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...locals were privy to some camptastic performances. In a delightful English-as-a-second-language moment, Romania's Elena Gheorghe, the daughter of a priest, sang that her "hips are ready to glow, this record is so hot and I have so much to show." American burlesque star Dita von Teese stripped down to a black bustier to play the title role of Germany's entry, "Miss Kiss Kiss Bang"; she had originally hoped to go further, but officials warned her to respect "cultural differences." And the Ukraine's Svetlana Loboda, singing "Be My Valentine," did the splits...
Given the enormous bill for reunification, such failings have inevitably given rise to a debate in Germany about the policy of propping up the east. In 2004, an informal commission headed by Klaus von Dohnanyi, a former mayor of Hamburg, concluded harshly that eastern Germany was still far from being able to stand on its own two feet. One of the commission's key findings was that industrial policy should have been better coordinated and the money invested in a few promising centers, rather than being showered as if from a watering can across the economic landscape. But the fact...
...attack on her husband's sex organs, then her mutilation of her own - where you could hear "Oh, come on!" muttered in several languages. There's nothing wrong with a movie going crazy along with its characters, as we noted in our Thirst review two days ago, but von Trier doesn't have the craft to bring the moviegoer along in the most extreme parts of Antichrist. The thought was that we were being subject to the spectacle, not of a woman going mad, but of a director...
...Von Trier means to portray the woman's dangerous identity with the witches who were the subject of her thesis, and to argue that nature itself may be evil. ("Nature," the woman says, "is Satan's church.") What troubles even von Trier partisans is the connection this woman has with some of his other female protagonists. Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, Bjork in Dancer in the Dark, Nicole Kidman in Dogville and Bryce Dallas Howard in Manderlay are all made to endure, at the rough hands of men, indignations that are depicted so long and lovingly that they seem...
...Then again, you never know how serious von Trier is. He created the super-austere Dogme 95 style of filmmaking, which was copied by many even as he outgrew and denounced it. His last picture, The Boss of It All, was a comedy with a sour taste, so you can't be sure that Antichrist is as dead-serious as it appears. Maybe the movie is a big deadpan joke, an antic-hrist. What's certain is that serious film people on several continents will be talking about von Trier's latest affront, defending or deriding it, finding it hard...