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Nymp()maniac: Dead Eyes and Fly Fishing Strategy
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    • I have two theories as to Nymphomaniac Part 1: It is either a movie made for critics so they can feel good about being critics or an elaborate troll on anyone who came to see the movie based solely on the title.

    I say Critic's Movie, in that movies that are classic, artistic and/or just plain great are just too damn accessible. Citizen Kane is quotable and innovative, Dr Strangelove is hilarious, the original Star Wars is a cultural tradition at this point, and Do the Right Thing has black people. Oh the critics love those movies and rightly so, but it doesn't take being an Film critic to be able to love them. Sure I could tell you why Harakiri, Sorcerer or Le Samouraï is a great movie but it does not take any particular knowledge to see that its great, ah!


    Harakiri (more properly Seppuku) is a compelling treatise on the intersection of honor and hypocrisy.​


    I'm not trying to be anti-intellectual here because I am also a gigantic movie hipstress that loves old/foreign films you've probably never heard of :smug: and I love film and art. I just think that there is a specific set of work that is, if you will, pure intellectual fan-service. "Nrrrrr, we all went to school unlike Moira wo really wishes she did or could. She can't get a job in the field!"...and whoops, we're straying, I should keep that inside me where it belongs!

    Though a third theory I have, is that this is actually a troll on movie critics themselves. Lars Von Trier was at the front of the theater, beady eyes staring at every critic in the room as a triptych of a zoetrope of a naked man, the act of cunnilingus and someone playing a pipe organ (GET IT) are on screen at the same time, daring them collectively to go "No man, you're trying too hard and this movie sucks." but no, 75% of Critics went "no this is, this is...good". Maybe I'm just jaded though?

    Nymphomaniac Part 1 is about people who don't act like people, in a grungy, artless void. I can't really go through the movie blow by...uh, I can't go scene by scene through this movie because well, of course I can't. The movie is about Joe, a woman found beaten and violated in an alley by a man named Seligman, a dude as weird as she is stupid and awful. He takes her in and begins nursing her back to health as she tells stories about her "Nymphomania" through random things she sees.


    Good art movies are like a Eurogame in a way. Nothing this good is in Nymphomaniac.​


    Actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf plays her on again, off again dead eyed love interest Jerome in between bouts of her being self destructive or terrible. See, I really don't like this woman. I don't like anyone in this movie. Even people I should like or sympathize with often become unlikeable or unbearable. Its not even that people are unlikable in a good or meaningful way, they're just unbearable. I end up not caring rather than delightfully despising them, and I can't tell where the movie stands on these characters. The first thing we learn about Joe is that she always demanded more out of sunsets than other people. It's supposed to indicate that's she's just so emotional but it sounds more like what a dumb person writes on Facebook to sound smart and deep. Oh, plus she's an actual sociopath.

    How sociopathic is she? She rolls a 1D6 against a table to determine the love lives of men she's with like what an MRA thinks a woman DM would be like. Does she throw down a D20 and yell "ROLL FOR INITIATIVE" at them for foreplay? Do they need to give her character sheets in advance? This is the most unsettling and unnatural behavior but it doesn't stop there: She tells one of these men that because he won't leave his wife, their relationship is over and shoves him out the door. He returns shortly thereafter with a suitcase and his work clothes in a dry cleaning bag, having just left his wife. Don't worry though, she drove him there and comes in with the man's three children and begins a manic, passive aggressive assault on them using the children to try to make them feel any fucking shame as Joe's next date for the night arrives.


    Sorcerer is an existential thriller: Four damned men are stuck in purgatory, there is no heaven. Eat at Arby's.​


    As all of them sit there awkwardly, the wife asks how many lives she destroys in a day. She has no answer to this because she doesn't care. She tells us this in the present as the narrator: She just did not care and didn't feel anything in this situation and the movie moves on because it doesn't either. I actually really feel bad for the second date because he's done nothing wrong and is having the worst Tinder date of his life as opposed to the husband who had the brass balls required to make his his wife help move him into his mistress' house. I can't sympathize with the wife even though I should and want to, because her approach to the situation is unhinged and unbelievable. She's actively torturing her children with this shitty situation, going so far as to show them the "whore bed" in Joe's apartment, her words not mine. I have actually been in the place of those three children when my best friends father had his three girlfriends discover each other one night and let me assure you, it doesn't go like this at all!

    As an aside, during this part of the movie, she has a binder full of dicks. She has an actual collection of pictures of dude's dicks when they're not erect and aside from the racism of her narration, I think several of these dick pics are stolen. The one's with sticky notes are assuredly for the movie but of the Fibonacci of Dicks (SO DEEP, SO ARRRRT), but it throws in some filler dicks that I feel cribbed from somewhere. I really hope you licensed these dicks but I feel like I've actually seen a few of these before, and so I worry that these dicks were not properly handled.


