Nymphomaniac: Vol. II

Nymphomaniac: Vol. II; erotic psychological drama / tragedy, Denmark / Germany / France / Belgium, 2013; D: Lars von Trier, S: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Shia LaBeouf, Mia Goth, Christian Slater, Jamie Bell, Willem Dafoe 

The middle-aged woman Joe continues to confess her life story to bachelor Seligman in his apartment: while she was married to Jerome, and they had a son, she suddenly lost her ability to achieve sexual pleasure. Jerome passively allowed her to see other men. Joe tried everything: she randomly talked to an interpreter to ask an African migrant to have sex with her, but later, in the hotel room, the African migrant brought his friend with him to have a threesome, after which Joe left. Joe accepted to see sadist K, who slapped and whipped her butt. When her son almost fell off from the window, Jerome files for divorce and brings the kid for adoption. Joe became pregnant and performed an abortion herself at home. She attended a sex-addict therapy, but eventually blasted them for rejecting their passion. Joe was hired by L to be a debt collector, assissted by two bodyguards. She recruited a teenage girl, P, to be her apprentice. P wanted to have a lesbian relationship with Joe, but Joe refused. P then had an affair with Jerome. Joe wanted to shoot Jerome, but her gun failed to fire. Seligman admits he never had sex. When Joe goes to sleep in bed, Seligman touches her butt and wants to sleep with her, upon which Joe shoots him.

If you can't keep the viewers' attention through inspiration, shock. That seems to be the motto of Lars von Trier's second part of "Nymphomaniac", which forms the final part of his 'depression trilogy', yet judging by the finished result, it is more suitable to be called von Trier's 'creative crisis trilogy'. The film is an aimless mess of episode after episode, without reaching a specific goal, lingering for some reason on several gruesome details which feel like empty provocation. Its biggest problem: it's not even sexy. Von Trier directs the scarce erotic sequences as if an alien would try to recreate human sexuality. In one example, at the sex-addict therapy, one woman tells about her sexual encounter with other men: she invited them, and then lied down naked with her back on a hill of coal. She then used the dirt from coal to besmirch the black soot over her breasts and stomach. You would rather want to give her soap than to think to touch her in that filth. In another, Joe arranges for a sexual encounter with an African migrant in the hotel room. But for some reason, the migrant arrives with his friend and they want a threesome, even though they don't speak her language. Would a migrant really risk ruining his chance at sex like that? For all he knows, the woman could be terrified and run away when a third, uninvited person appeared. At best, he would first have sex with her, and then subtly ask her if she would like a threesome next time. In this edition, this sequence feels fake and unconvincing. The worst moment is the infamous self-abortion procedure by Joe at her home, in which she inserts three tubes deep inside her vagina, equipped even with an X-ray image of a sharp tube penetrating the uterus to pierce a fetus, which is so disgusting and intolerable it makes you want to throw up. Does von Trier want to make a movie about sexuality or to traumatize viewers? He himself seems to be confused as to what he wants to say here, and thus this misguided tone contaminated the entire film. Far below the best movies about sexuality with taste, such as Nishima's "In the Realm of the Senses", Virgo's "Lie With Me" or Medem's "Sex and Lucia", which look at this ill-conceived movie with pity.

Grade:+

To All the Boys I've Loved Before

To All the Boys I've Loved Before; romanic comedy, USA, 2018; D: Susan Johnson, S: Lana Condor, Noah Centineo, Janel Parrish, Anna Cathcart, Andrew Bachelor, Trezzo Mahoro, Madeleine Arthur

Lara Jean is a teenage girl living with her widoved father and two sisters, Kitty and Margot. When her older sister Margot goes to study in Scotland, she breaks up with her boyfriend Josh. Lara Jean has a crush on Josh, but realizes it would be inapropriate to date her sister's ex. Lara Jean wrote five love letters to the guys she has a crush on, yet never sent them. One day, her letters are gone and were mailed by Kitty to Peter, Josh and Lucas, who is gay. In order to deflect from talking with Josh about the letter, Lara Jean kisses Peter, and they also decide to fake a relationship to make Peter's ex Gen jealous. When Peter really gets feelings for Lara Jean, it causes a lot of troubles, but in the end they truly become a couple.

Based on Jenny Han's popular teen romantic comedy novel, "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" is considered the best entry in this film trilogy, a sweet, honest, humble, loveable and funny little film with a great lead, Lana Condor, who plays Lara Jean with charm. The concept of someone sending the heroine's unsent love letters is tantalizing, though it is too quickly concluded when Lara Jean decides to lead a "pretend relationship" with Peter, which becomes the real, unannounced new plot of the story from around 40 minutes in. The movie starts refreshingly daft: Lara Jean imagines she is in a romance novel, seeing Josh on the meadow, all until she is hit in the face with a pillow, as the camera pans to the left to reveal her sister in the house who threw it, and then the camera pans right, revealing the "normal" Lara Jean in bed, in a cool match cut. Sadly, the rest of the story is less inspired, running sometimes better and sometimes weaker, depending on how snappy the dialogue is. Some lines are great ("How does he look at me?" - "Like you're a sexy little Rubik's cube. He can't figure you out, but he's having fun trying." / "Look, her logic was off, but her heart was in the right place!" - "Her face is gonna be in the wrong place!"), yet there are also long empty spots in between. Both the actors playing Lara Jean's crushes act self-congratulatory and do not feel genuine, whereas the story needed more sharpness, yet it is overall an endearing and sympathetic depiction of the chaos time of high school life.

