This flick's en Francais (with subtitles) and has a frustratingly convoluted plot, so prepare yourself; you're in for a long, slow night here.

Let me just say two words: Connie Nielson.  Oh wait, let me add two more: Chloe Sevigny, and, hang on, Gina Gershon.  So, at least there's something in this movie to look at.  Would that it were so.

Director Olivier Assayas and cinematographer Denis Lenoir have managed to make all the women in this movie look remarkably unattractive.  How did they do that?  The cinematography in general, except for a few Godardian hand-help night shots, is cold, pedestrian and uninteresting.  Which I'm sure was deliberate and tres French but I found it tres tedious.

There's lots of smoking, mostly by Gershon and Nielson, lots of drinking, by pretty much everyone, and lots of implied sex, except for the anime sequences, where we get a few pixilated seconds of some typical anime super-heroines being ravished by aliens with silly looking tendrils for genitalia.  Ho-hum.  If that's your thing, you already know where to find it without the pixilation.

Anyway, if you're still watching after the first hour, bravo, you clearly have masochistic tendencies and would likely fit right into the cold, emotionless corporate culture depicted in this time wasting bit of cinematic pretension.  By the time we get to the mildly interesting, online torture site, the Hellfire Club, it's much too late to save this mess.  If that's why you're watching, and if you read the hype on the DVD box it may well be, your time would be better spent on the Internet.  (A quick google search of "torture web sites" returned over 1.5 million hits - there goes another Sunday afternoon.)

So, ask me what I really thought?  Oh, ok, Gershon has great lips and wields a mean piece of broken glass; Nielson has a nice back and looks good in a skin tight jumpsuit; Sevigny's kinda cute; and the anime chicks have VERY big boobs.  There is some blood.  And big burly guys in black leather hoods.

And, oh yeah, there's 2 1/2 hours worth of extra stuff on a 2nd DVD, but really, who cares?

--jmb




Actors: Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny, Dominique Reymond.Gina Gershon
Directors: Olivier Assayas
Format: Anamorphic, Color, Director's Cut, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD-Video, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Language: French
Region 1
Rating UNRATED
Studio: Lions Gate
DVD Release Date: September 14, 2004
Run Time: 116 minutes
 

AddTime:  2007-05-17 17:36:29
Count:  2268
Keywords:  internet, torture, manga, demon, pornography, corporate, murder, sabotage, espionage, tokyo, cyber,
Average Rating:  0