    The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is a beautiful movie that will disgust you.​


    I can tolerate a movie about sex that isn't erotic, if it was a well crafted movie about the debilitating effects of sexual addiction. It's not though , its about a sociopath whose weapon is sex. A dumb, self centered sociopath who can't function in actual society because of her rock levels of stupidity. It's shown that she can't even do the most nominal of jobs because she has zero skills. Not that her sexual appetites get in the way, its that she has zero fucking skills. She has to have it explained to her that she needs to be qualified to hold a job. She doesn't understand work as a concept and her attempts at it paint her as someone I wouldn't trust with any task. Her first instinct as an assistant to Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf, is to grab all the loosely arranged documents\papers on his desk and haphazardly shove them all them into random drawers. Mission Accomplished, you stupid, awful woman. P.S: The movie expects you to believe she was in no shit med school at one point.

    I just don't feel anything for her so when the climax and ending of the movie is her lady parts becoming insensate because she's experiencing love, my reaction is a big "Good" followed by laughter because it fades to black to the end title card (FIN) and starts playing heavy metal. I'm edging towards my third theory here, that's too on the nose to be anything but parody. I certainly laughed at least. I also certainly didn't feel any pathos because her behavior has been so awful that this might just be the work of a vengeful god. The book of revelations warned us about you. You raped a guy, am I supposed to feel bad that you can't feel Actual Cannibal Shia Labeouf plow you?


    There is improbably no clip of the famous reveal shot in The Third Man available to me, so have a kitty. Its a natural segue because-aha, sorry...​


    So I hated this movie, if that wasn't clear. It tries way to hard to be pretentious, its unlikable and bleak in a bad way. Plus of course, the sex is awful and I can't tell if that's on purpose or not half the time. Its not erotic and also not effective if its trying to be unerotic. Its just dead eyed sex acts while Stellan Skarsgard talks about the Fibonacci sequence or fly fishing or dessert, interrupted by her being terrible. Meanwhile it actively insults your intelligence every time it flashes some overlay on the screen Stranger Than Fiction For Dummies style as it explains to you that 3+5 = 8 and 8 + 5 = 13. It helping you pee when you stumble out of the movie theater having drained your soda in boredom, is merely implied however.

    I should probably wrap this review up in a way that naturally leads to the second part I will do later, in a satisfying yet stand alone fa-FIN.


    Real ending: I can't screencap this movie so I decided to put in clips from better but less well known classic films. This film will sink into a mire of forgettable movies while these have endured and will continue to endure. It's about quality rather than the level of pretension you can muster. You are not Ingmar Bergman, this is not Persona. You can declare that you're the worlds best director, true story, but George Miller is still alive. I'm not saying George Miller is the best director in the world, but I think he has a much better resume for making that claim than you. Its a long line ahead of you, trust me.

    I'm not going to keep kicking you though, because like, I just dislike the entire cinematic circle jerk genre. Movies to me are about what I feel and think during them. They're about the joy of sharing and discussing them with others. A lot of these indie movies just don't do that for me, in the same way that I'm not the kind of person that talks about the deconstructed lasagna they ate off a board. They're forgettable and self-indulgent in a way I just don't care for, sorry.

    Maybe I'm just dumb, but I like things that are actually good or entertaining.
     
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    • Oh, I hit the video limit. Accursed lack of subscription!

    *shakes fist*
     
    Apparently people want to know what I think of this movie. Well this is a start.


    Nymphomaniac is a movie about a sociopathic rapist and the terrible people who orbit her before she throws them out like used toilet paper. Apparently it's also about fly fishing, the Fibonacci sequence, and cake forks, because hey, if you throw paint at a canvas long enough someone will call it art, so why not apply the same logic to film? This is a movie that has a lot to say -it's 117 minutes long and I felt every one of those minutes like a drop from a bucket in Chinese water torture- but none of it is of value. The protagonist, as stated before, is a horrible person. A horrible incredibly stupid person. I think the scene which, in my personal opinion, most sums up the kind of character we're dealing with here, is when after watching her dying father literally shit the bed, she goes off to fuck someone and then comes back to lube herself in front of his corpse. Yeah. That's a thing that happens.

    But don't let this convince you that I just don't like movies full of terrible people, hell Pulp Fiction is incredible, and the few decent people in that movie barely get any screen time. No, this movie is just boring. Agonizingly so. The narration is delivered in the sort of monotone I associate with the one kid in my highschool class whom to this day I suspect might had had a double digit IQ. Monotone, mumbling, full of attempts to sound smart or clever that fall flat and only make me want to beat this character to death with a tire iron even more. A good movie should catch your interest somehow, it should grab you by the shirt and shove you toward the screen and say, "Look at it!" Nymphomaniac doesn't manage that. It opens with several minutes of blackness with only sound to tell that no the file has not frozen, and then it focuses on and alley, snow drifting down, water dripping from a roof and onto a garbage can lid. And even though the shot itself is pretty nice, all I could think when confronted with this opening is, 'Oh fuck me it's one of these movies.' The kind of art film people who have never seen an art film think of when they hear the words 'art film.' Pretentious, pointless, boring, and ultimately not only forgettable but a film that you want to forget.