Grade:++

Seinfeld (Season 8)

Seinfeld; comedy series, USA, 1997, D: Andy Ackerman, S: Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Michael Richards, Wayne Knight, Jerry Stiller

Susan's parents name George the head of Susan foundation, much to his dismay... George uses the photo of Susan to date other women for pity... Jerry is bothered that his new girlfriend has big, "man's hands"... Elaine hates "The English Patient", but everyone else loves it... Kramer cannot sleep due to too bright neon lights of a chicken restaurant seen through his window... Everyone feels Jerry's new girlfriend is terrible, but he himself cannot find a single flaw about her... When his dentist converts to Judaism and starts making jokes about Jews, Jerry is angered... Elaine inspires a man to make a cake shop selling only muffin tops, but the rest of the muffins need to be disposed off... In order to get pity from women and get a date, George pretends he is an Arkansas tourist in New York, working for Tyler Chicken. However, this gets George fired from his job, since his boss makes a deal to exchange him for food from Tyler Chicken. 

Season 8 is creatively a big fall for "Seinfeld", making the season at times even weaker and overstretched than the 1st season, caused by the departure of co-writer Larry David. Indeed, it seems Jerry Seinfeld spends the entire first 13 episodes struggling to find David's "missing link" and make sense of his own show, yet he eventually does get a hang of it in the last nine episodes. Some early episodes are embarassing in its banal attempts at humor, with jokes so lame and silly they feel like an episode from some cartoonish sitcom. For instance, in episode 8.10 Kramer decides to take the cheaper dog medicine for his cough, but starts displaying dog-like behavior, resulting in several weak jokes such as the one where Jerry is driving him in the car and Kramer just escapes and acts like a dog. However, he character of George (great Jason Alexander) saves the episode: upon hearing that a committee will grant a lovely apartment to a man who survived Andrea Doria, George takes this as a challenge (!) and speaks in front of the committee to try to gain even bigger pity by listing all the misfortunes and tragedies that happened in his life, in a glorius "take that!" moment. 

Episode 8.11 is somewhat better, but exclusively again thanks to George: a woman working in the photo store gives a photo of women's underwear to George, who interprets this as the woman trying to seduce him, so Kramer makes a photoshoot of him to give it to the photo store for development. The photoshoot sequence is hilarious, especially in an insane moment where George, in his underwear, randomly stretches his hand out towards the photo camera, in a pointless pose. Episode 8.11 involving a rooster trained by Kramer and Jerry for a fight is one of the weakest episodes, but other episodes still have that witty observations about life, from Kramer having trouble sleeping in the same bed with his girlfriend (Sarah Silverman) because she keeps tossing and turning, up to George complaining about hair growth at advanced age ("It's like puberty that never stops. Ear puberty, nose puberty, knuckle puberty..."). In the funny episode 8.15 Elaine is mistaken for "Susie" by a woman superior at work, but fails to correct it out of fear of sounding disobedient, culminating in the sequence where the boss and said woman call a meeting with both Elaine and "Susie", but since only Elaine is in the office, she carefully plays both roles without mentioning her own name. The following episode, 8.16, even tops it, featuring a great pay-off: sufficient to say it involves three random events (a sewing machine on the road; Newman hitting it with his truck; flammable tar on the road) merging into a perfect, hilarious disaster at the end. However, the last episode is an anticlimax, Seinfeld's opening and closing stand-up comedy bits are sadly absent (probably due to his exhaustion from too many episodes), whereas the first episodes are disappointing, all leading to the conclusion that "Seinfeld" seasons have a horshoe curve when it comes to quality.

Grade:++

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; art-film / drama, Belgium / France, 1975; D: Chantal Akerman, S: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Yves Bical

Bruxelles. Jeanne is a housewife in her 40s, living in a small apartment together with her teenage son Sylvain after the death of her husband. She spends her day making lunch, dinner, and occasionally having sex with men for money in the bedroom. In the evening, she goes out for a walk with Sylvain. They get a letter from her aunt in Canada. Sylvain goes to a Flemish school to be with his friend. On the second day, Jeanne becomes more nervous and erratic. She goes to pay her bills at the post office and bring Sylvain's shoes for repair to the shoemaker. On the third day, Jeanne sits for a long time on the chair. After a customer has sex with her, she takes scissors and stabs him in the neck, killing him. Jeanne then returns back to sit at the table.

