The Barbarian Invasions

I must first point out that I have NOT yet seen Decline of the American Empire (the prequel to this movie). However, it doesn't matter, as the story is completely watchable without it and I didn't even suspect there was a prequel until I checked IMDb. Although I felt the lead character was a pig who had wasted his life in some ways by being so self-indulgent and leaving his family, I appreciate the movie because DESPITE this, I was very engaged and cared about what happened to this less than likable man. The story is a non-flinching and direct film that looks at the dying process. It is very rare to see a movie do this and it succeeded marvelously. This film also had some daring aspects as it talked about the use of heroin for pain control and the right to die. As a result, it really made me think--and that's rare for a movie! PS--I was intrigued by how openly the film addresses the short-comings in the Canadian health care system. I could definitely see why this man chose to go to a beloved place to die instead of hanging around the hospital. What a dump! UPDATE---I just saw The Decline of the American Empire and BOY DID I HATE IT!! Watching these characters drone on and on and on and on and on about their sordid sex lives really annoyed and bored me. How amazing it is to find a sequel that is head-and-shoulders better than the original. My advice is JUST watch this film and avoid the prequel.

It's really amazing. In Sweden this film is free to watch for all ages. In Norway there is a 15 year limit and in UK an 18 year one. There is a lot of sex talk here, but 18! That's ridiculous. This is a movie about the free sex generation starting to pass away. They were left-winged and indeed had their own strict rules, which they have passed on to later generations. Still they don't seem aware of it. Anyway this academy award winner is made about that generation, by that generation and for that generation. The jokes and the attitudes are their own rather internal ones, but there is also the conflict between the dying leftish father and his very vulgar and very capitalistic son, whom is prepared to do anything, absolutely anything, to make the last days easier. Well acted by Rémy Girard and Stéphane Rousseau, it is anyway too witty and too predictable, like people in that "age group" often are. The movie wasn't worthy of the award, but few of the awarded films are.

I am not inclined to really comment on the movie itself, I would like to point out though, that the tagline is utterly misleading. The people promoting this movie must be having a good laugh right now: "Oh, we shall promote this movie as a 'Provoking comedy about sex, friendship and other things that invade our lives'. And everyone is going to watch it! And then sit through two miserable hours of watching someone dying from brain cancer! And people doing heroin, yes, actually administering the drug repetitively! Hilarious!" .... NOT. If you are looking for ANY comedic relief, trust me, you won't find it in this movie. If you are looking for any insights, or novel cleverness about things that 'invade' our lives, don't hold your breath either.

Despite attempts at profundity, I found this movie shallow and facile. The characters were single dimensional, and any emotion coming from the screen was manipulative and transparent. At least it did not try to blatantly contrive to move the viewer to tears (like 'On Golden Pond'), but the inane and sometimes unbelievable plot twists (such as the sudden going clean by the young woman)makes one really wonder how it ever got nominated for the Academy Award, let alone win it. To be fair, the son was a fairly good role, and well presented. As the for the daughter at sea communicating by satellite to a laptop in a hospital, and later at a cottage it Quebec ---well, really!!! Has anyone tried using a cellphone in that part of the world recently?? I begrudgingly give it a 5/10.

I saw an advanced screening of "Les invasion barbares" yesterday... This film is a follow-up to the 1986 film "Le déclin de l'empire américain", also directed by Arcand. He is considered one of the great directors here in Canada...well now that's only my opinion, but this is not the work of a "great" director. The only intersting camera move was at the begining when we follow someone through the overcrowed hallways of an hospital.( I did like the message though, hospitals in Quebec are a mess). But it would have been nice to see this in a long, single shot, something Brian DePalma does so very well. But instead Arcand chickened out and cut it right in the middle. Too bad. Now the script; I don't know if people really talk like that, but boy did they get on my nerves... The main characters are all "so-called" intellectuals, but when they talk it looks like the actors are reading a script, which I think is not a good thing ;o) The story involves a dying man, his millionaire son coming back to him and paying big bucks so he can get a nice room in the hospital. He also finds a junkie so his father can take heroin, which is supposed to be better than Morphine. And that's where the only positive side of the film shows up: Marie-Josée Croze. She is beautiful and by far the best actress in the whole movie. We also see his friends coming back to him, who were the main characters in "Le déclin de..." The film will be in official competition at the next Cannes film festival. All I can say is good luck, you're gonna need it.

This movie bears all the hallmarks of a manipulative melodrama; death, oppressive institutions, broken family, and drug abuse. Someone remind me if I missed anything. In any event, this particular melodrama fails to generate empathy for any of its characters, which is its death knell right there. The characters are bland and unreal. The dialogue is horrible. The plot is nonexistent. Lush cinematography and cleverly placed advertisements might deceive someone into believing that this is a sophisticated movie. Don't be fooled; its no more sophisticated than your average gore flick. The only difference exists in the target demographic. Simply put, this film sucks. I couldn't make it past the first half hour.