    "But DissMech!" You say, "It sounds like this movie made you angry! Isn't that what art is supposed to do? Provoke an emotional response?" Sure, Nymphomaniac provoked emotion in me, very occasional feelings of outrage or anger interspersed by long periods of apathy. But I can't say it's the film itself that provoked those feelings. No it's the intent behind the film, that and the fact that this garbage is wasting my goddamn time. Am I supposed to sympathize with this person? Really? She has no redeeming qualities, no interesting aspects to her personality. She is a black hole of awful where all that is good in this world goes to die. If she was a villain, people would say she wasn't a very believable villain, because she was just so pointlessly terrible. What? Am I supposed to feel bad about all the terrible things that happen to you? It's all your fault! And you've done worse to other people! Die already!

    I guess what I'm taking a very long time to say is that Nymphomaniac is shit. It's a boring terrible movie about boring terrible people. It's full of non sequiturs (because that's what art it apparently), and not only does it waste your time, it takes a dump on your intelligence while doing so. This movie offends me, not because it's immoral or obscene (though it's probably at least one of those) but because it took 2 hours of my life away and gave me less entertainment for it than a high school economics text book. This movie should be burned so that nobody ever has their time wasted by it again. Nymphomaniac probably isn't the worst made movie I've ever seen, but it is the most boring and annoying. Recommended for torture purposes only.
     
    DissMech said:
    Nymphomaniac is a movie about a sociopathic rapist and the terrible people who orbit her before she throws them out like used toilet paper. Apparently it's also about fly fishing, the Fibonacci sequence, and cake forks, because hey, if you throw paint at a canvas long enough someone will call it art, so why not apply the same logic to film? This is a movie that has a lot to say -it's 117 minutes long and I felt every one of those minutes like a drop from a bucket in Chinese water torture- but none of it is of value. The protagonist, as stated before, is a horrible person. A horrible incredibly stupid person. I think the scene which, in my personal opinion, most sums up the kind of character we're dealing with here, is when after watching her dying father literally shit the bed, she goes off to fuck someone and then comes back to lube herself in front of his corpse. Yeah. That's a thing that happens.
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    But is the protagonist more sympathetic than in Freddy got Fingered?
     
    I know this director also did "Antichrist" and "Melancholia"(?), and I only know of "Antichrist" because of the "chaos reigns" scene. From their synopses, he seems to have a thing for deeply unlikeable protagonists.
     
    DissMech said:
    Nymphomaniac probably isn't the worst made movie I've ever seen, but it is the most boring and annoying.
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    Huh. Have you seen Manos: The Hands of Fate? Because I was fairly sure it wasn't physically possible to make a more boring or annoying movie than "Driving Sequences: The Incomprehensible Mess". If Nymphomaniac managed to top that I'll be impressed. Terrified, but impressed.
     
    Another bad movie would be Cool Cat Saves the Kids. Be aware, though, after several YouTube reviewers took a crack at it, the creator, one Derek Savage, edited the film, removing some of the more cringeworthy (and therefore funny) parts from what I heard.
     
    Athene said:
    THIS IS NOT HOW PEOPLE WORK
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    I thought you weren't going to review The Room. :V
    Lunatic350 said:
    Huh. Have you seen Manos: The Hands of Fate? Because I was fairly sure it wasn't physically possible to make a more boring or annoying movie than "Driving Sequences: The Incomprehensible Mess". If Nymphomaniac managed to top that I'll be impressed. Terrified, but impressed.
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    Manos is terrible yes, but keep in mind that while Manos was one of the few movies that MST3K could not get through, it was essentially put together by community theater and people who had no idea what they were doing, as opposed to people who should have known better.

    Italian Spiderman is far better to riff. (And is available on youtube)
     
    samdamandias said:
    Manos is terrible yes, but keep in mind that while Manos was one of the few movies that MST3K could not get through, it was essentially put together by community theater and people who had no idea what they were doing, as opposed to people who should have known better.
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    Eh, I've never really cared about the behind the scenes of a film.
     
    Lunatic350 said:
    Eh, I've never really cared about the behind the scenes of a film.
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    Manos's badness is, by all accounts, very visibly the badness of a movie made by people who have no idea what they're doing.

    The badness of Nymphomaniac, on the other hand, sounds like it is very visibly the badness of a movie made by a pretentious asshole who knows exactly what he is doing.
     
    Just signed up for your Patreon, @Athene. Apologies for not chipping in earlier, Paypal doesn't seem to think I'm me. Keep up the good work.
     
    "I like young talent. When people get to be institutions, they direct pictures with their left hand and do something else with their right." - Walt Disney

    I found this today and it's great for both the sheer "whaaat?" of who said it and the fact it's often true.
     
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