Recent Blog Posts
Thu Dec 4, 11:01 AM
Thu Dec 4, 9:23 AM
Thu Dec 4, 3:21 PM
Thu Dec 4, 2:10 PM
Thu Dec 4, 9:00 AM
Wed Dec 3, 5:30 PM
Thu Dec 4, 2:05 PM
Thu Dec 4, 1:31 PM
Recent Articles
Recent Articles by Ella Taylor
Welcome to Baz Luhrmann's not-quite-marvelous land of Oz.
Disney's latest toon is a starry dog story.
Kristin Scott Thomas shines as a child killer in middlebrow French melodrama.
No related articles found
National Features >
Miami New Times
South Florida's lawless exotic rental car industry keeps rolling.
By Gus Garcia-Roberts
Houston Press
In Texas, restitution for victims is nothing but a state-sanctioned sham.
By Chris Vogel
Seattle Weekly
If you thought Seattle couldn't fetishize coffee any more, you haven't been to a "cupping" yet.
By Jonathan Kauffman
Brothers in Arms
Published on May 20, 2008 at 4:20am
Joachim Triers dazzlingly kinetic tale of two aspiring Norwegian cult novelists, Reprise, is bounded by fantasies of what might have become of the friends and literary competitors after the publication of their first novels. But the entire film plays out in the conditional tense, a bold experiment in narrative and style that in less passionate or skilled hands might well have ended up as the wank that so many pomo novice filmmakers, drunk on technique and existential bombast, have to get off their chests before they give up or get down to business. Indeed, Reprise whose splintered form organically mirrors the mental life of its young protagonists and their crowd, lovers of punk bands, cult novelists, and Henry James is precisely about the tension between alienation and belonging, ambition and pretension, the chasm between dreams and reality. Trier, whos distantly related to that other adventurous Trier (Lars von), doesnt want you making sense of the ups and downs of sensitive, tragic Phillip and goofy, perennially smiling Erik, played respectively by doctor and musician Anders Danielsen Lie and advertising copywriter Espen Klouman-Hoiner. But Reprise a masculine story whose women come off best is less a hermeneutic finger in your face (though it aims wonderfully low blows at literary celebrity) than a savage, funny, tender, tragic, and strangely beautiful riff on growing up in a broken world.
Wed., May 28, 2008