Silly, Pointless
Added 6/7/2009
I usually stick to just reviewing what I like, but the distance between how some people speak of this film, and the reality of the movie itself, is so great that I feel compelled to chime in.
It's incoherent and pointless. It's just a sick Sirk-like (as in Douglas Sirk) melodrama that changes tone somewhere in the middle, as the director apparently likes to do. It's adds up to nothing and it seems rather obvious that this writer/director wouldn't have it any other way - he makes smirking little facsimilies of art products, not actual art products. This is like a bad parody of Fassbinder's take on Sirk's movies.
The lead actors are great, and Von Trier is technically just fine as a screenwriter and as a director. But don't be fooled into thinking that he's furthering cinema in some way with movies like this. He's just yanking chains and the only personal expression going on here is him laughing at the audience.
0 out of 2 people found this helpful.
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One of the best
Added 3/15/2009
I like to pick up a European movie from time to time, and most of them, are soso. This one, however, was so indepth, so close to the actual person, and so atypical of how we allow others to shape and form our mental capacities, I swear, I had to pause this move at least 9 times because I couldn't stop crying. This is the ultimate tear jerking movie of all times. Wonderful movie, well worth every minute I spent watching it. Gosh, I wish I could find movies on par with this one.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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Breaking the Waves is a Love Story Within a Love Story.
Added 11/5/2008
Set in a remote, repressed, and deeply-religious community in the 1970s Scottish Highlands, Danish film director Lars von Trier's film, Breaking the Waves (1996), chronicles the unusual love story between Bess McNeill (Emily Watson) and her husband, Jan (Stellan Skarsgård). The film is the first in von Trier's "Golden Heart Trilogy," which also includes The Idiots (1998) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). Bess talks to God. In fact, she has two-way conversations with him. After Jan is paralyzed from the neck down in an oil-rigging accident, she believes that it is God's will that she engage in sex with other men so that she may then share all of the details with Jan. Her faith in God leads Bess to believe that this will cure her husband of his paralysis. She is further convinced that the more deviant she becomes in her sexual behaviour, the more likely it will be that God will heal Jan. She goes places where even the village prostitutes refuse to go.
The mesmerising film shows von Trier's realist Dogme 95 influences: hand-held photography, grainy images, and natural lighting, but it is not a true Dogme 95 film (it was not filmed on location). How good is Breaking the Waves? Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese both named it as one of the ten best films of the 1990s. Breaking the Waves won the Grand Prix at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, and Emily Watson's mesmerizing performance was nominated for the 1996 Academy Award for Best Actress. This rare, fascinating film explores emotional depths with honesty, and is highly recommended. Its raw emotional power will leave audiences divided. What more can we expect from a truly great film?
G. Merritt
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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What Would You Do For Love?
Added 10/24/2008
Emily Watson plays an innocently naive, very religious, and perhaps slow-witted young newly-wed dealing with love for God, her Family, and her husband within her old-fashioned and intolerant Scottish community. The film is mostly shot in grainy black & white, but it has beautifully scenic color intermissions with snippets of phrases taken from various Beattles' songs that are relevant to the next section of the story as it unfolds. Also, more of the film is shot in color as the intensity of the situation rises. The ending is all at once tragic, poignant, hopeful, and metaphysical. A great film to watch alone on a quiet, rainy afternoon.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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about the DVDfilm/movie breaking the waves.......
Added 6/10/2008
The story is basically an oil rig worker get married to a woman he loves and they had good times together and then he has to part with his wife temporary and had to get back to oil rig to work but he finally get into accident on the job which led to be neckcuffed and bedridden with a hard chance of recovery. He later asked his wife to look for someone and have sex as to make her happy buy she went on sex with other man which the last one caused her to be serously hurt and landed in hospital where she later died. Her Husband was later seen recovering from the accident and had her body thropwn and buried in the sea where he works. Recommended to those whom are interested in this genre of film/movie. This woman in this film acting as Bess had some phycological problem where she had delusion about things and her husband, ian whom was suffering from accident in the movie.
Breaking the Waves
Review by:
Dr, MR Franc MBBS (PhD) GPS Ang Poon Kah
director 'lou Ye'- Ang Poon Kah for film summer palace.
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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Silly, Pointless
Added 6/7/2009
I usually stick to just reviewing what I like, but the distance between how some people speak of this film, and the reality of the movie itself, is so great that I feel compelled to chime in.
It's incoherent and pointless. It's just a sick Sirk-like (as in Douglas Sirk) melodrama that changes tone somewhere in the middle, as the director apparently likes to do. It's adds up to nothing and it seems rather obvious that this writer/director wouldn't have it any other way - he makes smirking little facsimilies of art products, not actual art products. This is like a bad parody of Fassbinder's take on Sirk's movies.
The lead actors are great, and Von Trier is technically just fine as a screenwriter and as a director. But don't be fooled into thinking that he's furthering cinema in some way with movies like this. He's just yanking chains and the only personal expression going on here is him laughing at the audience.
0 out of 2 people found this helpful.
|
One of the best
Added 3/15/2009
I like to pick up a European movie from time to time, and most of them, are soso. This one, however, was so indepth, so close to the actual person, and so atypical of how we allow others to shape and form our mental capacities, I swear, I had to pause this move at least 9 times because I couldn't stop crying. This is the ultimate tear jerking movie of all times. Wonderful movie, well worth every minute I spent watching it. Gosh, I wish I could find movies on par with this one.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Breaking the Waves is a Love Story Within a Love Story.
Added 11/5/2008
Set in a remote, repressed, and deeply-religious community in the 1970s Scottish Highlands, Danish film director Lars von Trier's film, Breaking the Waves (1996), chronicles the unusual love story between Bess McNeill (Emily Watson) and her husband, Jan (Stellan Skarsgård). The film is the first in von Trier's "Golden Heart Trilogy," which also includes The Idiots (1998) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). Bess talks to God. In fact, she has two-way conversations with him. After Jan is paralyzed from the neck down in an oil-rigging accident, she believes that it is God's will that she engage in sex with other men so that she may then share all of the details with Jan. Her faith in God leads Bess to believe that this will cure her husband of his paralysis. She is further convinced that the more deviant she becomes in her sexual behaviour, the more likely it will be that God will heal Jan. She goes places where even the village prostitutes refuse to go.
The mesmerising film shows von Trier's realist Dogme 95 influences: hand-held photography, grainy images, and natural lighting, but it is not a true Dogme 95 film (it was not filmed on location). How good is Breaking the Waves? Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese both named it as one of the ten best films of the 1990s. Breaking the Waves won the Grand Prix at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, and Emily Watson's mesmerizing performance was nominated for the 1996 Academy Award for Best Actress. This rare, fascinating film explores emotional depths with honesty, and is highly recommended. Its raw emotional power will leave audiences divided. What more can we expect from a truly great film?
G. Merritt
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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