Gasper Noe's "Enter the Void"

[Dark Victory]

Gasper Noe's (Irreversible, Carne and Irreversible) new film. What else do you need to know?

For a quick sypnosis, Oscar and his sister Linda are recent arrivals in Tokyo. Oscar's a small time drug dealer, and Linda works as a nightclub stripper. One night, Oscar is caught up in a police bust and shot. As he lies dying, his spirit, faithful to the promise he made his sister ­ that he would never abandon her - refuses to abandon the world of the living. It wanders through the city, his visions growing evermore distorted, evermore nightmarish. Past, present and future merge in a hallucinatory maelstrom. Noe has described it as a "Psychedelic Melodrama".

The film was shown at Cannes last year, and like Irreversible, it was met with a mixed response. Though, no one could deny the film's unprecedented visual presentation.

Spoiler

"The only avant-garde film in Cannes' Competition is Gaspar Noé's 'Enter the Void,' which picks up the gauntlet thrown down by the Wachowskis' 'Speed Racer' of an endlessly malleable cinema of acid-trip colors and plastic gymnastics and runs with it to endless, forceful, and nihilistic results." Daniel Kasman in The Auteurs' Notebook: "Springing from ideas explored in video games from the past ten years and by Stanley Kubrick (stealing from '2001' wholesale but also brilliantly pursuing and exploring 'The Shining'), 'Enter the Void' literally takes a first-person view of its protagonist - a heavily tripping American drug dealer (Nathaniel Brown) living in Tokyo - until he dies and his vision is freed from his body, which proceeds to fly around the city following what happens to his corpse and to his beloved sister (Paz de la Huerta)."
"Although he remains dedicated to shaking up viewers, to getting under their skin and into their nervous systems, Mr Noé has mellowed," argues the New York Times' Manohla Dargis. This "is an exceptional work, though less because of its story, acting or any of the usual critical markers. What largely distinguishes it, beyond the stunning cinematography, is that this is the work of an artist who's trying to show us something we haven't seen before, even while he liberally samples images and ideas from Stanley Kubrick and the entirety of American avant-garde cinema. The grungy milieu and calculated shocks might have been designed to make you flee - even while your attention is tethered to the camera - but, really, these aren't the point. The point is the filmmaking."
"Almost defying definition in contemporary cinematic terms," writes Screen's Mike Goodridge, "Gaspar Noe's third feature film 'Enter The Void' is a wild, hallucinatory mind**** for adults which sees the director explore new shooting techniques and ambitious special effects to capture a young man's journey after death. More experience than narrative, it runs to a massive 163 minutes, meandering and careening in and out of story and into visual realms and moods that are nothing short of hypnotic. It is a film that will instantly achieve cult status among young adults. If audiences care to, they can lose themselves in Noe's images and trip on his imagination. If they don't, they will be bored to tears."
This is "perhaps the most challenging film to premiere in the Cannes Official Selection this year," blogs Matt Dentler. "I have a soft spot for the enfants terribles like Lukas Moodyson, Carlos Reygadas and Lars Von Trier. What these guys are doing is some of the bravest fictional filmmaking left in the world. And, like these fellow filmmakers, Gaspar Noe may need to go back in and trim his latest work. Not because it shouldn't shock and dare, but because it shouldn't meander."
As noted earlier, for Screen, Geoffrey Macnab reports that Noé "is hatching a sex film. He says the as yet untitled film will be a 'a joyful porn movie - a joyful movie with explicit sex.'"
Update: "Noé shows none of the excellent flourishes he used in 'Irréversible,'" writes David Bourgeois for Movieline: "the clever and effective use of flashbacks and reverse chronological storytelling used to weave the gripping story of a Paris woman savagely raped. Instead, we get a laughable and pointless mélange of flashbacks leading up to the shooting (which yields the following information: Oscar was a drug dealer), and scene upon scene of spectacularly colorful drug-induced hallucinations. Speaking of laughable, a few notes about the acting, if you can call it that. It's so atrocious, that it's a wonder if it was intentional, though I think that's giving Noé far too much credit.... To be fair, Noé rushed to get this print to Cannes - there weren't even open or closing credits or a title sequence. But even at two hours let's say, it's still unwatchable."
