A red tunnel, broken in two.

[servermonkey]

The last two foreign films I've watched have left me on my couch taking a few moments catching my breath. Over the weekend, it was City of God. Tonight it was Irreversible. I'm new to Gaspar Noe, but have read quite a bit about this particular movie, and his Seul contre tous (I Stand Alone) as well. Interesting touch that the director threw in a cameo of The Butcher from I Stand Alone, though I don't think I'll be watching that soon--it's quite a way down on my movie queue. Even after reading spoilers, I was still shocked at the brutality of the first half of Irreversible. The way the scenes were filmed reminded me a bit of The Blair Witch Project, inducing just a bit of nausea--interestingly enough, apparently Newsweek stated this was the most walked out of movie of 2002. Also thanks to IMDB, the first half an hour of the movie has background noise set at a frequency of 28Hz--a low frequency that will cause humans to be nauseated. Nice, huh? Thankfully, focusing on the subtitles helped. If I had to quickly summarize the movie, I suppose I'd say it's something of a cross between Mystic River and Memento, both of which I was drawn into greatly--and I was equally drawn into this one as well. It's a bit difficult to write too much about the movie without giving too much away, suffice it to say that le temps detruit tout, time destroys everything sums it up quite capably.

Not for everyone, not by a longshot.

I was glad, as sad as this is to write, that I still had about a half an hour of Old School left to watch. If I hadn't had that half an hour to watch, I would've substitued Family Guy--which I ended up watching anyway.