You know 2022 is a bad year when the Sight & Sound poll released that year picked "Jeanne Dielman" as the best film of all time, in the critic's category. Chantal Akerman's art-film is a good meditation on the existentialist themes of loneliness, isolation and feeling of empty existence, yet it drags on for far longer than its point can sustain it. This is a movie that needed a better editor: Akerman opted for an "epic about boredom" with a running time of 3 hours, yet the movie didn't require anything above the 1.5 hours mark. While such long, static 5-minute kitchen scenes of the title heroine dipping pork meat in eggs, and then in flour and bread crumbs to prepare schnitzels make for interesting recipes, what does the cinema viewer get from them? As the book "1001 Movies You Must See" observes, Akerman aims to capture the "drab routine of her life in real time", so that the viewers can sense and experience how it looks like to be this housewife, articulating a depressing mood of a woman who has nothing going for her in this void life. Jeanne's bizarre, radical decision in the penultimate scene is almost a sort of protest against the grey world, and the movie sets it up subtly—on the first day, Jeanne does everything perfectly (dinner, prostitution as she puts the money in the porcelain in the living room...), but on the second day, cracks start to appear, as she becomes sloppy at times (she overcooks a meal on the stove and thus throws it into the trash can; she forgets to put the lid on the porcelain with the money...), and on the third day, everything seems to go wrong for her, showing her quiet mental collapse. However, themes alone don't make up a movie—"Jeanne Dielman" is thinly written and directed, without much ingenuity or creativity that would stand out. This life routine goes so far that one gets the impression than anything in life is worthy for an Akerman movie, no matter how trivial, making even "Seinfeld" seem significant. The main strategy of the film is almost self-defeating: Akerman wants to depict how boring and monotone life is by making a boring and monotone film. 

Grade:++

Seinfeld (Season 7)

Seinfeld; comedy series, USA, 1996, D: Andy Ackerman, S: Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Michael Richards, Wayne Knight, Jerry Stiller, Heidi Swedberg

Jerry thinks he has too high standards towards his girlfriend, which causes George to return to his ex, Susan, and propose her. However, Jerry breaks up with his girlfriend, so George starts having second thoughts... Elaine cannot sleep from a dog barking, so she has Kramer and Newman kidnap it... An African who overslept the Olympics stays at Elaine for a New York marathon, but Jerry wants to make sure he wakes up on time and doesn’t trust Elaine’s alarm clock... George doesn’t want to share his credit card password with Susan... Jerry gets the phone number of a woman he liked from an AIDS walk list... George is angry that a friend wanted to hook him up with Marisa Tomei, but he is already engaged... George becomes his boss’ favorite employee when he keeps buying him Calzone, but then George is banned from buying in the Italian restaurant... While licking the adhesive for their wedding invitations, Susan is accidentally poisoned, and thus George’s wedding is canceled.  

Season 7 of "Seinfeld" is a bit weaker than seasons 4 & 5, since a certain sense of mechanical routine entered these stories, yet it still has more than enough fresh humor and 'sleaze charm' to entertain better than some modern comedy shows. Some moments still have that typical sharp observations about life, such as in the episode “The Wink” where Jerry asks Elaine what percentage of the people is attractive and suitable to date, and her estimate is “25%”, but Jerry doesn’t agree: “No way, it’s more like 4 to 6%! It's a 20 to one shot!” The dinner with the Ross family also has some fine lines, such as the wife commenting on her husband, the writer: “If I had a dime for each time he wrote a book, I would be broke.”  In the episode "The Shower Head", Seinfeld has a sense for dark humor while talking to his Uncle Leo: “Look at you, you're disgusting. You're bald, you're paunchy, all kinds of sounds are emanating from your body twenty-four hours a day. If there's a woman that can take your presence for more than ten consecutive seconds, you should hang on to her like grim death. Which is not far off, by the way!" - "But she's an anti-Semite!" - "Can you blame her?!” 

Other episodes also have funny moments: in one, George plans to name his future kid Seven. George’s dad finally buys himself a pool table in the house, but when playing with Kramer, they realize the room is too small for them to swing or manoeuvre cue sticks, as they always hit them on the wall. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has consistently been better and better with each season as Elaine, and reached a zenith here, since she is in best comedy shape and manages to outshine almost anyone of the regular cast. Some of her facial expressions and sassy behavior really is brilliant. On the other hand, numerous episodes feel underwhelming. "The Soup Nazi" episode has gained such a high reputation and was referenced from "Scrubs" to "The Thundermans" that when watched it feels below all this hype. It is good and mildly amusing, yet much more could have been made out of the concept of an ultra-strict cook who punishes any client's untypical behavior vaguely interpreted as inobedient by banning him or her ("No soup for you!"), though Elaine is perfect when she "breaks" him in the final scene. Several epsiodes are only mildly amusing in this season. One wonders why "The Bottle Deposit" episode had to be a two-part episode when it is mediocre and leads into nothing. And the ultimate fate of Susan, George's fiancee, in the final episode is misguided and unworthy for her. It is more cringe than funny, and is the rare time when George isn't sympathetic anymore, but despicable. Seinfeld was feeling exhausted by coming up with new episodes by that time, yet the viewers can still find many situations from everyday life they can identifiy with. 

Grade:++