FiyaStarter.com - Reel Hot Movie Review with Dean Sizzle

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Dean Sizzle (32)

--Gay
--Loves foreign films, independent films, dramas and romantic comedies.
--fired from Village Voice for refusing to have sex with female editor…but, that’s just his side of the story. We called his former boss and learned that he was actually fired because he made a pass at Rupert Everett during the press junket for The Next Best Thing. We haven’t confronted him about it.

FiyaStarter RATING =

(4 1/2)Fiyaballs

Movie Review

Manderlay
The Great Dane Bites America In The Ass Again
by: Dean Sizzle, for Entertainment

Danish filmmaker Lars von Triers hates America and women. That's what many of his critics would have you believe. Von Triers clearly delights in placing America The Beautiful under his microscope and exposing her every flaw. His previous work, Dogville, explored how the presence of a mysterious woman named Grace turned the good people of a sleepy little Rocky Mountain town into torturers, rapists, liars, thieves and murderers.

In Manderlay, as he did with Dogville, von Triers strips away the distractions that can be caused by scenery, opting instead for a bare bones soundstage with structures signified by chalk outlines, forcing the audience to focus solely on the characters and their motivations. In the opening scene, we follow a caravan of cars across a map of the U.S. in 1933, eventually coming to a stop at the Manderlay plantation in Alabama. As Grace and her gangster father (Bryce Dallas Howard and Willem Dafoe, replacing Nicole Kidman and James Caan, respectively) engage in another of their philosophical debates, a frantic young black woman approaches the car and asks Grace for her help. Help for what?

"Timothy. They're gonna whup him," she says.

As Grace follows the young woman through the gates of the plantation, she is shocked by the sight of a black man, Timothy (tied to a post awaiting the lashings to be administered by a white man, as a crowd of frightened blacks and bloodthirsty whites observe. Slavery lives at Manderlay, much to Grace's horror. She insists the man be taken down from the post, informing everyone that slavery was outlawed 70 years ago.

"This is a local matter," the father calmly offers. Even if the slaves were freed, the family would just sign them to contacts and hire them as staff, paying them small wages and opening up specialty stores to sell their former slaves all of their essentials for living. Basically, he tells her that her involvement would leave the slaves in worse condition than she found them.

Grace would hear none of it. She asks her father to leave her with several of his gun-toting thugs and his shrewd attorney. She was going to run Manderlay herself, until she felt the former slaves were capable of running it themselves and that the family learned the valuable lessons of humility, justice and compassion. With her henchman at her side, Grace has new contracts are drawn, giving the slaves ownership of the plantation, and forces the white family are forced to perform all of the chores (even forcing them to serve dinner in blackface at one point, which I could've done without).

From there, the film takes off. von Triers brutally forces us to question whether the slaves are really better off being free at all, as they become aimless without the strict regiment of their masters. Yes, it's a sickening thought, but one that von Triers challenges to confront unapologetically. Grace, who had promised to stay uninvolved in how the blacks ran the plantation, can't help question them about planting the cotton crops, setting a time for dinner and. repairing the ceiling of their living quarters. The former slaves never had to worry about such things before, as they have been conditioned to do as they're told. Having to organize and be proactive is a foreign concept to the blacks. Damn, that kinda stings, huh? Needless to say, The prediction of Grace's father comes true in the worst way.

Manderlay is the most insightful and confrontational look at the impact of slavery that I've ever seen. As a filmmaker, von Triers' minimalist style has never impressed me much. Then again, neither has Woody Allen. However, as an artist, he has yet to leave me unprovoked, bored, or unchallenged.
If he made a six hour movie, I'd go see it.

Note: I'll spare you the sensationalist aspect of this film, involving Grace's lust for Timothy that culminates in an extremely graphic scene which many have gone so far as to call rape. Whatever, it wasn't rape when Simon Baker barged into Sanaa Lathan's house and took the pussy, so it's not rape when Isaach De Bankole' takes the pussy from Bryce Dallas Howard. Don't be mad, white people.