Updates, 5/23: "Billed by director Gaspar Noé as a 'psychedelic melodrama' inspired by his hallucinogen-powered screening of 'Lady in the Lake,' 'Enter the Void' suggests the Gallic provocateur should get some better drugs," writes Rob Nelson in Variety. "Not clever enough to be truly pretentious, Noé's tiresomely gimmicky film about a low-level Tokyo drug dealer who enjoys one long, last trip after dying proves to be the ne plus ultra of nothing much. Having come in under the wire for Cannes competition, 'Enter the Void' may once again be ready to enter the editing room."
"It goes without saying that the film is violent, but its obsessive emphasis on sex and drugs - to the point that most viewers are going to feel utterly bludgeoned by both - makes it virtually unwatchable, especially at its unofficial 'director's cut' length of 160 minutes," writes Peter Brunette in the Hollywood Reporter. "Couples coupling in fascinatingly diverse ways are shown over and over, and the whole thing ends in a kind of apocalyptic and ultra-silly sperm-meets-egg apotheosis that seems shot by what one wag of a critic later labeled a 'vagina-cam.' It also is suggested that Oscar's spirit crashes into a baby named Oscar in a plane flying overhead, presumably leading to his reincarnation."
"In terms of sheer mindblowing formal astonishment, Gaspar Noé's 'Enter the Void' is the movie I've been waiting for the entire festival," writes Mike D'Angelo at the AV Club. "It wouldn't be quite accurate to say it's like nothing you've ever seen, because you may have seen Noé's 'Irréversible,' which he now claims amounted to an elaborate test run for this project. I can believe it, even though - as sometimes happens - the sketch turned out superior to the actual canvas.... If only the movie's moronic content didn't keep distracting you from its exhilarating form."
"Gaspar Noé's 'Enter the Void' is disquieting and dreamy, as much a psychologically charged space as it is a conventional film narrative," blogs Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker. "Noé's decadent Tokyo riff on the 'Tibetan Book of the Dead' is structured around births, a death, and finds its twists through hypnotic tracking shots, strobe-lit effects and vertiginous clockwheeled pans. The film conceives its own sense of filmic structure, which makes the criticism that it's too long a bit puzzling to me. In that the consciousness of the protagonist becomes largely inaccessible to the viewer in the film's second half, I suppose this section is challenging, but to me that's where its eeriest psychological moments are. I liked it a lot."
"A massive narrative failure with simplistic plot devices, subpar acting and a droning structural approach that begs to be not trimmed but amputated, 'Void' nevertheless represents some of the most inventive filmmaking at the fest," writes Stephen Garrett at Time Out New York. "If there's one thing to be said about Cannes, it's the fact that three thousand people patiently sat through Noe's kaleidoscope of explicit images."
Updates, 5/26: "It cannot be denied that Noe is making an attempt to radically redefine the rules of cinema, and has succeeded in that he's made a film that looks like nothing that you've ever seen," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Comparisons to Kubrick have been made, but they barely scratch the surface; the only thing that comes close, for me, as reference to understanding what it feels like to watch this film, is to suggest that you imagine a two and a half hour live action remake of the flying stuff from 'Waking Life,' with that film's dimestore philosophy replaced with stoner TIbetan Buddhist claptrap, incest anxiety and a lot (a lot a lot a lot a lot) of naked, writhing Paz de la Huerta. That 'Enter the Void' would be destined to become a college classic if anyone dared to release it is to essentially say two things: its innovation is entirely at the service of saying nothing worth contemplating whilst lucid, and that doesn't really matter because it's so visually seductive that it essentially flips the brain off switch for you."
Christoph Huber at La lectora provisoria: "Peranson>, correctly, right after the screening: 'Conceivably, the most stupid film ever made.'"
Update, 5/28: "Noé's self-proclaimed 'psychedelic melodrama' arrived 15 minutes longer than the published 150-minute running time, leading to widespread speculation that the Cannes version was in fact 'unfinished' - a generous designation for a film that should never have been started in the first place," writes LA Weekly's Scott Foundas. "Yet in Cannes, where no empty provocation is without its perverse defenders, there were some (including, rumor had it, at least one jury member) who praised 'Enter the Void' as a work of visual virtuosity, perhaps agreeing with the movie's zonked-out protagonist that 'dying would be the ultimate trip, you know?'"

