Having just seen the film 'Michael', what so say? For one, it is clear one has to try and see it from a purely objective point of view, and try to forget that this film reinstates stupid medieval superstitions about human child- eating monsters, and calls upon our most basic instincts: the instincts created by media that has us believe that dark lonely beings are the most immediate threat to our children - and not the parents that regularly kill about 300 times as much as any external criminals, or indeed simple cash crashes, that kill about 500 times as many per year. Watching this film felt like being taken for as exploitative ride about the death of children in car crashes. It was like watching a films about how smelly black people are, shown to a Mississippi white audience in the 1930's, or showing a film about the evil of Jews to a group of neo-Nazis. Superficial, false, and totally stereotypical. However, forgetting about this aspects, and being objective, what was the film like? It is well made, has artistic homogeneity, and has consistent mood creation. It also has good acting. Otherwise, trying to be objective still, the film was stupid, pointless, exploitative, highly pretentious, and predictable. (I also founds it shameful, but that is a personal idea). We are a long, long way from any masterpiece which being entered in competition in the Cannes festival supposes. (A quick look shows up that the director is a friend of Michael Heneke, the 'enfant chéri' of the Cannes film festival if there ever was one). The film is completely stupid... though I'm not sure I can explain that one so clearly. Like a stupid person, it goes nowhere, does nothing, and worst of all, thinks it is intelligent. Every human emotion in the film is another reason for censorship in this film, which consistently cuts before anything gets too explained or too 'deep', as though it were 'cool' or profound to do so. This, I imagine, for the director, would be called 'style', in actual fact it is just plain stupid. It is utterly pointless, because despite its desperate attempt to seem 'deep' about something, it says nothing at all or about individuals, about society, or anything else for that matter, other than the closed mind of an unlikely psychopath who tortures children and kills cats. And it doesn't even make the effort to try and explain the psychopath! Some watching the film may feel there is something going on beyond their understanding. There isn't. It is little more than an ego trip taken by the director down an emotionally exploitative route, having not found a better way to grasp people's attention than usual the most crass and cheap means: a perverted pedophile mentally and physically torturing his defenseless child victim over 90 minutes. It doesn't matter how much you cover the cheap and easy theme with pseudo 'style', it remains as exploitative of our basic instincts as making a film about 20 different ways of slowly ripping the wings off a butterfly. The pretentiousness, is, above every else, not to be believed. It can only be understood maybe by the fact this is the director's first film. It is a cold and distant style we have seen from German cinema for decades now, and much better done than him. No it is not 'cool' anymore to take such emotional distance from everything, it is stupid, and a waste of a film. The experiment is over, try something new. Maybe I watch too many films but from the very start I heard myself saying 'please don't let him use the grotesque image of him spending a lonely sad Christmas with the boy'. And ...he did! No, worse, he had then singing carols! Please don't let this become a 'vengeance' story, and it did! (it was simply a basic story of how the boy took revenge on the evil man in the end). Well, that and about 10 other predictable events. From about half way through I knew he would finish the film JUST as his crimes are discovered, and leave us dangling. I just didn't know if he would be alive at that time, or if he died in a car crash. That ending the director might call 'mysterious', or something deep the audience should think about for weeks after seeing the film, when in actual fact it is simply ...stupid. But this film fits in well into such festivals. It is well made. That is enough to put any friends of yours in the biggest festival in the world. There are PLENTY, I mean plenty of much worse films than this one that take an incomprehensible precedence over others. That's how fickle the market is.
