He did say he was eager to return to his home country, where he plans on shooting both a soft-core and hard-core porn movie.
I wonder if they'll be holding open auditions? I'd go out for that.
"I want to be surrounded by porn people who love me for what I am, who say, 'Where do you want the erection, where do you want the penetration.' Where it's not complicated. There wouldn't be a porn star running out there saying 'Lars said this or Lars said that.'"
I'm proud to have been declared persona non grata. This is maybe the first time in film history that has happened. I think one of the reasons is that the French themselves treated the Jews badly during the second world war. Therefore it is a touchy subject for them. I highly respect the Cannes festival, but I also understand that they are very angry with me right now. I'm no Mel Gibson, but once again I would like to say sorry everybody.
A spokeswoman for Cannes said she did not know whether such an expulsion had occurred before or if Von Trier would be allowed back to the festival in the future. She added that Melancholia would remain in competition despite its director's expulsion.
von Trier's reaction to the ban in a Danish newspaper:
I'm proud to have been declared persona non grata. This is maybe the first time in film history that has happened. I think one of the reasons is that the French themselves treated the Jews badly during the second world war. Therefore it is a touchy subject for them. I highly respect the Cannes festival, but I also understand that they are very angry with me right now. I'm no Mel Gibson, but once again I would like to say sorry everybody.
The Guardian are saying: "He reportedly followed this up with: "If any of you journalists want to hit me, just go ahead. I will enjoy it." "
I'm not a fan of Lars Von Trier by any means, but what the fuck are are the members of Cannes thinking? Their stupid and ultra politically correct approach of banning someone from a festival that plays movies like Kinatay just gives the person more publicity, more notoriety and more press for their film by someone who's obviously using it to attract attention. Isn't that the opposite of what Cannes would want to do in this case? That said, his press conference is incredibly funny and it's a pleasure to see Kristen Dunst constantly move her arms nervously. "I am of course all for Jews. No, not too much, because Israel is a pain in the ass".
Cannes did the only thing they could do. Its stupid to even think about making a joke like that at a press conference. Not to mention how badly he kept digging the hole. People can scream about political correctness all they want but Cannes Film Festival is a business and bad press can really bring things down.
AttitudeAJM wrote:Cannes did the only thing they could do. Its stupid to even think about making a joke like that at a press conference. Not to mention how badly he kept digging the hole. People can scream about political correctness all they want but Cannes Film Festival is a business and bad press can really bring things down.
If they are so worried about their business, why did they invite Mel Gibson?
Lars said these things at a press conference during the festival. I'm sure that if Mel Gibson had an explosion at a meeting with the press they would have done the same thing. There is very little to these situations that is comparable. Obviously Mel has made terrible remarks in the past and has done some pretty stupid things but to do so at an event in front of the press during the festival is the biggest issue.
Remember that business is business and doing something that could directly hurt business will instantly get you put out the door.
What von Trier said was incredibly stupid, and what Cannes is doing in response is inexplicably managing to top it. But this is such a boring controversy, and anyone who gets intellectually invested in this has too much time on their hands. This is the art world version of "Imma let you finish, but . . . " and the VMAs.
Tom Hagen wrote:What von Trier said was incredibly stupid, and what Cannes is doing in response is inexplicably managing to top it. But this is such a boring controversy, and anyone who gets intellectually invested in this has too much time on their hands. This is the art world version of "Imma let you finish, but . . . " and the VMAs.
You're absolutely right but unlike Kanye this really could hurt Von Triers career irreparably. Kanye hurt a little girls feelings and Trier will forever be blurbed with "I'm a nazi" out of context, probably just below a photo of him holding up the fuck tattoo.
Out of curiosity, I dipped into Stormfront to see how this was playing over there, and the general consensus is that they don't think that von Trier is a proper Nazi. Largely because he consorts with people like Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose dad was rather famously Jewish.
Well it looks like the real world has intervened to make a flubbed joke funny. So I guess having real anti-Semitic sympathies is fine at Cannes but you better not crack a joke about understanding the mind of a genocidal tyrant in a self-referencing manner. John Prine was right, it truly is a big old goofy world.
Forget Gibson, what about the bonafide dyed-in-the-wool war crime sympathiser that is Kusturica?
In the short term, this decision doesn't really harm the film - indeed it's created more publicity and given Melancholia an outside chance at the awards, a sympathy vote, that it wouldn't otherwise have had. In the longer term... We'll have to see what happens. Hopefully tempers will cool and this decision can be quietly re-assessed.
I have checkdiscs already, and it looks like a terrific package - unlike earlier editions, this one includes all the LvT monologues to camera, and there are also plenty of extras: Tranceformer has appeared as a DVD extra elsewhere already, but there's also a dedicated documentary on The Kingdom as well as a bizarre collection of TV commercials fronted by the irreplaceable Ernst-Hugo Järegård.
If those specs are right, it seems mostly ported from the Zentropa/Electric Parc release, adding the Tranceformer doc and dropping some other extras (notably the selected scene commentary). The Electric Parc edition is OOP so it's probably not an option for most, although the U.S. release keeps all the Electric Parc extras (Tranceformer is on the CC Element of Crime). However the U.S. version comes from Koch Lorber, so I'm betting it's PAL-to-NTSC.
Sorry, I forgot to mention that it has the selected scene commentaries as well - so it looks like a straight port. And obviously it's native PAL, though it's not as though the odd bit of blurring would make much difference.
The R1 had a glitch that made it skip over a few minutes of one episode with no way to double back and see what you had missed. This was never fixed that I'm aware of. Presumably this set will not have this problem.
It's been a few years since I encountered this issue but looking online, others are saying it starts happening about 40 minutes into the third episode of the first series, when a character is rummaging through some files. Apparently it abruptly skips to a few minutes from the first episode and then jumps back to the third episode, but you've missed whatever happened in the interim.
A 2009 review of the U.S. version (over at Amazon) says the problem doesn't occur on their copy, and another review says you can contact Koch Lorber for a replacement -- not sure if that's still true, though. The issue was probably fixed for the complete series collection, which came out three years after the standalone series one release.
People with AS often have a limited range of intonation: speech may be unusually fast, jerky or loud. Speech may convey a sense of incoherence; the conversational style often includes monologues about topics that bore the listener, fails to provide context for comments, or fails to suppress internal thoughts. Individuals with AS may fail to monitor whether the listener is interested or engaged in the conversation. The speaker's conclusion or point may never be made, and attempts by the listener to elaborate on the speech's content or logic, or to shift to related topics, are often unsuccessful.
Judging by the non-reaction to my entirely unfacetious observations about Von Trier's possible neurological condition (the man himself has admitted to suffering from OCD,which is sometimes associated with high spectrum autism disorder) the underlying reasons behind Von Trier's behaviour are obviously completely without interest?
Given Von Trier's easy command of insincerity, figurative language, and non-verbal communication, some of the things that asperger's sufferers are known to find extremely difficult, I'd say no. There is nothing about his affect that suggests asperger's.
Anyway, diagnosing a man with a form of autism based mostly on the fact that he put his foot in his mouth is kind of absurd.