http://www.ifc.com/blogs/thedaily/2009/05/cannes-enter-the-void.php

Eric D. Snider agreed that, like Irreversible, it may be too polarizing for many, no one can deny the incredible visuals Noe and his team were able to capture.

Spoiler

Thanks to Irreversible, the notoriously graphic film that stirred up Cannes and Sundance audiences a few years ago, Gaspar Noé is already well known as a pusher of buttons and a churner of stomachs. His latest, Enter the Void, is certainly not a departure from that, but it is quite a bit more palatable, not to mention more thematically mature. From a technical standpoint, it is a marvel. From every other standpoint, it is totally jacked up. But I mean that in a good way. I think.

Noé revels in trying the viewer's patience, and Enter the Void commences its assault in the opening credits, which are set to pounding techno music and bright flashing lights, and sped up so fast they're impossible to read. It's Noé's little joke, rushing hilariously through the credits in order to leave more time for the film itself ... which is 161 minutes long and is frequently, shall we say, unhurried.

The story is about a young American man named Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) who lives in Tokyo and spends his time taking drugs. (He is able to support this habit by also selling them.) His sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta), works at a sex club. Orphaned as young children, Oscar and Linda have had to stick together, finding surrogates to fill the emotional and other needs normally filled by parents. Oscar and Linda have a lot of issues.

Oscar's issues are complicated slightly by his death. This occurs early in the film and is foreshadowed by a conversation with a friend, Alex (Cyril Roy), about the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But death is not the end for Oscar. His spirit -- or soul, or consciousness, or ghost -- rises from his body and floats over the rest of the film, drifting from place to place, an omniscient observer of the aftermath of his death.

He also takes a trip down memory lane, death having freed him from the usual constraints of linear time. We join him in reliving past experiences -- the accident that took his parents, his and Linda's childhood, the events that happened just before the movie started -- and all of these are presented as vignettes, dreamy snippets of memory, rather than fully formed "scenes."

And I'm not kidding when I say we "join" Oscar in these experiences. We are in his head. The entire film is told from his perspective -- often literally, with the camera as his eyes, and Oscar only visible to us if he looks in a mirror. (Those shots are pretty nifty, if you think about it. How did Noé hide the camera?) In other scenes, we see the back of Oscar's head, following him around as if in a first-person-shooter video game. To show us Oscar's uninhibited floating from one place to another, the camera is positioned over the set and pointed straight down; when we arrive at the new destination, we glide down to eye level and continue to observe. In some cases, Oscar appears to float right into someone, apparently accessing their consciousness and seeing through their eyes. The effect is unsettling: I suspect that the process of dying and then wandering around as a spirit would probably look, sound, and feel like this. At any rate, it's the most effective representation of it I've ever seen.

If the film sounds like it must be visually astonishing, it is. How were these sets constructed to allow so much overhead photography? Where are the cuts being made in the shots that look continuous but must have involved multiple sets? How much digital trickery is used? Like David Fincher, Noé loves to make the camera do impossible things and access impossible locations, and it's not just to show off. In this case, it's the best possible way to make Oscar our avatar.

Also like David Fincher, Noé likes to examine the dark, distasteful sides of humanity. Enter the Void is about death, but that's the least shocking of its themes. Incest, abortion, and the sexualization of children are also on the docket, not to mention the various sleazy dynamics between pimps and hookers, dealers and users, masters and slaves. Have you ever thought about how breast-feeding is a natural and wholesome thing between mother and child, but how most adult men are also sexually aroused by breasts? Gaspar Noé has! When a man sleeps with a woman old enough to be his mother, what does it mean? Noé has some theories (as did Sophocles and Freud).

