Enter the Void *spoliers

[CMonster]

It's about 1:30am and I'm at work and I'm bored. Uninterestingly enough, this is oddly reminiscent of a film I had the misfortune of watching early this week so I figured I would share some thoughts about this film because I seem to be in the minority with my opinion and I want some definitive answers to some questions I have.

Plot synopsis: The opening of the film we start off in a shoddy apartment in Tokyo. It's set in the first person view of Oscar, an American and drug dealer. We see him talk to his sister, do a couple mundane things, and then smoke some DMT. We get to have a trip with him(not sure how to better put it than that). Then his phone rings and somebody wants to buy some drugs from him. Then just before he leaves a Frenchman who is his friend shows up and decides to go with him to deliver the drugs. The Frenchman stays outside as we enter "The Void", a bar. Just after Oscar shows up the cops bust in. Oscar runs to the bathroom to try and flush the drugs down the toilet. When he refuses to open the door a cop shoots him and he dies. This is all shot in the first person, but as Oscar dies we switch to first person of his soul or spirit or whatever. His spirit then goes and stares at a light. Then we follow his spirit to a club where his sister works as a stripper. In the dressing room her boss stops her from answering her phone so he can have sex with her. After he finishes she listens to the message on her phone telling her that her brother is dead. We then get to watch he cry for a while and look at some more lights. Then we get a series of flashback of Oscar reliving his life. This is all first person of the spirit shot over the shoulder of the Oscar spirit Oscar is remembering. We get to see him and his sister as babies, then as children where their parents die in a car crash, how him and his sister got separated at a young age to go to different foster homes, him moving to Tokyo, his earlier experiences in Tokyo, him getting involved in selling drugs, his sister moving in with him, her becoming a stripper, and finally we get to rewatch the parts of the night he died. Then we get to follow his spirit watching how his sister, his French friend, and the friend he was going to sell drugs to after his death. All the while there are some shorter flashbacks to things we saw in his prior flashbacks and I guess his spirit is like a moth because it keeps zooming in on lights. His sister gets an abortion. His friend who was gonna buy the drugs goes to his sister's apartment to apologize and she yells at him to kill himself(only scene I really liked in the film). And then his sister and the Frenchman to took comfort in each other after his death go to a sex hotel. His spirit watches a bunch of random people having sex and giving blowjobs for about 10 minutes until it gets back to his sister. We then get to see the Frenchman's animated penis in his sister's animated vagina blow a load and the little animated sperm go and fertilize an animated egg. Finally, Oscar has a flashback to being born.

Before I really start, good things about the movie: incredibly original and ambitious cinematography. That's it.

Enter the Void is easily the worst film since I watch Twilight: New Moon (luckily New Moon had Rifftrax which is also the only reason I watched it). What saddens me about this is because this film came very highly recommended. I was told to expect something I had never seen before. While admittedly there was plenty of originality, I couldn't help but draw a few comparisons between the two films.

First off, acting. It was bad. Was it as emotionless and bland as the actors in New Moon? No, but there was really only one scene where the acting brought me into the emotion. As I said in my mini-review, "There is one good scene in this movie but you literally and metaphorically have to sit through an abortion to get to it." Hyperbole aside, I only made it this far because I have a thing about finishing movies. Feel free to tell me if I misjudged the acting, but nobody stood out as being great through out and most were barely or not even passable.

Which leads me to point two: this movie is goddamned boring. I'll cop to my biases here before I extrapolate more. I'm not really interested in just drugs. I am interested in characters and events worthy of interest and if either of those involve drugs that's great but the presence of drugs doesn't make things inherently interesting to me. I also find to much sex in movies to be boring. If there is a reason for it or whatever that's fine, but at certain point, it just feels like watching shitty porn. I don't wanna watch shitty porn, especially if I was in the mood for watching a real movie. But I feel I can't be alone when I say, that the main character wasn't really all that interesting of a person. It felt like for a significant amount of time when we were watching his life, we saw him do a lot of really mundane things and have a lot of conversations that didn't really go anywhere significant. So this is where my first important question about this film comes from: why is this excusable? Does the cinematography really supercede everything else by that much? What if I had a couple kids and was making a home movie of just family moment but it had amazing cinematography? Would that make it worth while for other people to see? I've seen home video of happy memories of me as a child but it is still boring. I can't image that anybody else would give a shit no matter what kinda crazy camera work there was. That's how I felt through a significant portion of this movie.

I noticed many people also mention the visuals as great along with the cinematography, but to be fair, I thought they were kind of boring as well. A lot of time was spent having the camera move over rooftops, around rooms, and zooming into lights. Again, does neat camerawork make this excusable? It was just drab grey rooftops and long shots of pavement that meant nothing. It was just there. I don't find pavement interesting. And when the camera would zoom into lights or at the beginning when our protagonist got high, the visuals were boring. At that point you may as well have turned on the Window's Media Player Visualizer to get more interesting and complex visuals.

