Saturday 8 August 2015

IMDb Bottom 100 Review - Number 50 Dis A Story About Love

If you have a couple of hours of otherwise unoccupied time, a video camera and a really stupid looking hair do, I suggest you cast that shit aside post haste and, contrary to whoever the fuck wasted an hour and 9 minutes of my life with this movie, step away from quasi-professional movie making for the remainder of your days. Let me be absolutely clear about this: This movie should not exist. Lots of movies on this list probably shouldn't, but I can understand why somebody thought they'd be fun to make. And why somebody would spend time doing them. This movie defies all logic. Nobody, including the cocksmugglers who hacked their way through.... alright I'm getting carried away already. Let's get on with this review and I'll throw virtual shit at this right after the jump.


Film School Reject Technique #5: Panning landscape from a moving vehicle for several minutes at a time. 

Let me open on a positive note. This movie was only an hour and 9 minutes long. On a slightly less positive note every single picosecond of those 69 minutes felt like a lifetime. I usually watch these movies with about 75% 25% attention, the remaining 70% spent on my phone and 5% contemplating how the fuck they fit those little model ships into those little bottles (no really. Even after having seen a person do it, I'm still baffled.) This movie had perhaps 15% of my attention. 20% during the juicy bits (of which there were none). And what's more, I realized less than 5 minutes in, that this was going to be the case. Not only was the quality of everything less than the standard of the bumbling dad filming the wrong kid play a teacup at the local elementary school theater show, it was just pointless and shitty and boring and lame and without point. Completely lacking a point in fact. A love story, the title falsely lead me to believe. A big fat lie. Dis means fog in Norwegian. That was partly true, except there wasn't actually any fog in the movie, but due to the excessively shitty quality of the camera, it looked like you needed glasses. Everytime I looked up at the screen from my game of Parcheesi, I rubbed my eyes trying to focus. It didn't help. I gave up 25 minutes in and just accepted my fate.

Another thing: Half the movie was kept in semi darkness. I guess it's a way of making it seem mysterious and profound while hiding the actors' faces.
Normally I'd spend two paragraphs going over the plot of the movie I'm reviewing. Hell, you've read every one of my reviews up until now, why am I telling you. You're a seasoned review reader at this point, so let's dispense with the idle bullshit and get right to the action here. The fact of the matter is, there is no plot in this movie. And I know, usually when I say that it's really 'haha the plot is so stupid that you could just as well say it isn't there when really there is at least a pretense of a plot'. Not so this time. There literally is no plot. There is no real dialogue even. Just voice over. It's just somebody filming a city and one and/or two people walking around. That's it. No I'm serious. That's really fucking it. Why? WHY IS THAT IT? ARGH!

Plot Twist: There isn't anything significant about this. It's 5 minutes of a guy fiddling with his bike. 5 minutes out of 69. 
Remember how I mentioned there wasn't a plot? It's true. There isn't one. So what is the movie doing? Well it's a love story, right? So the movie is split into 4 segments: Cairo, Oslo, Paris and New York. What happens on the screen? Well 30% of the movie is just the camera filming like... a panorama of the city or buildings or out of a car window. 50% is whoever is supposed to be the focus of that segment doing completely pointless and inane shit like filling up the tank of a motorcycle or rollerblading or smoking a cigarette. And the last 20% is filming a woman powdering her god damn face while contemplating her destiny. I'm appalled that somebody thought this shit up and managed to translate it to film. It absolutely should not be something that exists. This could not... it must not have made money. It's imperative that this movie didn't make money. I would punch a kitten if I learned that it made any kind of money. Each of the four segments is dealing with love, but the dialogue is like a high school poetry competition: clichés and drivel that wouldn't impress a 1 year old dyslexic hamster who was abandoned by its hamster parents as a kid and had spent years desolately drifting around the system.

20% of the movie was this lady. With voice over so dull I thought for a moment Woody Allen had executive produced it.


