Cebalord Very best movie i ever watch

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Glimmerubro It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

jzappa Epidemic appears to be all stylistic self-indulgence. It is filmed in black and white, with often purposely redundant subtitles. Each shot is very very long. Some are stoic, some are suddenly goofy, some are disturbing, mostly stoic. When there is dialogue, it is intellectually stimulating, but borderline irrelevant.Mainly, it is that director Lars Von Trier and his screenplay collaborator Niels Vorsel play themselves, coming up with a last-minute script for a producer. This strand takes disproportionate turns with scenes from their script, in which Von Trier plays a radical doctor attempting to cure a modern-day epidemic. In an warped turn, the doctor finds that he himself has been spreading it. For so long, one is left without a clue as to why there is such a coincidence between the screenplay and the outside world, or any progressions of the different narrative strands' signifying signs. But it infects you. It burns you.Whether or not the film is narcissistic, it is not form over function. Essentially, it is a basic exercise in what metaphysically affects the viewer. Consider the scene of the darker, quieter of the screenwriters in the subway, knowing predeterminately that the other one is going to die. Or when he looks in a mirror, turns to us, the camera, then the mirror again. Everything one expects would create a cohesive, sense-making narrative film is inverted and indeed develops an immediately conscious connection between itself and the audience.That is not to say it eschews any fundamental aspect of quality. Udo Kier delivers one of the most amazing, fantastic performances I have ever seen. Really, many of the performances, whoever these actors, or characters, are, shock and deeply move us. Some scenes are entirely made up of uproarious laughter or breakdowns of screaming, in spite of the unapologetic stoicism and quiet permeating the film.This hypnotic abstraction is truly very atmospheric and creepy. It is a transcendental, almost physiologically affecting virus that infests you for days upon being subjected to it. It is something that has to be seen and can hardly be explained. And that makes it a true work of art.

