I am responding off-list since I do not want to be too off topic.
> the wachowskis with _bound_
I love it, and now one brother is going transgender.
> gregg araki with _totally f***ed up_...
Never got him. Watched all his films. For me they were just too middle-class-kid-goes-to-film-school to enjoy.
> and wasn't rebecca romijn about the most lipsticked of lesbians
ever?
She was and the fact that DePalma let her be the deciding factor was amazing. She makes the decision to change. So rare you get a woman with that kind of power in a movie. Reminded me of how Mankiewicz used to write and direct female characters.
> but, come on now -- one pro-lesbian noir doesn't change a
couple of decades-worth of overwrought, undercooked cinema.
Agreed. I think with DePalma it is that I loved all his movies when I first saw them, but when I went to a retrospective I found that many (most) did not hold up. Too self-reflexively artsy.
But I was floored by Femme Fatale. Went to see it twice. It has just stuck in my creative imagination. It is as if he got over his obsessions and started looking outward instead of inward.
I think Ingmar Bergman does the same thing in the 1970's. For two decades he made these personal, intense art films and then -- WHOOSH -- he makes Cries and Whispers and from then until 1980 makes movies that look outward and not just inward -- both psychological and social. Then he goes back to Sweden and returns to navel gazing.
> personally, i'll settle for art.
I am always afraid of art LOL.
> i'll allow that von trier's capacity to allow innocent
women to be abused sexually and psychologically is
gloomy, but realism?
realism in that he shows how the world works and how films that are totally fake can lead to the experiencing of powerful emotions. The emotions and the insights are real -- and he shows you that they have been achieved through complete and obvious artifice. Fassbinder was the same way (though I think Fassbinder was a much greater artist. Maybe the last great filmmaker of the 20th century).
Watching his films I believe I know how audiences in the 1930's responded to Warner Bros pictures -- tough gritty pictures that were all artifice. but reflected the emotional realities of living in the Depression. Not MGM escapism.
I used to get the same feelings when I watched HK movies down in Chinatown. The movies were entertaining, but on a deeper level these movies spoke to/about the fears/hopes of their audiences.
I am not an MGM/art for art's sake kind of guy (can you tell? LOL.) I am not into films that express a "persoanl vision," but into films (and art in general) that is created to be of use to its audience. I take a very African approach to creating.
> hand-held video musicals starring bjork and catherine
deneuve as washington-state working stiffs? that doesn't even
rise to the level of a joke.
And yet think of all the roles we "accepted" Ingrid Bergman in (citing just one example). I think Von Trier was calling upon that type of cinema, where iconography counted for as much as location shooting and method acting.
> i guess _dogville_'s throwing over of the trademark redemptive
themes he shoehorns into his dogme-tic mise-en-rapes is something
of an, uh, advance...
Not so much an advance as a return. Some of the most subversive movies ever made were done in Hollywood by Wilder, Mankiewicz, Leisen who were also three of the greatest artificers in film.
As I typed earlier, Fassbinder was onto the same idea: you tell truths about a community by using the most outlandish artifice possible. Why Fassbinder movies age so well. The artifice makes them timeless, but he was clearly making those movies for a German audience at a specific time - the 1970's.
Brian