Why does it exist you may, if you are anything like me, be asking yourself as you are looking for a hammer to bash your fucking skull in with. Why indeed. My take on that is, that the long haired dickwad that seems to be involved in all 4 segments sat around some piece of shit coffee shop one day, with his arthouse friends, bragging about how amazing a film maker he was. Somehow a demented but rich philanthropist came by, and asked him what his idea was. Caught in an outright lie, this long haired shitstain blurts out the only lame idea his film school groupie wannabe brain can come up with: a love story. The demented philanthropist dismisses him immediately, and the long haired fucknugget, now obsessed with his own magnificent idea, decides to gather bottles from trashcans around the city and return them for money so he can fund his magnus opus. He then decides, money in hand, that he should of course film this in four different cities. Why not? He collected bottles with his own bare hands, and has money to spend, and the production itself is so cheap it could be funded by the money dropped out of a homeless' pocket. Four cities around the globe. If this guy received a government grant for fund this, so help me I will go on a rampage.


"Yo dude don't forget if you shoot out the front window, people will feel it is a gritty look at the world through somebody's eyes. Do it, man. It'll pay off!"
The movie is Norwegian, and the only Norwegian movie on the list, I believe, making it the second, and so far, lowest scoring Scandinavian country with an entry on the B100 list. I think Sweden perhaps steered clear of this amazing honor. I looked for subtitles a bit, but since I'm able to, with like 90% success, understanding Norwegian I didn't go through any trouble. I doubt subtitles exist. This was the kind of arthouse movie that would be shot on VHS and never made the transition to DVD nor would anybody give enough of a fuck to actually make subtitles for it. Especially because you'd vomit if you sat down and transcribed it. Example: “Sometimes I dream of a little man in the side of the road laughing. He jumps towards me, but right before he hits me, he disappears”. That was a piece of voice over from the Cairo segment. A love story? Sure. I was neauseous just from typing out that part. Kind of like being in love, only the inverted kind. Imagine doing the entire movie. I ran out of expletives 20 minutes into the movie and was reduced to making gutteral sounds of dismay to express my feelings.

Shouting at strangers hoping they'll stay out of shot, so his movie isn't ruined by actual content. Or mistaken for the longest and most boring entry to America's Funniest Home Videos
This film was so clearly ironically misunderstood art and before it was even before it was cool hipstery shit. It reeked of somebody full of themselves and full of blind eyed romanticism trying to make something profound and emotional that just came out as hitting way left of the mark. One scene from the New York segment shows a trash bag in the middle of the road, blowing trash everywhere in the wind. It reminded me of the already cheesy as fuck scene from American Beauty with the plastic bag blowing in the wind, inspiring tears of awe that life is so amazing. Interestingly this movie was made 4 years prior to American Beauty leading me to the only safe conclusion: Sam Mendes ripped this piece of shit off. What a knee in the groin for whoever made this flick. Oh well, can't be helped. They should have made something even more profound. Perhaps next time the coffee house crew comes up with a way to spend money they could've set fire to and derived more enjoyment from, they'll make something that is actually worth using an hour and 9 minutes of my life on. I'm not holding my breath. Not for long anyway. I mean we all hold it for a second at a time many times during the day, so I don't want to sit here and promise to never hold it again – I can't guarantee that. But what I wanted to say was, that I won't hold it until these guys made a decent movie, because I honestly don't think that's an option.

Shooting scenes in urban environments gives the viewer the feeling of digging deep under the hood of society for the real deal. The only thing I felt this movie was digging in, was a pile of shit. 
I could easily go on for another few paragraphs, spouting angry text about the problems inherent in this movie. But there is a point in every review, where enough is just enough. In closing I'll mention the voice over again. Because really a whole movie just with voice over to mask the fact, that nobody could act for shit. Why not write something that makes people feel like they are watching something somebody cared about at some point. And not just something made so some dude could jerk himself off to his title as film maker. I get it. You're a hotshot down at the coffee shop with nothing on the walls and instant coffee served ironically. It's a hit with the kind of people who thought hanging white pictures on the walls of museums was innovative and an amazing way to send a message to the world, that art is more than just something to look at. But with anybody who didn't sit in the back in film class thinking every established movie was propaganda for the masses it was far from a hit. It was a complete and utter loss, and I feel like less of a human being for having watched it.

Actual fog. The prophecy came true!

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