Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.


May 2006 activity

Total Log Entries: 54

Total Comments: 16


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Trouble Every Day / France / Germany / Japan / 2001

Denis’ is an effectively gruelling horror film, remarkably conventional in its structure, if typically ambiguous in its narrative mode. The first portion of the film is its most suspenseful and artfully realized, while the second half drifts towards an inevitable and very unpleasant conclusion.

My qualms are shallow and perhaps a little obvious: Vincent Gallo would not have been credible as a pharmaceutical researcher even if he had bothered to shave for the part; the immolation of a body is rendered with some very bad digital effects; and when Gallo ejaculates, it yields an improbable geyser that better resembles the result of someone stepping on a tube of toothpaste.

These reservations aside, the film presents a harrowing and fascinating metaphor of love and sexuality, in which the irrational impulses of lust are as dark and erratic as those of marital fidelity.

Rumsey’s (and Matt’s) thoughts.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Panorama DVD
08 May 2006 4:09 PM | Comments (3)


Comments / 3 total / Submit Comment

  1. rumsey / 8 May 2006 / 1:41 PM / URL

    Just to reiterate my own thoughts, Tindersticks’ score for this film (as well as Denis’ L’Intrus) is remarkable, and has been in heavy rotation ever since I first heard it.

  2. Ian / 8 May 2006 / 9:32 PM / URL

    The Tindersticks’ score is great, but I can’t help feeling that with Trouble Denis crosses the line between “ambiguity” and simple confusion as to what the whole point of this exercise is. Trouble is far below the achievement of the magnificent Beau travail and Vendredi soir.

  3. leo / 9 May 2006 / 9:31 AM / URL

    I haven’t kept up with Denis for a long time, so I can’t comment on how it compares to her other films. From what I recall of I Can’t Sleep, which is little, the tone of Trouble Every Day cleaves pretty closely. And to be honest, I don’t find it terribly confusing. Or to put it another way, the ambiguity of motivation is the point: both love and lust are blind; Shane’s appetites are driven by dark, unknowable forces, and his wife’s (like Leo’s) willingness to protect her spouse is the result of emotions equally obscure.

    If nothing else, this film makes me want to catch up with the Denis I’ve missed. And it makes me marvel that she was an A.D. for Wim Wenders.

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