There is plenty of sex on display, some of it titillating but most of it sad or angry or hollow. This, too, is one of Noé's themes, the idea that sex can mean so many different things, can be good or bad, all depending on who's involved and what the circumstances are. (See also: the dual nature of breasts.) Some of what Noé does is insanely over the top, though I admit he does take the first-person point of view to its logical extremes. Shocking though some of the events may be, everything fits with what came before. Nothing is gratuitous, nothing comes out of nowhere.

As usual for Noé, parts of Enter the Void are hard to watch -- only it's not because they're graphic or violent but because they consist of nothing more than ethereal sound effects and trippy light displays. It's how Noé conveys Oscar's wandering mind, whether the wandering is caused by drugs or death. This sort of thing, logical though it may be in context, can be exasperating, and the film is unquestionably too long anyway. But it's a powerfully bizarre movie, a psychedelic trip that must be experienced -- not just seen and heard but experienced -- to be believed.

http://www.cinematical.com/2010/01/24/sundance-review-enter-the-void/

Other reviews...

Spoiler

http://twitchfilm.net/reviews/2009/09/enter-the-void-review.php
http://www.screendaily.com/enter-the-void/5001692.article

The film is scheduled to release in America sometime during September and on May 5th in France.

Trailers

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Pictures

Spoiler

 

[ImWithTeamConan]

After Irreversible, I'm in for whatever Noe does.

 

[Octoberist]

i really want to see it!

 

[Dark Victory]

I forgot to mention that Thomas Bangalter (Daft Punk) is doing the soundtrack. Here's the first track...

EDIT: While one of the members is doing the score for the film, the song featured is LFO's "Freak".

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[Dark Victory]

Another positive review...

Spoiler

I took the train in the afternoon, making a lightning visit to Lyon to attend the festival for the strange, the first public screening in 35 copies of Enter the Void, the third feature film by Gaspar Noah. I expected this film for two good years. The work of the latter, since the unprecedented stylistic shift began in 2002 with Irreversible, was held in suspense the film world, and image, as the division in question chooses literally handed over a century of rules adopted view. Held in suspense, but shocked by the extent of violence and its treatment in the image and narrative. Irreversible after 8 years, what is the direction taken by Gaspar Noe? What is this "entry into the void"?

Noah develops clearly in the same way he has created since the beginning of his filmmaking career, hyper-realism, human or social violence, bestiality human relationships, but by this time with the changes that the film proposes.

The division is admittedly convoluted, swirling, but the style is less brutal than in Irreversible, less immediate, less pointed as a weapon against the viewer.

Why? Because the sweetness (re) is timidly emerging in the work of Noah. It shows the sense of exhausted 2:35 of Enter the Void, the effect is certainly wanted. But it appears with the memory of seeing things pretty simple, sensitive and human, through a dark and dehumanized world (the world of the night in Tokyo) and a story implacable destiny.

The film tells Noah the relationship between a brother and sister, which we know is most confused, and which one gradually discovers that the secrets of their tragic lives. Precarious existence in a Tokyo immense, infinite, beehive colorful striped with fluorescent lights and even. City Noah shoots his way and the feeling is mutual. The Japanese did not need LSD ... Fair Trade, however, between the director and the city, it was appropriate that the cons by filmmaker speaks about his perception of the urban, the city that inspired him, as a theme.



The complexity of the staging and image to second place, however the close and fragile of the two main characters in this story, and perhaps one of the few weaknesses of the film, stuck between the pure experimentation and a story that, perhaps, would have worked just as a staging simpler, although it would have sounded like the more traditional art cinema ...

The unspoken is important, difficult topics such as incest are sometimes touched upon, but this classic movie fans (or conventional) would perhaps have preferred a study of manners or a family drama, Noah prefers its lead story in an embodiment dynamic, fast-paced, we show in this town too big for the lost away from home, this city that devours and digests them so as ferocious as banal.

The pace is extremely effective in any case, it seems to have worked with a razor (like the rest of the assembly), and allows the story to evolve without losing the narrative thread to the viewer, the stages of history are here more channeled, more structured and consistent, where Irreversible proposed a series of cycles composed of clips. where the scenario consisted of 16 pages of Irreversible, to enter the void that holds 120 ...


