binnertdebeaufort

Incredibly overrated film. A man and a woman find out that his wife and her husband are having an affair. This stimulates the man, well, to smoke a lot and the woman to look a bit odd. We see cigarettes falling on the floor in slow motion, we see the wind blowing through red curtains. These scenes have to convey the message that we are dealing with 'art'. The main characters hardly say anything, their silence is supposed to be telling. It told me that these people are mentally and socially inept to express themselves. So our hero just lights up another one while the heroine keeps on looking rather uncomfortable, as if she hadn't visited the toilet for a long time. The endless silence, the endless smoking. Say something! Do something!, I heard myself shouting to the screen. Sleep with each other, have your lungs checked, deliver us from this endless boredom.

Yes, this is a very good film. Yes, the acting is formidable. And, yes, it tells us all kinds of interesting things about the confrontation of cultures in an environment of proud, though rather stubborn, Iranian refugees in an xenophobic US. But all these things really do not matter that much because the only thing you'll experience after watching this film is emptiness if not near suicidal depression. This is a complete 'no hoper'. Everybody looses in this film, well, half of the characters die anyway and those that do survive, are not going to experience any kind of simple joy let alone, 'happiness', in the near future. Maybe twenty ears of intense counseling will do the job but I sincerely doubt it. It left me numb. Actually, I almost regretted that I voluntarily went trough the ordeal of watching this agonizing story of painful misunderstandings leading towards death and suicide. Be ware.

Someone in the videostore advised me to see this film. Now I understand that this probably was a joke. Skulls is terrible. It is not even funny for it's flaws. The acting is lousy though you must feel sorry for the actors because the screenplay is even worse. The story itself is a cliché: blue collar student gets an invitation to join some fascist fraternity which seems to secretly run this planet. The fraternity exists for about two hundred years but it's rituals are shallow and do not go beyond driving expensive sportscars, having sex with supermodels and quoting the fraternity rules from a bible-like book which seems to be a mixture of Mao's Red Book and Hitler's Mein Kampf. The blue collar student completely dropps his old friends from the white ghetto - who conveniently for the story happen to be video-editing experts and own a surprisingly sophisticated mixing studio for the white trash they so unconvincingly try to portray- but becomes remorseful when his formal best (black) friend get's murdered by his new Buddy's dad who is president of the fraternity but also a high court judge and a total maniac. When the hero tries to uncover the cover-up he briefly ends up in a mental institution but is saved with in a day by this senator - who is also a skull's member- and by his girlfriend who earlier in the film made a MacGyver like paint spraying robot. The film drags on to a most ridiculous ending. One of the rules of The Skulls sacred booklet states that you are entitled to challenge a fellow Skulls member for a duel with ancient guns. Till death that is. So we see our hero in a duel with his formal new buddy, the buff but thickheaded son of the Skull's president. This troubled young bully kills his dad, the maniac judge, instead of our blue collar hero. The end.

The first time I saw this film was probably more than ten years ago on a late Monday night on the BBC. At such a time on such a day one never expects to be shown something decent. But 'Night of the hunter' proved to be one of the best films I have ever seen. The cinematography is breathtaking, especially the river journey of the two children who are fleeing for the evil and demented preacher who killed their mother. Never have I seen nature being portrayed in such a mysterious and dangerous way. The sharp contrasts of light, the dark church in the distance which symbolises the dangerous preacher. The film made me think of the books of Flannery 'O Connor, especially the strange and mysterious southern tale Wise Blood.