philip-davies31

I became acutely conscious that I was getting older during this film. Boredom, not love, is the really deadly petit mort. Maundering ghosts twitter in the affected limbo of a Swiss spa where the dead go to torment each other with their insignificance. To realise one has become two hours older in this depressing company is an intolerable deprivation, for which the vacuously stylish imagery is like dead flowers in a trundling hearse. The monotonous drone of the personal memories trapped in this airless, aimless reminiscence annoys with its flyblown memories of vanished youth. Being trapped in such emptiness is like a season in Hell. The intended redemption of the final concert comes across only as a pretentious and facile simper of the maestro's vanished audience. Anything Sorrentino had to say has finally been drowned in his own self-regarding stylistic pose. Tired artifice is presented as Poetry. The tired and the defeated come here to forget they ever lived. For the film's audience, they never really did.

Interesting historical film - unfortunately, Freevee doesn't employ people fluent in the language of foreign films so the English captioned subtitles to them are cued at random and completely useless. They don't seem to understand when people complain - as they do, frequently. Utterly stupid people.what else can I say? I'm trying to fill this out to get the warning to others but it takes a lot more characters before I'm allowed to send it I don't know why they don#t allow succinct comments - they have their point, as in this case. Anyway, you got my point in my first few lines so the rest of this padding is irrelevant - Ah! Now they'll let me post!

According to heavyweight film journal 'Slant' magazine, this is the point of the film, and the entire reason for its existence:

'Wounded introverts and workaholic intellectuals wrestle with their inability to connect with others'

That, it seems to me, is a fair warning to avoid Amazon's apathetic, maundering anti-drama.

Unfortunately, that notoriously po-faced art-house journal seems to mean what it says to be taken as a resounding endorsement.

Well, I left this lifeless, stillborn brain-child after the first glum encounter: Stunningly dull waste of time that fails to connect with anything anyone with a pulse or a flicker of curiosity might be interested in.

The 'loop' of the title eventuates in the kind of repetitive, aimless circling that recalls the futility of a fly trapped in an empty room, an irritating buzz coming and going but never arriving or settling, a distractingly inconsequent presence; or, the small, resounding echo of a steadily irregular dripping tap, impinging upon our attention as it lures us towards a resolution that steadily gathers in our mind but never fills it.

But that description is to make this interminable film, composed entirely out of scenes of merciless inconclusiveness - this Hell of Eternity, this cursed zone where the viewer wanders without hope of escape - sound so much more intriguing and purposeful than it really is.

Becket and Bergman and Tarkovsky and even Bela Tarr seem over-the-top melodramas in comparison. I'll really have to join the queue for Godot, again: Time for something worth my time. Time after time. Timeless but memorable.

More time spent in the loopy company of the affectless zombie drones haunting the cinematic nowhere of this series would be like having a lobotomy: Disturbingly peaceful, as if someone - possibly oneself - had died. Of boredom.

Fortunately, I didn't quite succumb to the creeping, crippling mental inertia this film creates, shook myself awake, and continued my ordinary life as if nothing had happened.

Which it hadn't, of course. Or if it did I didn't notice.

The grand promise of the underground Mercer Center for Experimental Physics is just a rabbit-hole without the magician's rabbit.