I have already placed a review with Amazon, since I thought it would make more use there - so that people don't buy this piece of s-t. But maybe some will read reviews here, so I place another review. Film, amongst few other things, is a most influential medium today. Many derive their way of living through films as well as their ideas about life in general. This is why films have been banned, like, for instance, 'Jud Süss' or 'Hitlerjunge Quark (or whatever)'. Still today you cannot see these films, although most of us have been informed enough for rendering these films harmless to us. This film is however not banned. On the contrary - it is praised! This is not surprising, because just like 'Jud Süss' in Nazi-Germany it is very popular with the people in power. "Spoilers" The hero of the film is a stock-broker or something similarly disgusting. It is a person who is not ashamed about the fact that he rakes in more money in a month than an average worker does during a life-time and more in a month than his father did in a year (the father being well-paid as a lackey in the university). This hero now spends money on his dying father, giving some of it to other 'heroes' like himself, like, for instance, the local drug-dealer. The dying father is/was a red-wine-(tryffels)-lefty. This is a person, who is left-wing when you are able banging girls being left-wing and who is right-wing when that is required. 'Opportunist' is a far to nice word for describing this man, who cheats on everybody including himself. This man is pure evil - not a molecule of him can be saved for something good. The filmmaker of this film does however find him ever so enchanting and, since this film did so well, maybe the filmmaker will find money to do a heart-wrenching film about misunderstood pedophiles in the future - nevertheless, that is the future towards which the equation of this film is pointing. In his wild young days, denys arcand made 'Jesus of Montreal' when it was opportunistic to make such a film. It was a good film nevertheless, which only proves how wrong it is to confuse the artist with the art. Maybe Arcand had a rifle to his head doing this film or was threatened in some other way - who knows and I don't care, I'm reviewing the film and not the filmmaker (the pedophile-film maybe some other will do). Back to the film. The dying father (which, by the way, is the most unbelievable part of the movie, since the bad don't die young) cannot eat his tryffels in the end and is lying on 'lit de parade' like the hero he is supposed to be, surrounded by other tryffel-eating heroes of the upper class or by old flames, who he first raped intellectually before he raped their bodies in past times, which is popular known as 'seduction', and who still don't know what happened to them and instead pour love over this piece of garbage. He is not surrounded by people like me, who cannot even spell 'tryffels' and much less have eaten any of them. This is the end of the film. Now, some of you may still wonder about what happened to 'revolution' of the sixties. Well, there is no need to wonder anymore. Some of the workers who revolted just died. Others got an opportunity to study and learn how to eat tryffels and the intellectuals, most of them, just went on eating tryffels and banging defenseless women, over whom they had the power of seduction - like this guy, whom we are now supposed to adore, according to this film. Well, I don't and had I been there on his death-bed, I would have banged him in the head with the collected works of Marx and Engels in thick heavy volumes.

There seems to be a lot of passion over the claim that the film is anti-American, anti-capitalist, etc. Many criticisms seem to dismiss the humanistic elements in this film - pain, death, reconciliation - because it has a vague intellectual, leftist, socialist face. My experiences in Canada tend to suggest that the Canadians have plenty of targets down south that deserve criticism. But does it matter? Whether the film included all these elements, the key theme was the preparation for death and reconciliation between those who will not see each other again. Doesn't anybody cry over loss? Are we scared of those things after death? or do we fear the process of dying - the loss of the person, their presence? A person died in this film - right before us - 100 minutes of decline -and what a sigh of relief that there was reconciliation in the end! That there was time to speak, time to be present. Consider the contrast between the daughter on the yacht - stranded, distant - and the son near his father. The great pain that welled up in me to see that there was no opportunity for her left. I don't cry in films, but I did here. I feared dying more than ever - other people's deaths, and mine - and I resolved to prepare for it.

This movie won Best Screenplay and Best Actress in Cannes. But there's nothing in it. The filming? It's shot like a telefilm in Scope. There's more great cinema in 24 than in here. The dialogues supposed to be the movie's interest? Arcand is not Tarantino. It's merely ordinary observations about life and history. The characters are cliché: the ex-leftist vs his son working as a businessman. And there's the cynical pose of the old characters saying "we were wrong to defend leftist ideals caus' we were conformist but so is everyone else in the world, and on the other hand we had a lot of sex fun". And why put feminism with the other wrong "ism" the character defended? It had its excesses but didn't kill anybody contrarely to communism. The movie is very much consensual: SPOILER the reconciliation between the leftist, the drug addict and the businessman in the name of love for instance. END OF SPOILER To avoid. 0/10

I recently watched this film and was very impressed. The screenplay, acting and directing were all top-notch. It was at times funny, sad, tragic and thought-provoking. It touches on everything from drug-use, Canadian medicare, the child-father relationship and of course, past intimate relationships- not all they were cracked up to be! Denys Arcand is so very astute on all these fronts and wrote a fantastic screenplay for the wonderful cast of characters. It has to be one of my all-time favourite DVD's of 2004. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to see a riveting, quality film made in Canada. It deserved the Oscar!