SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Mjeteconer Just perfect...

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Finfrosk86 Saw this movie at Frightfest Glasgow.And let me just start by saying oh my good god and holy ghost and mother mary, this is so fantastically boring.Yeah, yeah, before you get your sweats in a wrinkle, I get that it is supposed to be "art", and blah-blah. But that doesn't mean it has to be boring.There is close to no horror here, it is absolutely not a horror movie. There is one scene that is actually pretty creepy, but that's it.No more. No more horror for you! Get out!Really. It is a lot of, uhm, silence, and, I don't even know what to call it. Just, super mellow. People looking through key-holes(?), scarfs blowing in the wind. I don't know. I feel a little douchy, because I'm sure the people who made this are nice hardworking people and I doubt they would call this horror. It should definitely not be shown at a horror movie festival. No, no, no.It should be shown at a can-you-stay-awake-though-this-festival.During the whole movie I hoped for the horror to start. In every scene (feels like about 14 hours long) you wait for something to happen, then no. Just a new scene with nothing cool. I was so happy when this movie was over. That's not what you want from a movie!

fedor8 No story, no point, no script. Please, viewer, fill in the blanks yourself, and then feel as if you're smart. (Absurdist cinema as a confidence builder – the con-job that has healed many.) Why have an actual plot? That's so old-fashioned, so passé. It's so much more "artistically valid" to throw in a few loosely related - or even better, totally unrelated - scenes together and then hope that there are enough suckers out there to mistake your laziness for genius. It certainly worked for Godard and a host of other cinema la-la-land charlatans."Amer" is a girl of few words. But then again, so is the movie which is dedicated to her rather confusing life. There are perhaps a dozen lines of dialogue in the entire thing. Note that I said "thing" and not "movie". Just because "Amer" runs for 90 minutes doesn't necessarily make it a movie. But that's debatable, I admit.The thing/"movie"/whatever starts off with a little girl who lives with her parents and her zombie/dead/undead/barely-living/perhaps-living grandparents in a large mansion near the French coast. One would think the fresh air and beautiful vista of the French Riviera would lift the spirits of the population of French people that have amassed there, but that's not entirely or at least not always the case. There is an air of doom and gloom about (as is fitting for a dull flick aiming to be "artistic"). The living are constantly peeved except when they're having sex in upright position (the girl's mother), and the dead/undead are even worse: they are harassing little girls (she's alive, at least for now).The girl, Amer, plays a game of hide-and-seek with her zombie grandma who may or may not be a flesh-eating demon. It's tough to tell, because grandma certainly acts like a hell's minion, chasing her poor granddaughter throughout the house, trying to snatch some sort of amulet or something from her. The same amulet that Amer hijacked from her dead?/undead?/zombie grandpa while he was lying asleep?/dead?/undead? in his bed. To cut a 29-minute non-story short, the girl Amer escapes the clutches of evil Granma and makes it all the way to puberty, which is where the second part of the movie takes us. Yes, at hour 0:29 we are finally spared the continued shenanigans of the living dead (coz it does get a little tedious after about 5 minutes) and their 29-minute long game of hide-and-seek. Not exactly a cinematic experience to tell your (dead/undead/not-yet-born/unborn) grand-kids about.Part 2. Cut to the girl some years later. I can't quite tell how old she is, strangely enough. At first she appears to be around 20, but after a 12-to-14 year-old boy attempts to kiss her pouty French lips, I start thinking that perhaps Amer 2 is meant to be in her puberty, around 15 or even less. Oh, well, who the hell knows. At least she doesn't meet a 55 year-old bald man and falls in love with him, which is the premise of 35% of all French dramas and comedies. This segment doesn't last long. Soon we are to enter Amer 3. Ehem, I meant, we're to enter Part 3 with Amer 3.Part 3. At around 35 Amer is pretty much into masturbating all the time. This is a French movie, after all, so obviously she's going to be obsessed with sex 24/7. She does it during taxi rides while sticking her head out the car window, and she does it in her bathtub. In the bathroom, an unknown assailant tries to drown her. It's a half-hearted attempt because Amer 3 manages to save herself simply by unplugging the water in the tub. Not exactly a master-killer this one. Or perhaps he was just teasing. Who knows. It's a French art-film, we are not supposed to understand anything, so just the fact that I can tell you that someone was trying to kill her is a phenomenal success in itself, meaning I actually managed to understand SOMEthing here.Some time later, the taxi driver approaches the house. He must have come for sex. Someone bars the exit of the mansion so the taxi driver draw out his knife (don't all cab drivers carry knives while on their sex-related rendezes-vouzes?) But before long he is being cut to pieces by the mysterious assailant. Hmm. Was it Amer 3 herself? We are meant to think that, but then she is attacked too (perhaps ANOTHER assailant? anything is possible in a silly flick like this; after all we had a retired old zombie couple chasing around a young girl). The movie ends with Amer 3 stiff in a mortuary. Dead. Braindead. Just like the movie.If you haven't seen this goofy little French bundle of pointless pretentiousness then you might think I'm joking. But I'm not. This really is the basic outline of "Amer 1-3", so if you enjoy absurd, lazily written, meaningless "art horror" flicks about sex, mutilation and the "coming of age" (ha ha), then rent this out or download it from a torrent. Have a ball. Just don't get upset if you start yawning, because this is "art", after all.

