Begotten

Against all my better judgement I sat captivated by this film. My watch, the sky outside, the hunger pangs in my belly becoming distant and thin. Is it a movie? I still don't know, it's more like opening up a window onto a world that exists elsewhere and just watching things happen. The stark grainy black and white is so grotesquely beautiful, it feels alien. This isn't "arthouse" filmmaking as we've come to understand the term. This is art. Living and breathing, entirely regardless of my interpretation, of my wants, or my needs in a film. If that sounds like something you want to see, by all means.

Don't watch this film while, or soon after, eating.

Having said that, Begotten will stick with you for the rest of your life, like it or not. Based on the nihilistic philosophy that life is nothing more than man spasming above ground (to paraphrase the title sequence/introduction), this will more than likely contain the most intense and grisly imagery you'll ever see in a film.

There is no dialogue, only image after image describing the cycle of life. The film's combination of stark black and white photography compounded with some truly creepy background sounds work to drive home the maker's message.

The movie begins with God (portrayed as a bandaged and obviously insane man) slicing open his torso with a straight razor and subsequently dying in his own filth. After his death, Mother Nature emerges from his corpse to impregnate herself with his blood and semen and gives birth to Man, represented by a maggot of a human convulsing on the earth.

The landscape is a barren waste, populated by hulking shrouded humanoids who eventually happen upon Mother Nature and Man. After a slew of violent scenes depicting the rape of Nature and destruction of Man, these humanoids proceed to pound the remains of the corpses back into the ground, and the cycle of life begins anew.

I actually rented this from Blockbuster one night, based on the cover art and hype content, but this is definitely not a Blockbuster-type film. Don't expect narrative, dialogue or any pulled punches. This is intense imagery based on a dark subject.

I give this movie some high marks for the filmwork and audio, but I don't think I'll be watching it too often, if again. I like my movies dark and unique, but this one is exponentially more than I expected.

I usually love bizarre, experimental, non-linear films. Not this time. This is a boring one, filled with very dull, repetitive images. Nothing goes on for on and on and on, and many times, due to the lighting effects, the editing, the grainy out-of-focus picture, and the blending of white with light and black with dark, you wonder if there is any image at all on the screen or if you are getting a bad reception. Oh yeah, and there are constant shots of the sun going up, and down, and up, and down... When the movie ended, my reaction was not of horror, or repulsion, or awe, but of amazement, as I wondered "THAT was IT?".

The reason why people think that this crap being passed great art is the work of a genius is the presentation of the credits. The guy that looked like Leatherface who was repeatedly cutting what is supposed to be an intestine is credited as God, and other characters as Mother Nature and etc. Why, how easy to create art! Now we can credit Elizabeth Berkeley's character in "Showgirls" as "God stripping several times and constantly acting stupidly in Las Vegas with Elvis look-alikes and screwing Kyle MacLaughlan" and officially declare it a work of art!...

When you make a film like Begotten you know it will divide people - one man's trash is another man's art. I don't think Begotten is trash and I'm not sure if it's art but I do know that it haunted me long after I saw it.

This is completely unlike any film you'll ever see. The graininess of it and the fact that you can't always make out what's going on just ups the creep out factor. It's like watching a vague memory or a disjointed nightmare play out on film.

On the downside, at only 68 minutes, it's still way too long. Each scene starts with promise but drags on and on and on...

I admire the audacity of the filmmaker and this is certainly a one of a kind work but ultimately Begotten is flawed by it's own self indulgence.

I saw 'Begotten' last night, and I'm of two minds on the film.

On one hand, I appreciate it for being the total invert of a Michael Bay film. No dialogue, extremely stylized grainy B&W photography, some of the most genuinely horrific imagery ever set to film, and a very compelling use of sound (which nobody else seems to have really picked up on yet). It's a reflection on a theme, and it dares go where most filmmakers do not not only in terms of images, but of production and concept. It's a movie that most people don't understand, and if you read through these comments you'll find a lot of people whose lack of ability to figure this film out results in them shrieking about 'pretentiousness' with the fervor of a gibbon rattling the bars of its cage at feeding time. It genuinely shocked and disturbed me, and the last time a film managed to do that was a while ago.

On the other, this is a thirty-minute short that sprawls out to over an hour and a half. I understand that there might be artistic merit in using repetition and monolithic pacing as a bludgeon, but in this case it just doesn't help everything hang together. Imagine being approached by a ragged man on the street who grabys you by the shoulders and says something that completely confounds the core of your being... but then, instead of leaving your shattered and gibbering in his wake, he just keeps talking and talking and talking. By the end of the movie, I found myself glancing at my watch now and again.

This is not entertainment, people. This is disentertainment. This is how you deprogram people who just watched "Glitter." If you watch movies to be entertained, this will frustrate, confound, and possibly anger you. You don't approach 'Begotten' like a chocolate cake you want to eat because it tastes good. You approach it like something on the menu you have never heard of before, something you see furtive glances of through the kitchen door, something that's dark and glistens and twitches on its platter; something you order not because it will taste good, but because you just have to know what it's like.