Must See Movie...

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I watched this movie few days ago, a friend who watched it before bought it for me, but he couldn't find any comparison with any other title, he simply told me I had to watch it. It took me a few days to make up my mind but this movie hunted me in a very singular way and truly enough there is no other title i can compare it with. It is an intimate adventure of a silent couple, a journey that reveals to them an undiscovered landscape. The American territory that I well know is suddenly unknown to me and mysterious, populated by a sense of imminent peril or uneasy calm. It is not a road movie, none of the usual cliché are present in this unusual and bizarre film, and perhaps Western could be, in a very open minded way the best choice since the movie has its violent moments and brutal depiction of a dusty land. In a way it reminded me of the Asian cinema, of the surrealism of Tsai Ming Yang with his silent character entangled in unique relationships, intense and visually stunning. The couple, like the landscape itself, is a mysterious entity and the perception of the land mirrors their interaction until the very last scene where the two characters try to resolve themselves. The two directors/actors gave us a brave film, a new wave of possibility to interact with a cliché-abused territory like the American one. The music by Martha Braun is again, like the movie, an open wave of cycling repetitions. It is truly enough not a movie for everyone but for the few lucky ones who are passionate about new territories and new languages.

The first time I saw this special work was at the Copenhagen film festival opening night. I was so tired and I have fell asleep after 1 minute and woke up when the final scene began... I saw deserts, dead animals and landscapes. Too bad, I wanted to see it. I went back a week later, and I finally had the whole puzzle complete. A meditative film, contrasting beauty with pain in a scenic western USA.Devil come to hell and stay where you belong was a special experience. Not everyone has the willpower to stand in front a 1.5 hours long plot, without dialogs, without characters at two o'clock in the night! and several spectator eyelids, during the movie, were gradually heavier and heavier.Those who could stay awake witnessed a very slow fascinating film, made with an incredible "home movie" aesthetic.

When the language collapses, at some point, sex, extreme violence and instincts take over. I saw this very interesting experimental film at the Goteborg Film Fest. The movie has been a blistering assault on one's senses, crude and unusual.The film is divided in different chapters. These stories take place in a road trip and each story follows the trail of a couple (I guess). In each story there's an element of the macabre and super-natural. In the words of Barston, the bounty hunter who narrates throughout Badlands: "They are places where sensible men never venture...where phantoms walk...way-stations somewhere smack between civilization and the Ninth Circle 'A Hell".The film zooms in on the strange relationship between the two characters in a deliberately slow observation. Enigmatic and grotesque. They exchange no words.This is a silent movie, with cold and violent sounds filling up the missed narration. Unquestionably, this film is unlike any film ever seen, and it definitely belong to the Art scene, more then cinema.. but I like this communion. I counted at list five long takes dedicated to landscapes, like giant animals resting in peace. The movie quietly integrates the five elements of nature to create a singular connection between them.The last scene arrives like an explosion of repression, grotesque like the animals found on the road..In one of the long shots we are shown the image of the sea as seen from a hill. We are drawn into the horizontal waves that decorate the widescreen in the form of broad white lines. Gradually, we have people walking across in front of us and guttural noises from seals, almost consumed by insects. The dynamics of the foreground, though initially attractive, feel like clockwork after a while.A movie of seemingly limpid transparency and tremendous, understated compassion.

Imagine every prejudice, every cliché, every stereotype ever conceived regarding so called art film. Then compress it into an hour and a half worth of screening, and you've basically got the atrocity that is Devil Come To Hell And Stay Where You Belong.I saw this hunk of junk recently at the Gothenburg Internationl Film Festival (GIFF), and I cannot recall the last time I had to sit through such a load of pretentious crap. The experience was, in short terms, horrendous."Devil" embodies the spirit of everything wrong with contemporary art. From it's shoddy camera work to it's unbearably slow tempo, it seems as though the directors simply went out and decided to "get artsy", not having a clue where to start, and the end result is, as expected, hardly worthy of the title "Film".And "Devil" certainly has it all - everything you "need" to be artsy: Hand-held DV cam - check. Little or no dialogue - check. Slow, over-the-top, lagging scenes - check. No lighting - check. I could go on.Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for a slowly pacing narrative (Lake Tahoe, for instance, comers to mind, also screened at GIFF) AS LONG AS IT SERVES A PURPOSE! This time, however, they come nothing close of it.The idea here seems to be "what if we were to shoot 90 minutes of semester footage and turn it into a film?", but sadly - just like in real life - your vacation stock film is best kept to yourself. Nobody needs to see you walk around and pose like a two-bit model in various grey landscapes ad nauseam, especially not when the person operating the camera haven't got the faintest clue what "framing" means. Combine all of this with your usual "art imagery" whose meaning we never come anywhere close to finding out (for those unfortunate enough to have seen this train wreck, I'm referring to the combined opening/ending-shot).Do yourself a favor, and give this waste of space a pass. There's plenty of good film out there, that dare to step away from the mainstream without relying entirely on pretentiousness and a static formula for creating "art".