![]() After taking his hands away from his eyes, this man assures us that the story of The Kingdom will continue, and encourages us not to hide our eyes from the nastiness on the screen (it’s only stage blood, anyway), because “Behind closed eyes is where the real horror begins.” Then he holds up a severed head and introduces himself: “My name is Lars von Trier, and I wish you all a very good evening.” He has all the presence of a grocery clerk, a waiter, or the innocuous-looking boy who lives down the block and poisons kittens. The end credits begin to roll, and standing before us is a bland young man, dimpled and handsome. This combination of “The Outer Limits” and “General Hospital” has screamed right off its rails, climaxed in horror, and then halted in a completely white screen. The end of the four-and-a-half-hour extravaganza called The Kingdom brings us to the loopy story’s bloodiest and most insane moment. I think I wrote this general intro to Lars von Trier in 1996 for, although I don’t remember why. We begin with an “intro to” von Trier written 15 years ago, in which I try to suggest the spirit of his work, and then we just keep going. Note the variety of descriptive terms for von Trier over the years: scalawag, scamp, genius-crackpot, evil sprite, and, of course, “Danish.” I still haven’t seen The Idiots, and haven’t written about Antichrist -yet. I am an admirer of this director’s films. Some of my past writing on the subject is posted below. I’m not sure which was more absurd, the outrage of the literalists or the tortured explanations (“I think what Lars meant was…”) of von Trier’s message-board explicators. In a parallel story, the world proved that it no longer had the ability to recognize a joke when it heard one. Lars von Trier got himself in trouble last week with comments he made after the Cannes Film Festival screening of his latest, Melancholia. Sansho the Bailiff – Editorial Review.Robert Mitchum Signature Collection – Editorial Review.Paul Newman Collection – Editorial Review.New York Film Festival 1994: Film Comment. ![]() Leos Carax – Int’l Dictionary of Films, 2000.Greta Garbo, Film Comment, Jul/Aug 1990.Frank Sinatra The Early Years Collection – Editorial Review.Frank Sinatra Golden Years Collection – Editorial Review.Film Comment: The Typewriter and the Camera (on Joseph L.Film Comment: A Touch of Noir (on Jules Dassin's 10:30 P.M.East German cinema primer, GreenCine 2007.Dans Paris review, Film Comment Jul/Aug 2007.Cutter’s Way (the Scanners opening shot project).It's a slightly more advanced version of the movie list I kept, in Flair pen, thumbtacked next to my bed when I was twelve. The second goal is to keep a daily record of films watched, annotated with brisk, brief comments. You may also link to my website of 1980s reviews and learn more about my book on Frankenstein and my graphic novel, ROTTEN. Selected past work for Film Comment and elsewhere is also linkified. One is to organize links to my critical work: reviews written for The Herald (Everett, Washington) and Seattle Weekly and public appearances and TV jobs.
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