Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

omega_work While doing a random Netflix search was something called "The Pervert's Guide to Ideology"... It sounded like something that would appeal to my odd sense of humor.The film opens with one guy telling another guy (who somehow turned from a big black guy to an old German guy) to either put on glasses or eat from a trash can. I was already in stitches. But a few lines later I realized that I wasn't actually watching a comedy, but a preach-umentary in the vein of "WHAT THE #$*! DO WE KNOW?!"... at least that's how it seemed.It continued on with Slavoj Zizek narrating as the main character uses his sunglasses to determine whether or not the people he was looking at were aliens. I began to hurt my knee with my fits of unintentional laughter. I think at about this point I realized that the whole sunglasses dude was a different film... one called "They Live", which I'd never seen before but I might at some point because it looks like it would be a lot of cheesy fun.The annoying thing was that from this point I realized I was just watching some old guy tell us about his views of ideology (which Wikipedia tells me is "a set of conscience and/or unconscious ideas which constitute one's goals"). Therein lies the problem of this film... I know what my goals are, so if my conscience and subconscious are working towards achieving that, why the hell do I need some old fellow with an accent to tell me the problems with it?I was waiting for some kind of "pervert" to make an appearance in the film, and bizarrely it showed up when he was analyzing "the Sound of Music" and claimed that it was actually teaching us that Christianity is about sexuality. I guess no one told him that Catholics are not allowed to use birth control so that sex is not about pleasure but reproduction, which sort of flies in the face of his argument. In fact this whole argument sounds like someone who knows very little about Christianity and even less about The Sound of Music.Anyway, after watching as much of this as I could handle, I think I determined the point behind this movie to be: don't take things at face value. There, I just saved you two painful hours, and waiting in vain for something funny or perverse.

Alex Deleon Viewed at Seattle IFF, 2007. The day's opener, an 11 AM screening at the Egyptian was "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema", one I was dying to see but had missed previously because of a scheduling conflict (with another flick I was even more dying to see)."Pervert's Guide" is a Dutch-Austrian production directed by British documentarian Sophie Fiennes'(39)i in which Slovenian Psycho-(ahem -"analytic") film philosopher and culture- theoretical guru, Slavoj Zizek disquisses in grammatically correct but perfectly outrageous English, on a hilarious range of sexual perversions and their possible interpretations in a broad variety of flicks from Hitchcock to David Lynch, via Kubrick and other collective libido obsessives — with cleverly selected excerpts from the "perverted" sequences of the films in question — goes on and on for two and a half excessive hours! (150 minutes). The first hour and a half was interesting, informative, revealing, psychologically insightful, and often highly amusing– in a scatological vein — but eventually I began to fidget when I realized this psychoanalytic orgy was going to last far longer than bargained for, and was beginning to cut into my Ali Baba time.By the third take on Dennis Hopper (one of the most disgusting psychos ever to disfigure a silver screen) in "Blue Velvet", I was beginning to get sick to my stomach — even more so when my illuminated Casio wristwatch revealed that I was missing the beginning of Ali Baba. Somehow I couldn't quite bring myself to stalk out before the end, but I did then scurry immediately over to the SIFF theater under the Opera House in time to catch the second half of Ali Baba — which turned out to be the perfect antidote to the mental illness that had gone before at the Egyptian. Mind-bending at times, sickening at others, but definitely worth The effort it tales to sit through.

korr007 I understood from the credits to the film that Slavoj Zizek is the sole writer. Having seen Zizek lecture in person, and interviewed him on one occasion, would appear to confirm that it is tightly scripted. This in my opinion was a mistake. Zizek is calling all the shots in the film, which exposes the director's very shaky and underdeveloped premise: just let Zizek talk. And by just letting him talk, trust in him that he will enlighten us, the audience, and that you, the director, will be able to capture that. Problem is that the director doesn't understand what he's talking about, which makes her incapable of editing him (hence the extraordinarily long running time! of over two hours!!). And since she cannot engage with his discourse all she contributes in the way of direction are a series of jokey mises en scenes where Zizek gets to live out his fantasies by appearing in his favourite films. What would have worked much better is if Zizek had had an interlocutor, someone to contradict him. Or if some of his fantasy screen idols, rather than remaining impassive and mute to his presence, had woken up. But the director can't do that because she doesn't have the confidence or knowledge of his philosophy, so instead she just lets him ramble, interminably, for over 2 HOURS, in the kind of free association mode that should only ever be heard in private from within the analyst's surgery. The film presents a one way conversation, a closed discourse, and we end up not really involved, as voyeurs. Maybe that's the point, the "pervert" of the title. But then I thought that voyeurs were supposed to get a thrill...

Stefan Magometschnigg (stefanmago) An old intellectual talks about what he considers art in movies. You get your Hitchcock, your Chaplin, your Bergman and some other stuff prior to the 80ies. To disguise that he has no clue what is going on in cinemas these days, he throws in The Matrix.But it's not only the same lame film-as-art speech all over again. This speech is reduced to outdated psychological platitudes: it-ego-super ego, anal phase, sexual insufficiency. It is garnished with the cheesy effect of having Zizte edited into the movies he is taking about. For someone who is supposed to know much about movies, his own is, cinematographicly speaking: yeiks.To put it in Zizek's own words - I saw 5\-\!7 on the screen, last night, or in the words of a great movie maker:Mr. (Zizek), what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you (two) points (only), and may God have mercy on your soul.