flagrantsake

first i have to say that i have never been taken in by this talk of innate or inherent characteristics of men and women etc. i find that way of thinking to be a trap for fools. this film was very heavy on these sort of ideological constructions. almost from the first few scenes where she tells the guy in the gay club that he went downstairs just to get sucked because that's what men do etc... like all men. from there it gets worse... once the female character gets the guy to watch her she starts laying on these very thick knee jerk pseudo psychological feminist interpretations of why men feel they have to oppress vaginae etc. enough so that it was difficult to tell if it was a critique of men or just misogynist gay men. was that the point? are all men misogynist homosexuals in essence?

of course the worst element was that both characters where overwhelmed by what i call bourgeois angst. meaning that these characters sensibilities where dictated by the fact that they were well to do and had such leisure time to engage in frivolous idiotic behavior.....like ideologically constructing pseudo psychological feminist interpretations about why misogynistic gay dudes want to oppress vaginae. the fun part of the film was thinking the bourgeois gay dude totally deserved it.... like 'aha jerk'!! therein though lies the trap of this film.... i felt that the misogynistic gay dude was only that way because the film constructed it so...like a self fulfilling prophecy, which was a key element of the film.

so yes this film was aptly titled but maybe not in the way the filmmaker intended. though if this was exactly what the filmmaker was going for (i doubt it)... i would have to give some credit here maybe for a good trick to play on the audience that the filmmaker must loathe. a similar phenomena can be seen in P. Voerhovens 'the Fourth Man'..... equally nasty!!

"Please forgive her for being a Marxist, she just doesn't know better." was not the line in the film. the overdubbed story was that the little boy rejected the little girl for retaining her illusions about Castro. the guy then goes to the (now crying) little girl and tells her she shouldn't keep her illusions about Castro.

see it with a good translation....if you liked Woody Allens' 'What's Up Tiger Lilly', Dialectics is much funnier. though the jokes mostly are in line with leftists disillusionment with state socialism, if one isn't familiar with that line of thinking the jokes will seem very obscure....there definitely should be more 'detourned' films of this manner.

wow...i was looking for a Japanese film that was the perfect cross between 'Mystery Men' and 'Mystery Train'. the cinematography is exceptional, very isolated and claustrophobic.....you really get no sense of an outside world until near the end. Mystery Train' had to be a huge influence on this movie. the animation was maybe the only distraction for me...the ending, not to give it away, was perfect.