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The Kingdom (Riget)

The Kingdom (Riget)

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Pretentious nonsense
Review: This is the most over-rated film since Eraserhead - and at least Eraserhead was visually stunning and less then 5 hours long. This video is boring and plotless and visually ugly. If it was in english no one would bother with it. Don't believe the hype.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Stanley Kubrick meets David Lynch
Review: When I first saw this foreign gem from director Lars Von Trier ("Breaking The Waves")in Cork, Ireland, the film festival program copy read, "Kubrick meets David Lynch. Already has a cult following."

What "it" is, is "The Kingdom." Perhaps best decribed colloquially as ER on acid, "The Kingdom" is a four-part series set in a hospital in Sweden. Built on an acient burial ground (somewhat a la "The Shining"), as the hospital (named The Kingdom) defies nature with the pursuit of hard-nosed science, it begins to undergo structural damage and visitations by uneasy spirits.

While shifting from the levity of relationships between the doctors, who range from open-minded and good-natured to practitioners of bad medicine, to the greek chorus (represented by two mentally challenged dishwashers who work in the basement), "The Kingdom" delivers palpable chills. Expect ghosts, severed heads, malpractice suits, seances, alien/ghost births and operations involving the switching of organs. It may sound like a bad episode of "The X-Files," circa '98, but the full effect of Von Trier's opus is decidedly classier and worth every second of the four one-hour installments (it originally ran as a television program in Denmark). If you enjoyed the following, you will most certainly take delight in "The Kingdom": The City of Lost Children, La Femme Nikita, Twin Peaks, The Shining.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Stanley Kubrick meets David Lynch
Review: When I first saw this foreign gem from director Lars Von Trier ("Breaking The Waves")in Cork, Ireland, the film festival program copy read, "Kubrick meets David Lynch. Already has a cult following."

What "it" is, is "The Kingdom." Perhaps best decribed colloquially as ER on acid, "The Kingdom" is a four-part series set in a hospital in Sweden. Built on an acient burial ground (somewhat a la "The Shining"), as the hospital (named The Kingdom) defies nature with the pursuit of hard-nosed science, it begins to undergo structural damage and visitations by uneasy spirits.

While shifting from the levity of relationships between the doctors, who range from open-minded and good-natured to practitioners of bad medicine, to the greek chorus (represented by two mentally challenged dishwashers who work in the basement), "The Kingdom" delivers palpable chills. Expect ghosts, severed heads, malpractice suits, seances, alien/ghost births and operations involving the switching of organs. It may sound like a bad episode of "The X-Files," circa '98, but the full effect of Von Trier's opus is decidedly classier and worth every second of the four one-hour installments (it originally ran as a television program in Denmark). If you enjoyed the following, you will most certainly take delight in "The Kingdom": The City of Lost Children, La Femme Nikita, Twin Peaks, The Shining.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Brilliant
Review: I loved this (parts one and two). It is at once; creepy, haunting, deeply disturbing and, not least, hysterically funny. Lars von Trier is one of those directors whose work I will always see, regardless of whether the critics or the public have approved, because I know there will always be moments of pure genius which I will not want to miss, whether or not the whole adds up to brilliance (the other two are Almodovar and Egoyan). I long for this on DVD.

Don't even get me started about "Steven King's The Kingdom" - Steven King? How is it "his"? He's the Andrew Lloyd Weber of mass market horror, that one.

And, finally, why put down "Six Feet Under" in order to praise "The Kingdom"? That hurt.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Why is Kingdom II not available?
Review: Sit back and enjoy the ride. It's weird, sometimes silly, but thoroughly captivating.

I hate to bring up a boring old theme, but we in North America rarely come up with works of such subtlety. I have been watching 6 Feet Under and the comparison is stark. In Kingdom, the characters are flawed, interesting, and likeable. In 6 Feet Under, they are flawed, uninteresting, and unlikeable.

It is scary to think that an American re-make of this is in the works. But, you never know...remember Twin Peaks (almost 20 years ago now!)?


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