The Five Obstructions (2003)

Touches You

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

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I had never seen nor heard of Jorgen Leth's short film, "The Perfect Man"Here it is online if you care to (re-)watchhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qFS5IEctis&feature=relatedFor a 10 minute film, it has some remarkably memorable moments, the man dancing, the man muttering while eating. That film is the seed for this one. Lo and behold the DVD revolution has come completely round, and the making of a film becomes the movie itself. While I can understand some of the detractors here, I found the film fascinating, and could not turn it off. There is something inherently pleasing to me, to have some one map out a series of rules and then have another person exercise some creativity within those rules, or in this case obstructions. But as surely as obstructions become creativity this film flips back upon itself.My obstruction as a reviewer then is to describe this as a summer blockbuster:This is a film about Batman and the Joker playing ping-pong, but while the game is on, the Joker is busy destroying Gotham City on the sly. However, in the end, the Joker finds that Batman is not really Batman, but Alfred the Butler in disguise (and not portrayed by Jorgen Leth), ultimately Batman has preserved Gotham.Yes I know that fails, but if you enjoy books about authors writing books, you may enjoy this film as I did.

Wildly inventive documentary experiments with alternate short film types as modern Danish mastermind Lars von Trier orders his friend and collaborator Jørgen Leth to reinterpret his classic short film "The Perfect Human" with five new orders to follow.The cinematic results yield five very interesting mini movies which are displayed throughout the behind-the-scenes footage of these two director's strategizing how to accomplish any given task.While fascinating purely from a technical love for cinema, The Five Obstructions ultimately feels like a pretentious and partially vacant exercise, exemplified best when von Trier's demanding arrogance leads to the underwhelming and pseudo-profound conclusion.

While many art house patrons might enjoy this film immensely, the average person would have little interest in the movie. Instead of a conventional plot, the film was created by a documentary director (Lars von Trier) and he interviews veteran director Jørgen Leth about his early art film 'Det perfekte menneske' and challenged him to remake this esoteric film after given certain strict and rather arbitrary parameters ("obstructions"). Some of these requirements help to make up some dandy short films and some are just bizarre. One of the more bizarre ones actually works very well, as Leth had to make an edit every 12 frames (i.e., every 1/2 second) and the final result was unusual but watchable. I also liked the cartoon version Leth created--even though he swore that he hated cartoons. Some were pretty silly.However, while the ideas were intriguing, the original film was just too "artsy-fartsy" for me. Von Trier, by the way, was one of the creators of the "Dogme 95 movement"--an avant-garde manifesto that sought to create simple and "pure" films, free of the usual Hollywood clichés. In some cases (like FESTEN), this was a good thing but in other cases the films are quite difficult to watch and dull. Sure, I love foreign and independent films, but this one looked like it strictly for the beret-wearing, espresso- swilling bohemian crowd. It just wasn't my cup of tea, though the film was at times interesting. But is it really worth wading through the tedium to find a few glimpses of brilliance?

I have a lot of respect for Von Trier's work and find most of his movies clever and stimulating. Having said that I wonder why Lars as a person seems to be so arrogant and un-sympathetic and as a director so self indulgent... The strongest message I could get from this movie was "Ooh, I'm so bloody cool!". It's a pity because a style exercise in cinema could have been a great new idea, something comparable - in literary terms - to what Queneau did, or to Italo Calvino's famous "Se una Notte d'Inverno un Viaggiatore". But it soon becomes a rather boring and self centered exercise. Those are the risks of becoming famous and celebrated... you loose the plot! What a waste of talent.