Finished watching part II last night, I agree with a lot of your points. It is the weakest installment in his depression trilogy IMO. It has some very strong segments, but also has some
really bad ones. I describe it as equal parts complete crap and pure brilliance.
[Show spoiler]Structurally, the film is a mess...it rambles and certain parts are very disjointed. The part with Uma Thurman felt so random, and when it jump cuts to her screaming I laughed out loud (not in a good way). The part with Christian Slater in the hospital felt predictable and poorly developed. And the last chapter when Joe becomes a criminal...jeez, that felt like a completely different film.
The dialogue is at times pretentious, ridiculous, or down right laughable. When Stellen Skarsgard randomly talks about Zionism, or when Gainsbourg throws in comments about racial epithets or pedophilia, it felt like the characters stopped existing so Lars could lecture the audience. I think Lars' self-imposed exile from the media after Cannes '11 is really getting to him, as the film is filled with his own lecturing thoughts cut and pasted into the dialogue. Like Dogville, Lars uses the film to take numerous jabs at his audience and critics, and Nymphomaniac suffers those same forced and scripted results as the former. He doesn't let the film breath.
The only chapter of part II that was at all interesting were the S&M segments with K, which were the only scenes that were truly unnerving in parts I or II (the rest of the sex scenes were rather dull). That part was riveting and Jamie Bell was excellent. Lars could have cut that out, added it to part I, scrapped the rest of part II, edited it down to a 3 hour movie, and couldn't have called it a day.
I liked the connections Lars made between sex on the train and fly fishing, or polyphony and three of her best lovers, but even the connections that worked seemed ham-fisted and shoved into the narrative with a crowbar. There is a scene in part II where Gainsbourg mocks Skarsgard's intellectual interruptings, which is Lars poking fun at himself, but it was a little late at that point.
I wouldn't say I hated the film. These are my issues, but the scenes that worked really stuck with me. This is being called his sex epic, but unfortunately it has some of his best work as well as his worst IMO.
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...its basically had the PQ of a VHS tape.
) so the announcements won't be bumped to Tuesday.
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