Word: trier
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...these terms, a Lars von Trier movie is a dream-nightmare come true. And Nicole Kidman, who not only endured but also apparently savored her 17-month incarceration while making Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, is just the actress to see directorial fiat as a fast car worth strapping herself into. The result of this fascinating collision is Dogville, for which the notoriously kooky Danish auteur lured a distinguished cast to Scandinavia (he refuses to fly) so they could pretend to be in an American town in the 1930s...
Which town? Our Town. Von Trier asserts his intention to rethink the classic Thornton Wilder play with his film's magnificent first shot: an overhead view of a nearly bare stage set, with Dogville's properties and props designated by painted lines. The old mine down the road is identified by a sign reading OLD MINE. A townsman closes an invisible door and we hear a slamming noise. Von Trier presumably wants us to attend to his characters' yearnings and prejudices without the distractions of period furnishings...
...brilliant idea, for about 10 minutes. Then the bare set is elbowed out of a viewer's mind by the threadbare plot and characterizations. Into this town of ostensibly decent folk comes a fugitive named Grace (Kidman), a familiar Von Trier heroine-victim, like the ones played by Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves and Bjork in Dancer in the Dark. Grace is the beneficiary of the townspeople's Christian charity, then the victim of their envy, malice, lies and sadism. She stoically endures a spate of abuse nearly as long and relentless as Jesus' in the Mel Gibson gospel...
...Charlie Kaufman (“I can see your sadness” ranks as 2002’s dumbest line not written by George Lucas). I’ll probably also skip Dogville, because I’m not inclined to check out another Von Trier, even if he’s spinning Our Town. If I have to watch a Dogme man reinterpret Thornton Wilder, I’ll wait for Thomas Vinterberg to take a deranged stab at The Matchmaker...
King--horror author, screenwriter, jack-of-all-'fraids--based his new creation in part on the acclaimed Danish mini-series The Kingdom, by filmmaker Lars von Trier, and in part on his own long hospitalization after he was struck and nearly killed by a van in 1999. The resulting series is sometimes, draggily and dully, just what you would expect from King. Artist Peter Rickman (Jack Coleman) sees grim visions after a paralyzing accident takes him to the hospital, founded on the site of an 1869 mill fire that killed scores of child laborers. But it is also sometimes fresh...