Dan's Film Festival Diary for Sunday, April 8

Films: Day Night Day Night; The Boss of It All

Future Screenings: Day Night Day Night: April 10, Ritz East 2 at 2:15PM
The Boss of It All: No future screenings scheduled

The initial festival excitement is beginning to wear off, as it usually does. Exhaustion is starting to set in, and today I had my first bad movie experiences of this year’s festival. That was bound to happen but it still deflates my enthusiasm a bit. (It’s also hard to schedule time with the girlfriend when together you’re seeing ten hours of film a day.) Readers should know up front that my Day Night Day Night review contains potential spoilers, but I doubt anything short of kidney failure could really make the movie-going experience that much worse.

Day Night Day Night
You may have heard that Day Night Day Night is a movie about suicide bombing. Rest assured that this is not really the case. As one of the festival organizers mentioned—by way of praise—in his introduction, this is not a movie that concerns itself with “politics, religion, or reasons for things.” Julia Loktev is hardly the first filmmaker to attempt to make an apolitical movie about terrorism (both United 93 and World Trade Center were billed the same way), but it’s nevertheless a deeply wrongheaded proposal. At the risk of spelling out the obvious, suicide bombing is a tactic used to achieve political ends, and although Islamic fundamentalists were not the first to employ it, many suicide bombers have a religious vision of martyrdom in mind. Once you’ve decided not to consider what actually draws a person to blow herself up and what the larger significance of her actions might be, what’s left to explore?

Not much, as it turns out. Loktev is only interested in her nameless protagonist’s (Luisa Williams) impending suicide as a way to give the movie a queasy sense of immediacy that it hasn’t remotely earned. Anything that might suggest how she came to this decision (beyond the bare suggestion that her family life is less than perfect) is kept deliberately murky. The second half of the movie, which our heroine spends wandering around Times Square with a large pack of explosives on her back, is nothing more than an exercise in cheap shocks—Oh no, she almost dropped it! Oh no, the button doesn’t work! etc.—helpfully accompanied by graceless close-ups of the bystanders who are about to be killed. Those who enjoy sadism for its own sake may wish to seek this out; anybody concerned with the reasons for things should probably avoid.
Festival Rating: Poor.

The Boss Of It All
Admittedly, my irritation with Day Night Day Night may have poisoned my feelings about all movies everywhere. (I get in moods like that sometimes.) But in my admittedly churlish opinion, The Boss Of It All is an interesting idea for a comedy that was executed by a man—Danish director Lars von Trier—who doesn’t seem to understand comedy. (Remember all the gut-busting laughs in Breaking the Waves?) Although the movie is occasionally funny, von Trier has no natural sense of comic timing or momentum. The structure of the film is a complete mess, and the characterization is hopelessly inconsistent. But worst of all, von Trier decided to try using a machine (known as the Automavision) to film the movie, sharply limiting human input. As a result, scenes are buried in a pile of illogical jump-cuts and distracting compositions. The self-reflexive narration, all that remains of von Trier's traditional sensibility, made me nostalgic for the relative entertainment value of, say, Dogville.
Festival Rating: Poor to Fair.