The drug is an important component of a film by Gaspar Noe, but not treated with morality and destructive annihilation of Requiem for a Dream, or a dirty look like eighties pop Trainspotting. The drug is a character here omnipresent, omnipotent, silent and atavistic, which carries everybody in its path, with more or less noise. Although Gaspar Noe address an explicit reference to his accomplice and his Kounen Blueberry through a sequence of hallucinations early in the film, and the two friends seem to develop a curiosity for some substances belonging to the category of psychotropic, the film poses a clear and cold on the rubble left by the drug to those who find refuge in his arms.

And if, in fact, the footage of Noah was a film about drug residue in a family buffeted by life?

This is not the case, because the great strength of Enter The Void is its realization, and we can say that Noah was surpassed. The film incorporates visual concepts that we already saw in Fight Club, Panic Room or Irreversible, it is also the same company, Guff, who has realized the effects. The film pushes these concepts to the extreme: Here there is absolutely no physical barrier that can make stopping the camera. She plays everything from walls, place, distance and time.

She goes even inside the heads of characters to see through their own eyes. Enter the Void almost reinvents the concept of sequence, eliminating completely the concept of physical space, and also knocking the concept of time, introducing flashbacks or flash-forwards in a sequence where the plan camera is already any distance .. Angelopoulos as amphetamines or acids, choix.Espérons in any case the most sophisticated motorized cranes were able to meet all requirements of the staging.

It is noted that Marc Caro has greatly contributed to the project, working on the sets, which are indeed a very good sign of credibility for the world of plastic film and its identity. We feel for the decor of each scene is really nothing left to chance, that items of furniture are available and we very precise information on the identity of the protagonists in the sequence in which it unfolds. This is all the more commendable that abound in sets of Enter the Void, both the film and the narration are fractalised ...

Even if you feel that rhythm and downtime is very studied, between the film still in a kind of slow in the second half, where lengths and errors are displayed in the image. These desired lengths by Noah because his own words, "a hallucinogenic experience lasts for hours. Expected, AC stops, AC again. It lasts for ages. He had to recreate it in the film. "

Enter the Void, an alternative to LSD and psychotropic? The hypothesis is serious. We feel at least a desire in Noah share the pace, time cycles and their implementation in history, will lose his audience in a temporal maze and sensory. Time and space are dilated, reformatted, and was finally deconstructed.



Love him or not his films, it is clear that Gaspar Noe is one of the most talented filmmakers and creative when it comes to question form, question the sound and image and their functions within a film and its narrative, or as entertainment in a dark room. Noah is an explorer, an adventurer, perhaps, sensations film. The result is here sometimes totally immersive, especially the first part of the film, subjective camera in the eyes of Oscar, until his death.



One might even accuse Noah of complacency when, near the sad and sordid things of life. But this way, by undercutting the flesh and soul of his characters and making the same film as backing, that Noah may get a testing ground as large.

By kneading his concepts of image, sound, narration, retinal persistence, that Noah laid the groundwork for what may perhaps be the cinema of tomorrow. Who knows? The realization of Enter the Void, I carried at least more than the device's 3D avatar ...

What we can certainly not blame Gaspar Noe, is to remake the unacknowledged or improperly withheld. Everything here feels more originality than many other movies coming out in theaters now. Indeed, there is no borrowing or blatant plagiarism (perhaps the film references), while it is so common in international productions. Noah, himself, does not recycle, he invents. This is characteristic of his films, create new things, allowing oneself the right to experiment. The filmmakers have the means to do so are not so frequent. The criticisms and attacks that people like Oshima, Pasolini and Peckinpah were sudden they have not prevented him from becoming what they became. But it is time that some sterile cease attacks against the film by Gaspar Noe, it is after all free to like or dislike his films, but we must recognize that the major questions that bring his work to make it a cinematic form of most important filmmakers of our time.



