Dreadfully Boring

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

One's patience will be rewarded if you make it to the end of the picture. I guess that's my way of saying that it won't appeal to everyone, especially if you quit half way in like another reviewer mentioned, stating that it didn't make any sense. I'd have to agree with that observation, at the half way point it doesn't make any sense. But disparate threads eventually come together, even if some of the elements introduced have no bearing on the story. The film has a creepy vibe going for it throughout and things are definitely not what they seem at first. As an example, I thought Francis Brown's (Bruce Greenwood) relationship with baby sitter Tracey (Sarah Polley) was headed into unspeakable territory, and then we come to find out that she's his niece. It's those kinds of twists and turns that keep one off balance, just like Eric's (Elias Koteas) set up to get Francis thrown out of the Club Exotica. You never really know which way the story is heading until the very last scene, and the payoff is distressingly sad and depressing for the film's principal character, who's unable to reconcile his conflicted emotions over the loss of a daughter and wife in unrelated circumstances. It's safe for me to say I haven't run across another picture like this, at least not that I can recall. Even the title "Exotica" has the effect of misdirecting one's expectations after the fact, as the strip club atmosphere at the center of the story only provides the venue for the story to unfold in a most unexpected way.

Exotica is my first Atom Egoyan film, and I'm now inclined to go out and go through his entire catalog. The title and DVD cover may make is seem like an erotic thriller at first, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth; Exotica is a beautiful, dark, low-key drama that seduces the viewer with sensuality and sexuality but maintains a chilly distance throughout.Exotica takes place in a strip club but isn't at any time titillating. It keeps the viewer out both sexually and emotionally - it's a character study piece that doesn't allow us to get into the head of any of the characters, one that doesn't have a real protagonist. Every character is a stranger to us and they all keep secrets from us and from each other, secrets that unravel as the film unfolds in a deliberately slow and strictly structured pace.I'm glad that I went into Exotica knowing next to nothing about it, and so should you. Quit reading reviews and just watch it.