And the sex hotel was the most boring thing of all. Anybody who made it this far got to spend a long time at the sex hotel. It sounds really interesting. Well it isn't. It could have been if it were 80-90% shorter. Glowing whips of light emanating from the genitals of people boning for 10 minutes doesn't really make it interesting. I'm not about to get into a philosophical argument about what Gaspar Noe was trying to say with this scene, but if he was trying to say that sex is boring and tedious and emotionless he succeeded probably less than half the time this scene took. All other interpretations could have been achieved in less time than that (and yes I have thought about and read up about meanings behind what happened in this movie because I was trying to understand why people like it). To me it seems there is no conceivable reason why this lasted so long. If somebody can give me a legit reason why it was like this I would love to hear it. I also lied earlier when I said the only good thing was the cinematography. We did get to see full penetration.

New Moon was also very boring. Yet to it's credit, the pacing was somewhat faster than that of a snail which cannot be said for Enter the Void. New Moon was probably more boring as a whole, but like Enter the Void we follow people living a boring life, there is no interesting sex, and Window's Media Player Visualizer provides more interesting and complex visuals.

A lot of positive reviews for this film said it was "something you have never seen before." While this is technically true, does that actually add anything to it as a film? I have also never seen a man commit suicide in a very bloody fashion right in front of me, but that doesn't mean that is a good thing to watch. I've never once fisted somebody's asshole and then seen their rectum prolapse as I pulled my hand out. Again, just because it's new and never been seen before I don't follow the logic of why exactly that makes something good. Now, I'm not unreasonable so if somebody could say why something new in film is inherently good to the point that it overrides poor acting, poor pacing, and a boring plot/subject, I would like to hear it.

I'll fully admit I may have been overly harsh and hyperbolic but I really did not like this movie and it was hard to sit all the way through for me. But I really want to hear a better explanation than what can be given in a mini-review as to why so many people really liked this movie.

[ShogunRua]

Haven't seen the movie, but was interested in reading your review.

Unfortunately, your post reveals precious little about the film you're criticizing. For starters, I would have spent a short paragraph describing the plot of "Enter the Void"; it's not widely known, and was something I wanted to find out.

Also, you use the word "boring" again and again throughout the review, but don't do a very good job convincing us of this. You mention that some scenes with drugs and sex were boring, but how large a part of the film were they? And what made the drug scenes so boring? What was so monotonous about the sex? Instead of just telling us it's "boring", you could have gone into greater detail about what made it so.

Similarly, you mentioned the pacing was off and that a lot of the shots felt dull, too. What are some examples of this?

Clicking on this topic, I wanted to learn two things (I had seen your mini-review of "Enter the Void" and knew you hated it);

1. What the fuck is "Enter the Void" about?
2. Why does CMMonster hate it so much?

I received a very vague answer to the second question, and none to the first.

[CMonster]

All valid points about my review. I added a plot synopsis. The plot synopsis does make it sound interesting.

As for better examples I'm not quite sure how to better explain it because it is a very strange movie. There was a lot of time spent lingering on lights and zooming into lights. There were a couple times where we just get to look at pavement. Plenty of time spent going over empty rooftops. The camerawork was pretty cool but there was plenty of time looking at nothing. Sometimes it would zoom all the way into a light and just strobe for a while. I can't explain it better than that. I just find pavement and strobe lights boring.

As for how the drugs and sex were boring it really has to do with the pacing. I mentioned it in the part where I talked about the sex hotel. It's just lasts for way to long and we don't really see much of substance happening. Most of the stuff with his spirit watching stuff after his death in birds-eye-view, which made things feel kind detached for me. I kind of assumed that's what Noe was going for since Oscar's spirit is detached for the mortal world. So with that detached feeling, its 10 minutes of random Asian people having sex with wispy light coming from their genitals. It's just not interesting.

A lot of the flashbacks over Oscar's life were not interesting. His parents death wasn't boring and him and his sister being separated wasn't, but the rest of the flashbacks just chronicled a mundane life. That's the best way to put it. He was just some dude.

When he smokes DMT, it is really just a lame version of the Window's Media Player Visualizer. Its just some colors moving around. The scene is like 6 or 7 minutes long. The rest of the movie suffers from the same thing, most scenes and shots last longer than they should and it just kills the pacing and makes it boring.

I hope that may clarify what I was trying to say. Mostly I was writing to people who saw it and hoping they would give reasons for why they liked it because I really want to have somebody convince me I'm wrong so I'll rewatch it and enjoy it. I wanted to like this movie but a lot of the choices of how it was made did not make any sense to me.