Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

adonis98-743-186503 Inspired by a true crime, a man begins to experience mystifying events that lead him to slay his mother with a sword. I gave this flick a chance cause of Michael Shannon but damn it was just disappointing, weird and just bad from start to finish. I mean it hardly made any sense at all and even the perfomances couldn't exactly hold it off from being a huge waste of my time. The film is really weird and unfortunately not in a good way and it's probably on Herzog's part that whole flaw i guess. Now i wouldn't recommend this to be honest guys. (0/10)

Michael Ledo Brad (Michael Shannon) has murdered his mother (Grace Zabriskie) with whom he had an odd relationship. Brad was in a play where the lead character kills his mother. As Brad is in a standoff with the police, homicide detective (Willem Dafoe) interviews Brad's fiancee (Chloë Sevigny) and stage director (Udo Kier). The story is told as flashbacks.The director utilizes scenes from these interviews to show Brad's descent into madness. A surreal feeling is created around pivotal points when everyone stops moving. It is not a freeze frame, but a moment when the "whole world almost stops." These are supposed to highlight things which shaped Brad's thinking.I was doing fine following the symbolism up to the point they started talking about the midget riding a dwarf pony being chased by a giant rooster around the tallest tree...as one of the four horsemen. Seriously Herzog?The acting was good. With Lynch and Herzog you can expect something unusual, a drama where we try to discover what the killer was thinking. Token f-Bombs, no sex or nudity.

bob the moo Based on a true story where a young man with mental illness is involved in an old play about a man who kills his mother, who then kills his mother. The police are called and the man holds up in his house with two hostages while the police surround and try to begin negotiations. At this point the film appears like it will focus on this but instead we get a story constructed of flashbacks which mostly come from the perspective of Brad while also get nothing from him in the present. The flashbacks involve some that appear relevant (his experiences in Peru, his involvement in the play) and others than have no context (Brad wandering round China). The police action and interviews outside the house form the structure for all this but while in another version they would be the "all", here they seem to exist almost like a necessary evil.I say this because the film seems much more interested in the flashbacks and in particular using them as a tool to bewilder, set a very strange tone and generally make the viewer feel on-edge. It does this very well and even stories which seem relevant are given a weird tone. This matches most interaction with Brad in the film, he is intense, makes no sense and his anger is often as sudden and unjustified as the moments that give him peace. I guess that the goal was to replicate the inside of his mind, of the delusions and the feelings that within himself make perfect sense but to everyone else is either bewildering or frightening or a combination thereof. If this is the goal then it is achieved and the only remaining problem is that achieving this goal is not the same as making the film work – perhaps it could have been but in this case it is not.The structure doesn't allow us to experience Brad's mind, if anything it puts us in the minds of the police who have shown up from the outside. As such we think we know the score (because we have seen this genre like they have done this job) but yet what we then experience not only doesn't fit this expectation, but ultimately we are left none the wiser in terms of our understanding; the man and the crime remain an enigma with only the very obvious link to the play's themes being the "reason" (if there even is such a thing approaching that word). It is frustrating in this regard.The delivery is mostly good but doesn't make it worth it. As director Herzog delivers lots of striking images and scenarios but I felt myself constantly pushed away by the heavy use of music – most of it caterwauling to my ears. It seemed to be trying to present a profundity that wasn't there (which I guess is how it appeared to Brad) but all it did was grate and alienate, because again I was already on the outside – the music just made the walls higher and the gates stronger. Shannon is great though – he has a marvelous intensity that he brings to each role and it is just a shame that the film doesn't help him much. He did a similar role recently in Take Shelter, where the film tried to bring us into his mental illness – that one did that much more effectively than this. Dafoe, Sevigny, Kier, Zabriskie, Hall, Peña and others all provide solid support and add the sense of a deep cast, but they are just structural supports for a film which prepares the base well but seem to have much to actually hold it together from there. That said, I did like that so many of them linked to other films from Herzog, Lynch or both.It is a shame because it is rare to find myself so pushed away by Herzog as I was here. This is not to say that I always "get" him, but usually what he is doing has enough of interest and curiosity behind it that even when I'm outside his shop, he still draws me to put my nose against the window. But here it seemed deliberate to push me away, to prevent me understanding and I'm sure that was not the goal, just the side effect of the method of trying to achieve the goal.

kershmey_baker I wasn't entirely surprised to see the lacklustre rating IMDb had given this film, given its not the sort of movie that lets you 'enjoy' it in the conventional sense. None of the characters are particularly likable, the near entirety of the plot is revealed in the first few minutes, and the rest of the film is but giving you often surreal glimpses of how the characters came to this point. These, however, are not negative characteristics, or at least not where I'm concerned. The movie isn't 'pleasant', but its viscerally emotional; dark theatre that truly challenges the audience usually in subtle ways, but then at times quite directly, tearing down the fourth wall to do so.Willem Dafoe's role in the movie is understated, as are his scenes... he's something like the narrator as Detective Hank, and in the absence of the lead, his interactions seem strangely scripted, almost as if he's forgotten what an excellent actor he is. I get the impression this air of 'woodenness' around his scenes, especially his early scenes, is intentional... his scenes take place in the 'now' of the story, which seems a bland and almost plastic atmosphere... its when they track back to the 'past' that the Movie really begins to take shape as an almost anxious nightmare. Michael Shannon as Brad is spectacular. He's a grown man who seems trapped in the persona of a desperately sullen child, unstable and overwhelmed by the world around him. As we begin to empathize with Brad, he seems to make the very normal, modern, clean suburban world around him seem almost like a dystopia simply by his presence.The real star of this film in my mind was Grace Zabriskie, who played Brad's mother. She's always been an absolutely superb character actress, has given me the willies in more than one Lynch film, but never have I seen her shine so much than in this film as the submissively overbearing Ms. McCullum. She is a woman who seems to validate her own existence through the life of her disturbed son, and is incredibly desperate for appreciation. The most powerful bit of acting in the movie, in any movie I've seen in a long while in fact, involved her lingering in a doorway awaiting a thank-you from her son and his girlfriend. Her dwindling hope and mounting terror and despair with gradually dampening eyes as the moment stretched and stretched gripped like a fist behind my navel... such concentrated emotion is a testament to what a spectacular performer she is. The movie is excellent, but not for the impatient or those who can't appreciate artistic abstraction in film, nor for those who want a 'feel good' flick. This movie won't make you feel 'good', but it will make you feel, and think, a great deal.