
I don't think I will ever see this. However, a friend of mine said it was an "effective film" meaning good...but obviously not something to see if you're in the mood for fun.
 
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