Sitcom

Rating:
Summary: American Beauty Before America
Review: So you think "American Beauty" was a great film with a good message, huh? Well listen up my friends, that movie comes nowhere near this French film which was released quite a bit before. Same message (which you probably thought as new) applies here. Normal suburban family goes a little crazy in what is supposed to be a fantastic setting for them. Normal society is wrong for them, as it is for most, and the insanity starts to appear. Art in "American Beauty", hah! Art in "Sitcom", definitely. Although, what does the rat symbolize exactly? That is the main question.

Rating:
Summary: Rat Daddy
Review: This film is about the breakdown of the bourgeois family. It is very indebted to the films of Pedro Almodovar and Luis Bunuel. The head of the house brings home at rat. As a result, everyone including the maid, starts acting out their latent desires. S&M, suicide and incest are the rules of the day. Eventually the family realizes that they don't need the rat as they have all been liberated by it and are now free. It becomes apparent that Dad is the rat they need to get rid of. Who needs him? All he does is sit around and read the paper and allow everyone to do whatever they please. It is interesting and some of the sex scenes are very explicit, but it is not for everyone.

Rating:
Summary: Click no if you disagree
Review: This is an amusing, entertaining but not very deep gloss on suburban decay. The tables are turned on the buttoned down family in this movie. When the respectable, staid father brings home a lab rat in a cage, it becomes quite clear that the family members themselves are the guinea pigs. The rat exerts a strange, hypnotic power: these repressed suburbanites toss their inhibitions to the wind and embrace their darkest, wildest fantasies, be they erotic or morbid. This premise certainly promises much, and the filmmakers clearly owe a big debt to Bunuel and even Almodovar. But the film lacks the obscene, sacrilegious kicks of the one and the sultry, melodramatic absurdity of the other. And the film is somewhat wobbly in tone and structure; it has moments that promise revelation and visual beauty but never quite delivers. And when the father has his own explosive epiphany, it hasn't the deadpan shock that Bunuel would have given it. The tone is listless, inert. It's unclear at the end just what the father represented that had to be destroyed: patriarchal repressiveness? cold intellect? hostility to animal impulse? A far more disturbing scene is the son's confrontation with his mother in bed. I found myself giggling surreptitiously to deflect the impact of this most uncomfortable and blasphemous of Freudian scenarios. This scene combines horror and comedy in a way that the rest of the movie fails to live up to--for once, we are drawn into the vortex where anxiety gives way to irony. Next to this scene, the rest of the film looks like trendy, self-conscious posturing, as if the filmmakers thought themselves above the real, unsettling content of their theme.

Rating:
Summary: A shock and a giggle
Review: This is an amusing, entertaining but not very deep gloss on suburban decay. The tables are turned on the buttoned down family in this movie. When the respectable, staid father brings home a lab rat in a cage, it becomes quite clear that the family members themselves are the guinea pigs. The rat exerts a strange, hypnotic power: these repressed suburbanites toss their inhibitions to the wind and embrace their darkest, wildest fantasies, be they erotic or morbid. This premise certainly promises much, and the filmmakers clearly owe a big debt to Bunuel and even Almodovar. But the film lacks the obscene, sacrilegious kicks of the one and the sultry, melodramatic absurdity of the other. And the film is somewhat wobbly in tone and structure; it has moments that promise revelation and visual beauty but never quite delivers. And when the father has his own explosive epiphany, it hasn't the deadpan shock that Bunuel would have given it. The tone is listless, inert. It's unclear at the end just what the father represented that had to be destroyed: patriarchal repressiveness? cold intellect? hostility to animal impulse? A far more disturbing scene is the son's confrontation with his mother in bed. I found myself giggling surreptitiously to deflect the impact of this most uncomfortable and blasphemous of Freudian scenarios. This scene combines horror and comedy in a way that the rest of the movie fails to live up to--for once, we are drawn into the vortex where anxiety gives way to irony. Next to this scene, the rest of the film looks like trendy, self-conscious posturing, as if the filmmakers thought themselves above the real, unsettling content of their theme.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, grotesque and explicit
Review: This movie is a variation on Kafka's "Metamorphosis" taken to even more absurd extremes. It also took several cinematic & thematic cues from Dali's "Un Chien Andulou." Both of those works, like "Sitcom", are about rebelling of what is often regarded as proper or right in normal society.

The rat, an unusual, off-beat pet in an otherwise normal house, inspires the abnormal elements of the characters' subconscious, causing them to act in the most bizarre fashion, beginning with the son spontaneously announcing his homosexuality at the dinner table, followed by his immediate seduction by the maid's husband, then the inexplicable suicide attempt by the daughter.

After that, the movie gets wierd.

Through all of the strangeness & familial collapse the father remains steadfast that absolutely nothing is wrong that everything will come out all right in the end. And then ultimately his fate is the strangest of all.

There are movies out there that demands that the audience think about them, that in order to get something of satisfaction they have to put some effort of imagination, of their own personality into it, like a cinematic Rohrschach test (was that spelled right?). This is one of those movies. Highly recommended for fans of the Avant Garde cinema.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, grotesque and explicit
Review: This movie is a variation on Kafka's "Metamorphosis" taken to even more absurd extremes. It also took several cinematic & thematic cues from Dali's "Un Chien Andulou." Both of those works, like "Sitcom", are about rebelling of what is often regarded as proper or right in normal society.

The rat, an unusual, off-beat pet in an otherwise normal house, inspires the abnormal elements of the characters' subconscious, causing them to act in the most bizarre fashion, beginning with the son spontaneously announcing his homosexuality at the dinner table, followed by his immediate seduction by the maid's husband, then the inexplicable suicide attempt by the daughter.

After that, the movie gets wierd.

Through all of the strangeness & familial collapse the father remains steadfast that absolutely nothing is wrong that everything will come out all right in the end. And then ultimately his fate is the strangest of all.

There are movies out there that demands that the audience think about them, that in order to get something of satisfaction they have to put some effort of imagination, of their own personality into it, like a cinematic Rohrschach test (was that spelled right?). This is one of those movies. Highly recommended for fans of the Avant Garde cinema.