irreversible (2002)

Irreversible:

This one was tough at first. It starts with a constantly moving camera,
even when the characters remain still, which makes you wonder if it's just
for the sake of being different, but then lends itself to aide in the
illusion of the continuous shot that the director seemed to be going for, though
it is annoying at all times. The worst part of the camera trick for me
(when i wanted to stop watching due to nausea and irritation)was a very
long "continuous shot" in a bar where the main character is looking for
someone, and we follow him through the entire place with an awful siren-like
noise going constant with techno very faint in the background, while the
camera spins the whole time. Picture someone practicing with a bow-staff, and you have the view of the bow-staff. On the character-up at the ceiling-on someone else
-up at the ceiling-to a wall-to the floor-to the dark-to the ceiling-to
our character... This goes on waaaaaaaaaaay too long. This would have been fine
if it were just a continuous shot following him, but between the siren and
the spinning, I wanted to turn it off for fear that the whole movie would
be like this, and that i'd go mad with vomiting.
Thankfully, it isn't. What came next was disturbing in a far different way.
The following scene makes you wish the continuous shot was a little less
convincing, as the spinning stops and you watch a very brutal and too realistic
scene of two guys fighting.
This film is not for... most people. I don't want to give away the whole scene, but I will
not be complaining about not seeing the violence in this one.
I myself got through this scene and stopped the movie to cringe and wince for
a bit.
Did you ever see something in a film that looked so real that you wondered if
they really did that to someone, and everyone was in on it?... Kinda makes you
feel like that.
This makes number one of my top three most brutal and hard to watch scenes I've
witnessed in a movie.

#3 is the curbsmile in American History X. Thank god for cut-aways so they
can put the dummy in.

#2 would be the face smashy part with the butt of the gun in Pan's Labrynth.

This scene hits #1. The only one where I've stopped a movie for a bit.
I still feel a little uneasy, but it was on with the rest of the film...
Whether to come to grips with that scene or not, the rest of the movie
is a lot more tame with the exception of a rape scene that leaves an
awful discomfort in your soul as well. You feel dirty and gross watching
those scenes anyway, but this one is especially long which makes it worse.
Reverse chronological order makes the movie progressively tamer and happier
from this point on. For realism, this movie does it for me, because most of the cast
are idiots with nothing to say attempting to say things. Just like real people.
My biggest problem with this film is that the writer/director decided to throw in irony at the end, or foreshadowing but it's all backward so that doesn't work, by having one of characters mention a dream about the place where something
happens to them. This was not needed as we already saw the scene if we are at this point. This film was powerful enough to keep you engaged without that, thinking something more was going to happen, but it doesn't. Don't get your hopes up.

Well. That was long. Sorry.

-Sleeve-