Noah filming the life, death, birth, blood, things primal, primary and essential to existence. This film is his world and he directed the destinies crushed as naturally as other movies comedies, blockbusters or ****. It evokes, with Enter the Void, for the improbable creatures of this planet, between impermanence and fragility. We are also not very far from Babel Alejandro Innaritu regarding the mention of the unfortunate passing improbable destinies.





Unlike nearly as Noah himself is the director of the chaos. From chaos.

I loved this movie, but I expect to see him again. D can study it more quiet and also take the pleasure, long and patiently dissect ...

Play It Again Gaspard!

http://lesfilmsdalexandre.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/enter-the-void-un-film-de-gaspar-noe/

 

[Dark Victory]

new teaser

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[Dark Victory]

International trailer

http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/04/14/enter-the-void-international-trailer/

 

[Carmine Falcone]

Yeah, colour me interested. I'm always interested in films that push the boundaries of cinema as a visual medium. This looks like it has pretty astounding visuals.

 

[Dark Victory]

Yeah, colour me interested. I'm always interested in films that push the boundaries of cinema as a visual medium. This looks like it has pretty astounding visuals.

Agreed, its emphasis on secondary colors looks phenomenal.

 

[Dark Victory]

http://www.buf.com/visual_effects.php?display=movie&id=882

VFX video

 

[Rac]

Saw this today. It was good, but I'm not sure how good. 3 or 4 out of 5.
I liked I Stand Alone more. Haven't seen Irreversible yet.

 

[Carmine Falcone]

I watched this last week. I must say, it started out very promising. The first half hour or so is shown through a first-person perspective, which was really well done. It's been done before, but never as well as here. There was also a pretty crazy drug-trip that reminded me strongly of the ''beyond the infinite'' section of 2001: A Space Oddysey. So far so good. Then the movie shifts gears, and we are shown the memories of the protagonist's life. This was pretty lengthy and then the movie started to drag. Yeah, it had had a crazy, slow trippy tempo the entire time. But it just got less and less interesting to watch. The visuals were good, but incredibly repetitive. It wore me down like crazy. It was so tiresome. For about an hour we see everything shot from above, just showing the top of people's heads. Which is dull, to say the least. Then, from boring it turned into straight-up disgusting, repulsive and offensive with a mounting, pervading sense of the director's incredible pretentiousness.

Spoiler

There is a godawful abortion sequence, showing a lengthy close-up of the killed fetus. Then there is a sequence in a ''Love Hotel''. It's basically many couples ****ing for what felt like an hour. Trippy music and slow cameramovement, everything drenched in pink neon colours. I felt like I was in a porn theatre. To top it all off: during the sex scene, the camera goes inside the vagina and shows the penis thrusting inside and ejaculating. After which the camera followed the sperm. I am not kidding.

I cheered when it was over. I was so relieved. It was near-unbearable.

 

[Doctor Jones]

Wow, I've never heard such a shift in different attitudes during a film, Carmine. So was it like driving a lamborghini and then descending off a bridge and crashing?

 

[Carmine Falcone]

Yeah, that's a pretty accurate description Doctor. Just add that after descending the bridge, you don't crash in water but on a passing oil tanker. Which proceeds to explode, burn and leaves you slowly dying in the fire. And after you're dead, you get to spend a nice long weekend in Hell.

 

[Doctor Jones]

Yeah, that's a pretty accurate description Doctor. Just add that after descending the bridge, you don't crash in water but on a passing oil tanker. Which proceeds to explode, burn and leaves you slowly dying in the fire. And after you're dead, you get to spend a nice long weekend in Hell.

My God. Dark Victory was looking forward to this film it seems.

 

[darkseid26]

I have yet to see a film by Noe, but it sounds like him and Lars von Trier have been reading pages from the same book

 

[Dark Victory]

I watched this last week. I must say, it started out very promising. The first half hour or so is shown through a first-person perspective, which was really well done. It's been done before, but never as well as here. There was also a pretty crazy drug-trip that reminded me strongly of the ''beyond the infinite'' section of 2001: A Space Oddysey. So far so good. Then the movie shifts gears, and we are shown the memories of the protagonist's life. This was pretty lengthy and then the movie started to drag. Yeah, it had had a crazy, slow trippy tempo the entire time. But it just got less and less interesting to watch. The visuals were good, but incredibly repetitive. It wore me down like crazy. It was so tiresome. For about an hour we see everything shot from above, just showing the top of people's heads. Which is dull, to say the least. Then, from boring it turned into straight-up disgusting, repulsive and offensive with a mounting, pervading sense of the director's incredible pretentiousness.