Graham Greene It's common knowledge that Epidemic began it's life as a bet between von Trier and the head of the Danish Film Institute, with the emphasis being that von Trier would be unable to make a film for under one-million kroner. Trier accepted the wager, and set about constructing a film that would move away from the rigid compositions and moody atmosphere of his first film, The Element Of Crime, whilst simultaneously advancing on it's themes of post-war devastation, optimism in the face of horror, and idealism. As a result, Epidemic is presented as "part two of the Europa trilogy"... continuing on from the themes and ideologies behind his first film, whilst concurrently laying the groundwork for his third project, Europa.Taking into account the low-budget and the intentions behind it's conception, it is at times quite difficult to view Epidemic as anything more than a private joke between von Trier and his film-industry friends. The plot is self-referential and a little cluttered, revolving around a scriptwriter and director attempting to write the outline of a screenplay in five days after a computer virus has destroyed a year and a half's worth of work. To keep costs down, von Trier and his co-writer Niels Vørsel play the filmmakers within the film, trying desperately to flesh out their story about an idealistic young doctor going from town to town in an attempt to stop a life threatening plague that is destroying the country. The bulk of the film is shot very much in the documentary style, with shambolic camera-work, rough cuts and a bare, minimal use of production design. Some have noted how this style prefigures the use of back-to-basic film-making demonstrated in von Trier's later dogme film The Idiots, which is true, though for me the effect was more akin to von Trier and Vørsel's classic TV mini-series, The Kingdom.The rest of the film is made up of beautifully photographed fantasy scenes that attempt to convey the basic story of the film within the film within the film. von Trier stars again in the fantasy scenes as the doctor flying over the country on a rope tied to a helicopter or discussing the meaning of life and death with a black priest who previously turned up as an eccentric cab driver (von Trier regular, Michael Simpson). The fantasy scenes are beautifully composed and photographed in lush 35mm black and white by Carl Dryer's favourite cinematographer Henning Bendtsen (who also shot the majority of Europa), which juxtaposes nicely with the high-contrast black and white 16mm footage of the real-world sequences. These sequences are a joy to watch, showing us the meticulous von Trier of The Element Of Crime, with the great majority of these brief sequences coming close to the visual poetry of filmmakers like the aforementioned Dryer, and von Trier's great hero at the time, Tarkovsky.The real-life scenes just sort of ramble along - which is a great deal of fun if you don't find Lars and Niels too annoying as characters - as they go about writing this nonsense film that ends up spilling out into the real world in a bizarre and suitably absurd fashion. The strangest set of scenes in the whole film has to be the lengthy sequence towards the middle of the film in which the writer and director drive to Cologne to meet with the actor, Udo Kier, who, upon meeting the filmmakers, proceeds to recite an emotional monologue about his mother's death, and a secret she had kept pertaining-to his birth. Other bizarre scenes include a flashback to a moment in Niels' life, where he talks about pretending to be a teenager in order to trick a young American girl into revealing details about her home life, so that, like Kafka, he would be able to write a book about America, without actually having to go there.The film establishes many of von Trier's cinematic preoccupations not already formed by The Element Of Crime, in particular the idealistic doctor blinded by his own arrogance, the use of medical horror (an early trip to the Kingdom hospital for Lars to observe a clandestine operation on a naked man), European devastation, questions of faith, improvisation and, last of all, hypnosis. Hypnosis was a key narrative device in all of the Europe trilogy, often used to position the audience within the mindset of the lead character... Here, however, it's used more as window dressing, as Lars and Niels invite a hypnotist and his subject to a dinner party with their financier at the Danish Film Institute so that, through hypnosis, the girl can act out the ending of their film. Here, the whole thing becomes far too surreal, as bubonic cysts break out on the guests, and Niels' wife starts vomiting blood all over the dinning room. Despite that lurid description, the use of actual hypnosis and the unbelievable horror etched onto the protagonist's face, makes it one of the most powerful scenes ever witnessed in a von Trier film (and yes... that does include the climax of Dogville, and The Idiots).Ultimately, it's hard to really know what to think of Epidemic. Like The Element Of Crime, von Trier has since disregarded it as a post-modern parody of his cinematic hero's... then again, he also once said it was his favourite film of his own... so who knows? I personally quite like it, and I find the integration of the documentary style footage with Bendtsen's beautifully composed fantasy sequences to be quite spectacular and fairly hypnotic. At the end of the day, I'd say that this is a film for von Trier fanatics only, with everyone else probably despairing of all the self-aware references (a conversation towards the beginning about a script called "The Cop and the Whore" references The Element Of Crime) or the possibility that it's all just a silly joke.

marymorrissey spoilers I liked this movie for the idea which probably comes into focus best in this scene in which the leader of the two writers sketches out a plan for the film in paint on the wall (which is very hilarious).The way we talk about story ideas as we refine them to make the more ideal film is a little troubling! We develop stories such that they should conform to these supposedly universal values, essentially. The scenes of the film within the film are mostly completely awful, aside from the sheer photography and high contrast posterized look and let us never forget that the title with a copyright symbol is displayed throughout the entire film (nice!). As far as I'm concerned the scene at the end with the woman having her hypnotic freakout was a pretty damn cheap and much less than effective way to usher in the long predicted finish to the film. It was surely worth watching for what it had to say about what we want to see in films and why, as sarcastic as all of it was. personally I couldn't fail to be amused.Funny no matter how hard LvT pushes away at certain parameters he so often relies on these simple structures: day 1 day 2 etc. and never forget: women being tormented, which is obviously his favorite thing in the universe!

ooeht Of course, you gotta be a masochist to enjoy some people's genius - you know that if you bear with them they will take you to new levels of perception. With Lars von Trier, the voyage is often hilarious. Epidemic is funny. Funny, in a Gummo kind of way: the characters are real, reality is eerie, and we laugh to break the tension; funny in a the characters say amusing things kind of way (preacher: "this bible is in goddamned Latin"); and funny in an Andy Kaufman screwing with the audience (yes, you) kind of way. Make no mistake: you will suffer. If you are afraid, stay away from horror movies, ya pansy!This movie also features some great aesthetic distance! It's bold!