suspiria56 Cinema can be a powerful thing to behold. Not only as a means in which to express whatever saga it may desire, but also to provoke feeling and thought in its viewer. Much has been made, certainly in academic terms, of what the audience perceives through cinema, and this unique and astounding Belgian gem conveys this like no other piece of film in a long time. The triptych story, following the life of Ana through her childhood, her coming-of age adolescence, and her eventual becoming as a 'woman, is clearly focused on using cinema as a medium in its purest form. Dialogue is sparse, images are vivid, the editing poignant, not a shot goes by without meaning. As a reference point, we can cite the giallo movement as an immediate connection, yet AMER is so much more than a mere homage. Recalling the great works of Franju, Bava, and Robert Weines' 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari', to name but a few, modern menace and eroticism is also adopted here to startling effect. A lot has been expressed in terms of a lack of narrative as a main cause for concern. For this viewer it is the complete opposite, in that we are made to feel the fear, the sexuality, the loss, of our vulnerable protagonist, not too dissimilar to Jires' Valerie. A film to experience, interact with, rather than simply allow. Enter and take pleasure in the real power of this medium. Unfortunately all too rare in modern cinema.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx Amer is structured in three sections and deals with the experience of Ana, who is shown as a child, a teenager, and a young woman. The movie is hyper-stylised, and intensely saturated with colour. Amer is doing its best possible to get you inside Ana's sensorium, although it's also highly voyeuristic at the same time. This dual perspective seems to coincide with the mixture of a male and female director, and produces a view of Ana en ronde.Reviewers have made a lot about the relation of this movie to giallo, and indeed the film does contain many cine-literate references to the genre; however giallo fans may be disappointed by this steer. Whilst there are quotes of visual motifs, reuse of classic soundtracks, and a similar overall atmosphere, the movie isn't a murder mystery. Stylistically it's more likely to appeal to those who like late Argento, films such as Stendhal Syndrome, which is bonkers, and has a hysterical female lead, or those who liked the dream sequence at the start of Lizard in a Woman's Skin.I also think that the giallo focus doesn't lend one to expect what is more a film about the shock of life, this confused, vulnerable, painful, tantalising, quizzically rich shiver, over in a flash.The voyeuristic perspective of the movie is certainly arousing to those oriented in line with the mise-en-scène. After the example of Russ Meyer, Amer contains a mons-veneris-fixated shot, here dogging teenage Ana from behind, capturing the diaphanous ripples of her minidress hem in a blatant long take.The first sequence, reminded me very much of my childhood dreams, intense, baroque, magic lantern type dreams, at a time of life when darkness was dark, not eigengrau. Another type of nostalgia Amer induced was of bloodfulness, of being at an age where one still has vasomotor tone, and this exquisite feeling of warmth. There's a capturing of the sensitivity of youth (that time when coffee wasn't purple, to make a "Welt am Draht" joke). Ana's bed is shown canted at night, all in orange against a blue curtain and a black backdrop, this is the phantasmagoria of a child's nighttime. There's also a well-captured feeling of the pre-moral state of childhood, that age before seven when children merely behave themselves out of respect for the power you hold over them.One other thing the film is good at is bringing you into its world, by including imaginative yet very recognisable stimuli, such as sitting down on leather in an over-heated car, trilling the teeth of a comb against your mouth and the sound of contact on teeth (cf. the nervous rattling of a glass against teeth in Suspiria).There has been a criticism of Amer as a long short film, but, like a foot long hot dog, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It's just unusual for a form such as Amer to receive funding as a feature.