Spoiler

There is a godawful abortion sequence, showing a lengthy close-up of the killed fetus. Then there is a sequence in a ''Love Hotel''. It's basically many couples ****ing for what felt like an hour. Trippy music and slow cameramovement, everything drenched in pink neon colours. I felt like I was in a porn theatre. To top it all off: during the sex scene, the camera goes inside the vagina and shows the penis thrusting inside and ejaculating. After which the camera followed the sperm. I am not kidding.

I cheered when it was over. I was so relieved. It was near-unbearable.

Damn, sorry to hear you didn't like it. I'm still remaining cautiously optimistic, but the movie really has been splitting people right down the middle. Have you seen any of Noe's other work?

 

[Carmine Falcone]

Yeah, I must say though that it wasn't an utter waste of time and money. I'm not sure if I can say it is ''worth watching'', but perhaps it is. By all means, it's a different kind of movie-going experience. I haven't seen any of Noe's other work, but I know Irreversible's reputation.

 

[Dark Victory]

Finally seeing this tomorrow at the Music Box in Chicago. My friends and I waited more than a year and a half for a distributor to pick it up. If we can't get into the theater, I'm going to flip out.

 

[Carmine Falcone]

I hope you'll make it. I'm curious to hear your opinion on it.

 

[PWN3R]

Just finished it. The first 30 or 40 minutes are exceptional. It's like watching something completely new, you can't quite grasp it at first. And then the movie starts to slow down and becomes absolute ****. Granted, it's masterfully well made, technically stunning ****, but **** none the less.

The story is dull, but the visuals are extraordinary. Definitely want to see this drunk and/or high, or any other altered state you can manage. I'd still recommend this sober, some incredible cinematography at work.

Also, one of the coolest title sequences, really captivating. Like Falcone said, this movie feels too long. I'm all for letting your film breathe, but the editing here goes too far -- it's like an hour too long.

 

[bullets]

It's out on dvd/blu ray but I've haven't seen it anywhere. I'm about to go netflix

 

[PWN3R]

It's on instant, at least here in the states it is, as is 'Irreversible.'

 

[Octoberist]

Enter the Void is crazy. Insane.

It's a very transgressive movie (like 'Irressibble') where Noe will try your patients and sanity with gratuitous scenes with sex and mayham.

 

[Dark Victory]

Enter the Void is crazy. Insane.

It's a very transgressive movie (like 'Irressibble') where Noe will try your patients and sanity with gratuitous scenes with sex and mayham.

To some extent, I disagree.
Emotional response, in theory, can only be stimultated on some level when emobodied, which isn't the case for a huge portion of the movie. Everything that is pointed out as cheap shock factor - and really isn’t shocking at all - is meant to be exactly thus for two important reasons. First, these scenes numb the mind in such a way that they replicate the death experience. When you’re not embodied, the sex-drugs-abortions: these things don’t mean anything to you, which weigh very little in emotion to the viewer. This is exactly the state that the film replicates with great success. There is no understanding of the physical and emotional pain that is connected with the body when one is not in a body to sympathize with such corporeal things. There is no signifier, just so much smut that is completely irrelevant, but the irrelevance itself holds the meaning. This film replicates the death experience admirably in this respect.

Second, these scenes that numb the mind so that when something truly shocking comes along – the accident – it gets an incredible response. At least when I went to see it, everyone leapt from their seat at the accident every time.

This is a very clever and mentally manipulative -- especially how it dabbles in perception of environment and certain situations with particular incentives - drugs, friends, impulses, etc. -- device moving stealthily in the disguise of taboo. That's mostly why I found the film to be great.