This is a review of "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Exotica", two films by Atom Egoyan, both of which deal with tragedy and loss and both of which feature the same actors in similar roles.Like most of his films, Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter" is structured as a jigsaw possible assembled around a single traumatic event. As the film unfolds, and the cast's relationship to the central event grows in clarity, some moment of revelation is achieved. Virtually all of Egoyan's films adopt this narrative structure, which seems to blend a modernist search for truth with a decidedly postmodern admittance that truth requires the careful sorting of both vantage points and testimonials.The traumatic event in this case is an accident involving a school bus. The bus skids off a road and veers onto a frozen lake. The ice breaks, the bus sinks and 14 children die. Of course, everyone in the town then suffers the knock-on effect of this accident.Man, you might say, is a creature constantly in search of meaning (the brain itself is a pattern recognition machine). He creates myths, patterns and rhymes, trying desperately to assert some measure of order. He cannot accept the chaotic cruelty of the universe, preferring instead to create comfortable rituals and routines in the hope of insulating himself from pain.When the unexpected does occur, man lifts his head and cries "Why?". But God never answers. Into this vacuum steps Ian Holm, who in "The Sweet Hereafter" plays a lawyer trying desperately to assign meaning to the film's central bus crash. He wants the parents of the dead children to band together and file a law suit. A law suit against who? The guilty bus driver? Nope, the driver is broke. He wants to go after the company that made the bus. He wants to sue them for millions. It is their fault. Alone.At first Ian Holm comes across as a greedy pig. Here is a man milking suffering for money. But gradually we learn that he is himself a man intimately familiar with loss. His life has been one of misery, and the film is peppered with flashbacks detailing his relationship with his daughter, a drug addict who is dying of AIDS. Like the parents whom he hopes to represent, this lawyer is looking for the meaning of his own suffering. "Why me?" he cries. Lashing out against others and assigning blame is the only way he can rationalise things.Similarly, the small town in which the accident occurs seems at first to be a picturesque postcard village. But gradually this image is shattered, as promiscuity, infidelity, alcoholism and sexual abuse all raise their heads. Director Atom Egoyan, an outspoken fan of "The Shining", even uses the famous "Horse and Train" picture from Kubrick's film, a recognition that both films deal subliminally with the same buried, almost invisible horrors.On top of all this, Egoyan adds a layer of myth. He has one of the film's children narrate Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin". In a self referential moment, the child asks "Who took the children? Who was the piper? Why did the fabled portal in the mountain (the breaking ice) open up and swallow the kids?"In this way, Egoyan approaches his central the tragedy from at least 3 angles. Firstly, as a fateful moment of chance, secondly, as a mythical act of God (God smites the parent's for their sins) and thirdly as an event exploited by a vengeful pilgrim of pain. All three approaches seek to lay blame, targeting either the failures of parents, the actions of a punishing god or the laws of a wholly arbitrary cosmos."The Sweet Hereafter" is a very hopeless film, man never able to grasp absolute clarity (which of my behaviours, if any, caused this?). But there's also something very hopeful about Egoyan's ending. The sweet hereafter of the title is that zone of wisdom (found by the child who narrates the Piped Piper) where we ultimately come to accept the unacceptable and go on living.Similar in structure, Egoyan's "Exotica" approaches the same themes from a different angle. A man (Francis) loses his wife and daughter in a car crash. To cope with the pain he hires a young girl to come over to his house every day and babysit the daughter he lost. This babysitter simply plays a piano and lurks about his empty house, after which the bereaved father drives her home and pays her for babysitting nothingness. This ritual helps Francis assuage his pain. Every night Francis also visits a strip-club called "Exotica". There he watches a young woman (Christina), dressed in a schoolgirl's outfit, strip. But their relationship is an odd one. They seem to have a strange history. When she dances for him, it has nothing to do with sex and more to do with longing and loss. Of course both Francis and the stripper have a secret which is incrementally revealed, the truth peeled back like a stripper's clothes, leading to that revelatory final payoff that is typical of Egoyan's work. I won't spoil that moment. Suffice to say that this movie takes us into fairly interesting places. For Egoyan, man seems to live a life of cyclical substitution (we grow or are pushed out of everything and are forced to find substitutes). It's a bleak film, but unlike the work of Sam Mendes, to whom Egoyan is often wrongly compared, Egoyan eschews easy sensationalism and carnival freak-shows. 8.5/10 - Worth two viewings.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)Atom Egoyan's Exotica is an outstanding movie. I have seen Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997) which is also very good. A father's (obsessive) love for his daughter(s) is featured in both movies, consequently the theme must mean something special to Egoyan. He is a most talented and original movie maker, a Canadian as are his players, Bruce Greenwood, (Francis Brown, the accountant whose daughter was murdered), Sarah Polley, (Tracey, the high school girl), and Mia Kirshner, (Christina, the exotic dancer). His wife, Arsinee Khanjian and Polley were also featured in The Sweet Hereafter.What really makes the movie is Egoyan's use of time and action sequence. He cuts up the chronological order of events and then presents them in a dramatic way. This is not so easy to do. Christopher Nolan in Memento (2000) used the same technique to great advantage. I have come late to such a technique and would love to master it myself. I worked on it last year and a couple of years before. You can't just scissor it and then paste it back together. Something must be gained from reversing the order of events. When Eric and Christina are shown walking the fields in a long line of people I jumped to the conclusion that Tracey would be found dead. We don't learn that Francis lost his daughter until the film is nearly finished.The psychology of Francis and the young girls is interesting. Christina says she gave something to him and he gave something to her. This vagueness with its unmistakable sexuality is something that always exists between young girls and older men. And, as Egoyan observes, there are rules and awkwardness, and confused emotions. However the girl wants it made unmistakably clear that she is desired physically and just talk is almost never sufficient. She often doesn't know whether she really wants to be "taken" fully, and of course that is usually, shall we say, problematic. Some great subtly is required in handled such a theme, and Egoyan realizes that. His character Francis Brown is content with fantasy and does not touch at all.This film would have found a larger audience except for the title, the theme, and the milieu. The female audience for the most part didn't even consider watching the movie since, as one woman said, I thought it was just another movie with an older man lusting after a girl half his age. That theme bores women to death. But surprisingly at the IMDb a viewer asks how women feel about the film and several write in to say that they liked it. Another poster remarks that women over forty actually liked Exotica in higher percentages than males.I thought the veracious and business-like depiction of the exotic dancer club was well done. The very nice side plot with the gay animal importer was just a perfect fit for the main plot. Egoyan wrote the script. It is a great script. So much surprises. It's almost too good. For me, since I have seen so many, many movies, something different, some surprises in plot, in character, in treatment are always welcome.And the plot does surprise. Even when the protagonist, Francis waits outside the club to shoot Eric, Egoyan turns the situation on its head by having Eric appear from the side and explain something that changes Francis's attitude toward him.I am being vague because I don't want to spoil the story. Some movies—most movies I would say, since I go back to the generation that would go into the theatre and sit down during the middle of the movie; and then four or five hours later, realize, "This is where I came in"--in most movies to know the ending or the plot would not spoil the movie. We know so and so dies at the end. What is interesting is how he dies, how the actions develops. But in this movie to know the plot would take something away.I think. I'm not sure. Anyway Francis is a tax auditor who lost his daughter when she was less than eight years old. She was murdered. The police initially thought he did it, but he was found innocent and the murderer was apprehended and convicted. But Francis is left hollow and tries to bring her back in a way by having teenage girls "babysit" his nonexistent daughter. Egoyan teases us near the beginning by showing Francis and Tracey in his car as he drops her off at her home giving her some money and asking, "Are you free Thursday?" Very near the end of the movie we find that Tracey had a precursor in that babysitting role. You might be able to guess who it was.The sound track features "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen.