The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

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Big Ben
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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#201 Post by Big Ben » Sat Nov 24, 2018 9:31 pm

I hope some of you can give some detailed impressions as I imagine I'll be waiting for quite some time. Looking forward to seeing what you folks think. Fascinating that the screenings are selling all those tickets though!

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domino harvey
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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#202 Post by domino harvey » Sat Nov 24, 2018 9:39 pm

I'm thinking about making a double feature of this and Green Book, the two most notorious "audience response" films of the year. Barmy would be proud!

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#203 Post by McCrutchy » Mon Nov 26, 2018 2:44 am

For some reason, I've been lackadaisical about this film, but again, I have to sort of marvel at the cast von Trier has been able to wrangle for this, especially after that Cannes booting he got a few years ago that was subsequently reversed. Some quick thoughts:
This reminds me of when Kino Lorber submitted Malgorzata Szumowska's Elles to the MPAA back in 2011 or 2012. Looking at the movie, anyone with any knowledge has to know the film isn't going to be rated R, yet even though the film could have gotten an identical arthouse release without a rating, they submitted it, anyway, and unsurprisingly, it received an NC-17. Of course, the rating was surrendered and the film was released "unrated" on Kino's Blu-ray.

I haven't looked at spoilers for The House That Jack Built, but I have seen phrases like "child mutilation" here as well as something about a duckling, so it's possible that IFC feel that with some cuts, they can remove content that would prevent a not insignificant portion people from continuing to watch the film. Assuming the film is mostly or entirely in English, a lot of people know who Matt Dillon and Uma Thurman are, and with the inconspicuous title, perhaps IFC is banking on people who recognize the actors taking a chance on the film. Plus--and this is a real stab in the dark--there might be some states where the kind of content depicted is either illegal or could be taken to court if shown on TV or made available via VOD.
domino harvey wrote:
Wed Oct 31, 2018 3:26 pm
I mean, decades ago the French film system allowed some rather notorious posters for Bertrand Blier's Beau-père to be openly displayed (don't Google this), so I think they operate on another plane of existence
I Googled it, since you told me not to, and I'm disappionted. I was expecting something much worse, like violence or gore, and instead, I got breasts. While it's a bit tasteless, I don't really see the issue, especially not in Europe and not in 1981. The film itself sounds much iffier, but apparently, the actress involved was fifteen and had parental approval.
Cinephile1 wrote:
Wed Oct 31, 2018 4:44 pm
I was wondering whether anybody here knows what is the earliest worldwide DVD release for this. Earliest I can find for the time being is 4 March 2019 (in the U.K.). Thanks!
I'm slightly surprised it's not being released in Denmark/Scandinavia first, but the French national theatrical release was over a month ago (October 17th), so I could see it coming out there first, though there doesn't appear to be a pre-order yet. The UK Blu-ray might well be the first home video release.

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Big Ben
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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#204 Post by Big Ben » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:11 am

It's a stab in the dark. There are exactly zero states that would successfully do anything about the content and anyone proposing it would be laughed out of court. The sheer number of exploitation films (Take any of the many commercially available cannibal films) exceed what von Trier has done here. Services that you pay for such as HBO, Showtime or any other VOD service are not bound by FCC regulation either so streaming it isn't subject to scrutiny. Have people been prosecuted within the last few years for things they've made? Yes, but it has to be really, really bad and it far exceeds whatever Lars has cooked up. ( NSFW Wikipedia Page About A Prosecuted Individual.) In short an independent "Art" film with Matt Dillon and Uma Thurman isn't going to be subject to regulation. I do however feel it was edited for commercial reasons. Ensuring people show up is more important and removing animal violence, even proven to simulated, is very much a part of that. Plus it provides incentive for completionists to buy it later if they are in for more ghoulish content.

As for the film itself I'm hoping the reactions are worth reading about. Independent of how I feel about some of his films I've never found von Trier boring!

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#205 Post by Zot! » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:44 am

I live in Copenhagen at the moment, and this comes out here on the same schedule as the "one night only" screening in the US, though in an unlimited release. (it did premiere at the CPH film festival a few months ago).

However, and I'm sure you'll agree, that I have found the most appropriate venue for viewing this, which is the BabyBio, where I will be able to see this uncensored with breastfeeding mothers and their screaming colicky infants in a half-dimmed theater. Now that is what I call hygge.

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#206 Post by Oedipax » Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:51 pm

The idea that this needs to be cut for theatrical release is, in my opinion, very silly.
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Yes, the child murder is particularly hard to watch, but the film doesn't work without it, as far von Trier's polemic project re: the depiction of violence in cinema, and the connection (or lack thereof) between morality and art. It's also not particularly gory, so I don't know what they would cut, unless they eliminated that act entirely.

The most objectionable thing for me by far is von Trier's inclusion of real Holocaust/concentration camp footage (bodies being bulldozed, etc) within the context of a fictional film where he is certainly intending to provoke and push the audience's buttons. That is to say, it's arguable whether the film stands on particularly strong moral/ethical grounds to include such footage (I guess it depends on whether you think von Trier's artistic project has the same seriousness and weight of, for instance, Alain Resnais' in Night and Fog - or whether such images are 'just' images and there for us to play around with). And I anticipate that particular nuanced ethical quandary will get less consideration/outrage in the popular press than debates around entirely fictional depictions of violence against women and children.

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#207 Post by domino harvey » Wed Nov 28, 2018 9:20 pm

Had to skip this due to last minute work demands-- out a ticket and everything. I hope everyone else is having fun tonight watching Uma Thurman get murdered!

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#208 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Nov 29, 2018 12:00 am

Thought this was just great. Probably von Trier's funniest film, although not without the advertised genuinely nauseating violence. He does some self-exploration here and there in smaller moments, but it does strike me that the whole "this is a parallel between von Trier's art and Jack's" thing is overstated - Jack is a character seen through a lens of utter contempt, taking the viewer on a journey through multiple facets of common toxic male personality flaws until the epilogue practically makes a giant fart noise in his direction, with perhaps the most apt, cathartic final moments I've seen in a film. Thankfully the dramatic reactions out of Cannes were much ado about nothing, this was much more fun than I could have ever anticipated it being.

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#209 Post by kcota17 » Thu Nov 29, 2018 1:30 am

Very annoyed that I had to miss out on the Director's Cut tonight because of work. Is it any worth seeing the Theatrical Cut then and does anyone know if there are detrimental changes?

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#210 Post by jindianajonz » Thu Nov 29, 2018 2:24 am

For those who missed the director's cut, I don't think a "toned down" version will be missing too much. Only one of the five segments is likely to see major changes. The reaction to the scenes most likely to offend in my screening were a mix of shock and laughter, so ironically, by removing those scenes I think it may make that segment play more seriously than intended.

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#211 Post by Never Cursed » Thu Nov 29, 2018 3:09 am

I loved this, in particular for the ways in which Von Trier attacks the tropes and character traits that one might expect of a serial killer (and of a movie based around one). As Von Trier said in the message that preceded the film, there's a lot to unpack here, and there's certainly a lot this movie has to say on art and the egotism that drives its creation, but most interesting for me was the way the movie undercut all the typical ways one would enjoy watching a serial killer doing their thing. I've had indirect experience (ie I was not a member myself, but knew people who were) with members of serial killer fandoms, groups of young people (a majority of whom are women) drawn in some way towards the personas of killers. Matt Dillon's Jack is, for me, a point-by-point rebuttal of everything that attracts people with odd or perverse tastes to those individuals. Jack is a loathsome and wholly sexless character, lacking any charm or wit or even introspectively-known motivations for his behavior. Accordingly, the movie that he inhabits offers no lurid or romanticized thrills in the form of pleasurable presentations of his actions, correctly choosing to entertain more through Bruno Ganz's ceaseless attacks on Jack. Of course killings are shown, killings that are obviously not filmed with the same kind of obfuscation that accompanied, say, the murders in You Were Never Really Here, but the graphic content in this movie is either bleakly comic, as with the film's most haunting image,
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that of the taxidermized corpse of a murdered child, complete with a cutesy smile,
or else just bleak in the meaninglessness that Jack mistakes for meaning in his actions. Even the nudity that pops up later on in the film is antiseptic rather than salacious, if only because of its ominous use. That this is all wrapped up in a messy and perverse and altogether really fun film, one with lots of energy apparent in everything from the editing of the narrational segments to the music cues, just makes the experience that much more incredible. This is almost tied with First Reformed and/or Le Redoutable as my full-stop favorite movie of 2018, and it might very well have topped my list had this come out in a less fruitful year.
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I agree with jindianajonz regarding the stuff that the R-Rated version will lack - only the third segment (the one with the child murder/taxidermy) has enough real gore and shock value that I could see it getting significantly cut, though I could see a couple short "aftermath" shots from other segments getting cut as well. Maybe some of the concentration camp footage too, but either way, 99% of the movie seemed acceptable at an R rating to me, and you definitely don't miss anything major in the stuff that did not.
Last edited by Never Cursed on Sat Dec 08, 2018 11:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.


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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#213 Post by willoneill » Thu Nov 29, 2018 8:40 am

I don't know as much about the MPAA as I do about the Canadian rating systems, but I always thought the MPAA system was voluntary, at least on paper if not in reality. So I wonder, at this point in 2018 where the landscape is much different than in the late 60's, what would happen if the studios just abandoned the MPAA ratings system altogether?

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#214 Post by tenia » Thu Nov 29, 2018 9:17 am

I also thought that if you weren't happy with a MPAA rating or doing cuts to reduce it, you could just screen the movie unrated, providing you could find theaters who would accept it.
If that's the case here, then, what's the problem exactly ? Because the MPAA had a version already rated and thus it removed the possibility to screen the uncut version as unrated ?

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#215 Post by jindianajonz » Thu Nov 29, 2018 11:45 am

Never Cursed wrote:
Thu Nov 29, 2018 3:09 am
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I agree with jindianajonz regarding the stuff that the R-Rated version will lack - only the third segment (the one with the child murder/taxidermy) has enough real gore and shock value that I could see it getting significantly cut, though I could see a couple short "aftermath" shots from other segments getting cut as well. Maybe some of the concentration camp footage too, but either way, 99% of the movie seemed acceptable at an R rating to me, and you definitely don't miss anything major in the stuff that did not.
Just thinking back on the elements that could be cut:
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Incident 1: This will play just fine as is
Incident 2: The final shot of the corpse half eroded from being dragged along the road
Incident 3: The killing of the children, the mother being forced to feed them pie, the "family portrait" shots of them at the picnic, and the taxidermy scene
Incident 4: The quick shots of Jack slicing off Jacqueline's breast
Incident 5: The scene where Jack has kept Jacqueline's breast for use as a wallet
Going through this list only reinforces that the removal of these scenes will drastically change the tone of the film, since most of these (with the exception of the pie scene and the mutilation of Jacqueline) served as macabre punchlines for what came before.

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#216 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Nov 29, 2018 11:50 am

It appears that within certain (most) segments of Film Twitter, people are now rejecting von Trier as someone that only bearded guys in their early 20s who want to live out fantasies of torturing women are interested in, which is so... bizarre. How did the creator of some of the most thoughtfully humane and all-around excellent films in the last 20+ years get to this place? This film, in particular, as Never Cursed lays out so well above, is rejecting that sort of audience by making them live in the reality of that sort of thinking. It seems to be working among those who actually saw it, as on Letterboxd the unwashed midnight movie hoards seem disappointed by the film being "boring" without enough "good kills." And good riddance, frankly.

The epilogue of this picture has stuck with me in a big way. Yes, von Trier is wrestling with some philosophical questions about whether art made in the name of nihilism and cruelty can be considered valid and even beautiful, but by the time he rounds the bend and cuts to credits, it's very clear that he doesn't feel that way, that his film doesn't feel that way - only Jack does. So why is it a negative attribute of a film about someone murdering women and children that it is either sickeningly difficult to watch, doesn't have enough exciting acting moments for its female costars to dig into, or is (gasp) boring, by people who are taking a position of moral superiority over the material? Do they want to be more titillated by what they're seeing? Wouldn't that be the much more problematic option?

As far as cuts, I think you guys are overstating just how much material will be excised. My guess is that only:
SpoilerShow
The footage of the kids within the gun's sight and the footage of Keough's character's breast being cut
will be removed. The MPAA Is truly terrible, but it's unusual for them to demand that several minutes of a film be cut out in order to achieve an R rating - this will probably be around 30 seconds to a minute shorter in its cut version, if that.

And frankly, it's totally nauseating that IFC has seen this as an opportunity to market this as some sort of a midnight movie. They should have just put it out unreleased in theaters that are willing to play it and left it at that. It's too serious, and good, of a film - from too great of a filmmaker - to have side-by-side with stuff like The Human Centipede in their lineup. That being said, seeing those things I mentioned in the spoiler box above isn't something I need to experience again to appreciate the film - and if cuts are minimal, I doubt you would need to skip this in theaters just to make a point or protect yourself from seeing a cut version.

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#217 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Thu Nov 29, 2018 12:07 pm

tenia wrote:
Thu Nov 29, 2018 9:17 am
I also thought that if you weren't happy with a MPAA rating or doing cuts to reduce it, you could just screen the movie unrated, providing you could find theaters who would accept it.
If that's the case here, then, what's the problem exactly ? Because the MPAA had a version already rated and thus it removed the possibility to screen the uncut version as unrated ?
If IFC only wanted to release the uncut version, they could just surrender the NC-17 and release it unrated. The issue is that they want to release both the uncut version and the R-rated cut, and MPAA rules don't allow a second version of a movie to be released theatrically until 90 days after the original version finishes its theatrical run, unless the distributor applies for and receives an waiver (as happened with the PG-13 version of The King's Speech). IFC apparently didn't even apply for a waiver and will fall afoul of the rule if they go ahead with the planned release of the R-rated version on December 14th.

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#218 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Nov 29, 2018 12:12 pm

One way to please everyone will be to just release it unrated, I suspect that'll be what happens. It might miff some who went to some extra effort to see it last night, but I'm sure that sort of whinging will be minimal. I just want to see it in a halfway decent movie theater. It was showing on both screens at the Roxy in Philadelphia last night, which was the perfect place to see something claustrophobic like Unsane, but was a truly terrible place to engage with the operatic visual splendor of... pretty much anything like this.

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#219 Post by SomethingWild » Thu Nov 29, 2018 12:41 pm

Never Cursed wrote:
Thu Nov 29, 2018 3:09 am
I think I loved this, in particular for the ways in which Von Trier attacks the tropes and character traits that one might expect of a serial killer (and of a movie based around one). As Von Trier said in the message that preceded the film, there's a lot to unpack here, and there's certainly a lot this movie has to say on art and the egotism that drives its creation, but most interesting for me was the way the movie undercut all the typical ways one would enjoy watching a serial killer doing their thing. I've had indirect experience (ie I was not a member myself, but knew people who were) with members of serial killer fandoms, groups of young people (a majority of whom are women) drawn in some way towards the personas of killers. Matt Dillon's Jack is, for me, a point-by-point rebuttal of everything that attracts people with odd or perverse tastes to those individuals.
I completely agree. The film got me to thinking about the misbegotten popularity of true crime media and especially a podcast like My Favorite Murder, which makes light of these sorts of situations. The film shows how these obsessive portrayals of serial killers and their work create a toxic mix of notoriety and rampant egotism. I think von Trier's film seems so provocative because it manages to find humor in its serial killer's actions while simultaneously illustrating the bleak, gut-wrenching reality behind something like serial killer fandom.

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#220 Post by Finch » Sat Dec 01, 2018 3:43 pm


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mfunk9786
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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#221 Post by mfunk9786 » Sat Dec 01, 2018 6:43 pm

Worth mentioning that on a per-screen basis, this made a very healthy return on Wednesday, pulling in $172,131 on 140 screens

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#222 Post by Peter-H » Sat Dec 01, 2018 7:16 pm

I have two questions for those who have seen the film. What percent of the movie is taken up by Jack and Verge's discussion? Also, is this discussion presented as narration over the action of the story, or does the movie cut away from the story when they start talking?

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Never Cursed
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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#223 Post by Never Cursed » Sat Dec 01, 2018 7:33 pm

Each of the "incidents" largely start with the incident itself, with narration from Jack and some commentary by Verge, although I wouldn't call this section of each incident a discussion. The sequences play out, after which Jack and Verge discuss the inherent meanings and themes involved in the incident, over which is played a mixture of material shot for the film and a selection of pieces of stock footage and picture somehow related to the discussion. This eventually leads into the next incident, where the cycle repeats itself.
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The fifth incident is marked by the first appearance of Verge on-screen, leading into the epilogue (which I will only discuss in vague terms here), which heavily features both Jack and Verge. It is implied that the discussions mentioned earlier occurred chronologically during the epilogue.
In short, I would say a plurality but not a majority of the film is taken up by the discussion, that the amount of time that the film focuses on the discussion increases as the film progresses, and that the movie sometimes cuts away and sometimes presents their discussions as narration.

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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#224 Post by Peter-H » Sun Dec 02, 2018 4:32 pm

Thank you for your response. One more question: on average how much time is spent on each incident?

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Never Cursed
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Re: The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)

#225 Post by Never Cursed » Sun Dec 02, 2018 6:25 pm

Somewhere around twenty minutes, I'd say (though I certainly wasn't timing it). The incidents generally got longer as the movie progressed, and I'd wager the epilogue was the longest section of the movie, though I'm not sure.

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