The Boss of It All
May 16th, 2007
There’s a host of reasons why I make my modest living on the Internet and at the movies, but here’s one of the better ones: offices give me the creeps, and not just since the slapdash zoning violation filled with generator fumes and world-class drunks where I failed to catch a whiff of irrational exuberance. My aversion to soul-deadening cubes goes so far that I wasn’t able to stomach either version of The Office past the first few minutes.
But when Lars Trier makes a movie, I go. The Boss of It All is his first comedy–and his first Danish film–since The Idiots. Jens Albinus (also of The Idiots) plays an actor hired to impersonate the mysteriously absent CEO of a company about to be sold to Icelandic investors. The fish-out-of-water setup results in three kinds of humor: actor jokes, office jokes, and Icelandic jokes.
More on About.com when The Boss of It All opens next week.
Direktøren for det hele. Lars von Trier, 2006. ****
Pusher 3
March 27th, 2007
Copenhagen is a tough place for drug lords, heroin addicts, and fathers–and Milo (Zlatko Buric) happens to be all three. Set over the course of one particular rough day in Milo’s life, the final installment of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy walks a thin line between character study and hard-hitting underworld expose. When we first meet Milos, he’s in a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. In the next scene, he tries to accommodate his bratty daughter’s ballooning plans for her 25th birthday party–and then it’s off to figure out what to do with the 10,000 pills of ecstasy smuggled fresh from Holland. You see, Milos doesn’t know much about pills; he’s more of a dope man himself. There’s more than a little Tony Soprano in the harried patriarch and the way he has to juggle family life with the demands of the Danish underworld. It should come as no surprise that by the end of the night, Milos is back on the dope, women have been bought and sold, business associates beaten and gagged, and spoiled food isn’t the only thing that’s been spilled. I haven’t seen the other parts of the trilogy; apparently they’re only loosely related.
Pusher 3. Nicolas Winding Refn, 2005. ***
