YayNayorMeh

In one way I admire this movie. The intent of showing the buried and uncomfortable history of a major European city and simultaneously showing the conflicts and protests that have become part of the present day is admirable.

McQueen manages to show modern Amsterdam on a city-wide civic scale as well as a personal, private scale and gives equal importance to both.

I also find the focus on multiculturalism admirable. We spend time with people with North African, East Asian, Afro-Colonial & Palestinian heritages. As well as the modern Jewish community of Amsterdam.

But it's very repetitive. The historical anecdotes are very compelling, but after a while they seem to be the same type of story over and over. We also didn't need the journeys of the roofs of trams in Amsterdam.

Bottom line, this documentary DID NOT need to be over 4 hours long. It turns what could have been a truly meditative experience into an endurance test.

... but still don't think it's very good.

This is a film which is so clearly inspired by/a pastiche of American Beauty it's painful. Cod-philosophical musings on Vonnegut, Kafka, Soviet Sci-Fi and of course Death. A protagonist who films mundane things on VHS video tapes and calls it art. We don't need to see this kind of thing again.

I was attracted to this because the trailer made it look like a film where there would be some kind of mystery revolving arund the videos that are being made or at least the videos would be a major plot point or revelatory about the central relationship.

No.

What we have instead is a typical story of naive girl falling for bad boy with disasterous consequences. The VHS tapes that the protagonist films are barely part of the plot. Mostly an incredibly lazy excuse to have some "Deep" voice overs.

It's also worth pointing out that this film has a couple of issues that are common to low-budget film-making: a) Some of the acting is incredibly stilted and awkward b) The sound mixing is terrible. Many times through the course of the film dialogue is drowned ut by the sound design and/or score.

I was already luke-warm on this movie. I appreciate the attempt to use folklore from a place like West Africa to show a different type of horror than we're used to in the West (BTW I recommend Saloum). I also appreciated the tense relationship between Anna Diop and Michelle Monaghan and the naturalistic cinematography. However I don't think the spiritual aspects of the film were strong enough or were explored enough. It felt a little under developed.

And then the ending. I don't know if it was the producers or Nikyatu Jusu herself who decided to tack on a coda seemingly using off-cuts from previous scenes, but whoever made the decision made a wrong decision. We have a beautiful poignant scene that would have made a perfect, albeit melancholy, ending. It is then immediately undercut by some bad ADR and a montage of images left over from the cutting room floor. This attempt at a less melancholy ending did not work and tipped me over the line from a mediocre movie to a frustratingly bad one.