The greatest movie ever made..!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Perfectly adorable

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

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.

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.

His choice of films, the basic 'conceit' of the production (which places him in the sets or simulacra of the films he is commenting on ) and his delivery are brilliant! But if you want Freud, be aware that you're getting Zizek's version of Lacan, which should not be confused with Lacan himself. As usual, Zizek delivers complex ideas with gusto and in a convincing manner. The rub is he is also quite mercurial and so there may be more in his gusto than in actual content. Cinematically, it is a gem. Psychologically, this will have people of all persuasions (Freudians, Lacanians and Jungians) scratching their heads but reaching for the popcorn all the same. Zizek is a phenomenon and pop icon unto himself.

He's stocky, sweaty, slightly cross-eyed and restless. He stands in front of us and calls himself a pervert. He claims that we – the film viewers – perceive the screen as a toilet bowl, and are all secretly wishing for all the s**t to explode from the inside. He's unpredictable and scary. Well…? Come on, you could have guessed by now: he's one of the leading philosophers of our age.Slavoj Žižek is both a narrator and a subject of Sophie Fiennes' extraordinary new film, A Pervert's Guide to the Cinema. Fiennes illustrates a feature-long lecture by Žižek, and does so in two ways: by providing exemplary film clips and putting Žižek on real (or reconstructed) locations from the movies he speaks about. It's always nice to watch neatly captioned scenes from great movies (although Revenge of the Sith got here as well), but the main attraction of A Pervert's Guide… is Žižek himself. What makes the movie such fun to watch is the unanswerable question one cannot help but ask over and over again: what is more outrageous, Žižek's views or Žižek's screen presence? In a documentary by Astra Taylor (Žižek!, 05), Slovenian philosopher at one point confessed his fear of being silent. Because, he claimed, he feels like he doesn't exist in the first place, the only way to make all other people believe he does is to talk constantly and feverishly. And talk he did, and how. Also A Pervert's Guide… is dominated by his voice – delivering perfect English in most crazy way, and making some astonishing points about the cinema.What are those? Well, for example he sees Chaplin's reluctance towards talking picture as a sign of an universal fear of voice itself (kind of alien force taking over the human being – think the ventriloquist segment of Dead of Night [45]). He says that the perverse nature of cinema is to teach us to desire certain objects, not to provide us with them. He identifies Groucho Marx as super ego, Chico as ego and Harpo as id. He says a million other interesting things, and all the time we cannot take our eyes off him, so persuasive (and captivating) are his looks. At some point I couldn't help but stare at his thick, scruffy hair and wonder what kind of a brain lays stored underneath. Craving, of course, for more insights.Most notable are Žižek's readings of Lynch and Hitchcock (which comes as no surprise since he has written about both of them). The cumulative effect of many brilliantly edited clips from their respective work made those parts of Žižek's lecture memorable and – unlike others – difficult to argue with, since he seems to really have gotten things right on these two directors. This doesn't go for his reading of Tarkovsky for example, upon whom he relentlessly imposes his own utterly materialistic view of reality, dismissing precisely what's so remarkable in all Tarkovsky (namely strong religious intuitions and images).The question isn't whether Žižek is inspiring and brilliant, because he is; or whether Fiennes film is worth watching, because it is likewise. The real question is rather: are Žižek views coherent? One smart observation after another make for an overwhelming intellectual ride, but after the whole thing is over, some doubts remain. For example: while considering Vertigo (58) Žižek states that what's hidden behind human face is a perfect void, which makes face itself only a facade: something of a deception in its own means. However, when in the final sequence we hear about the ever-shattering finale of City Lights (31) as being a portrait of one human being fully exposed to another, it's hard not to ask: what happened to the whole facade-thing…? Why should we grant Chaplin's face intrinsic value of the real thing and deprive Kim Novak's of this same privilege in two bold strokes…? Or maybe that incoherence might also be read in Lacan's terms? (The name of the notoriously "unreadable" French psychoanalyst is fundamental to Žižek's thought.) The film has all the virtues of a splendid two-and-a-half hours lecture: lots of ground are covered, many perspectives employed, even some first-rate wisecracks made (when Žižek travels on a Melanie Daniels' boat from The Birds [63] and tries to think as she did, he comes up with: "I want to f**k Mitch!"). But it has also one shortcoming that isn't inherent to two-and-a-half hours lecture as such: it's almost obsessively digressive. Žižek's yarn about how far are we from the Real is as good as any other psychoanalytic yarn, but after some 80 minutes it becomes quite clear that one of Žižek's perverse pleasures is to ramble on and on, changing subjects constantly. Overall effect is this of being swept away by a giant, cool, fizzing wave: you're simultaneously taken by surprise, refreshed, in mortal danger and confused no end. As you finish watching, your head is brimming with ideas not of your own and you're already planning on re-watching some films – but you also share a sense of having survived a calamity.The ultimate question is: did Žižek lost it? Or haven't we even came close to the real thing? Once cinephilia becomes punishable by imprisonment, we shall all meet in a one big cell and finally talk to each other (not having any movies around to turn our faces to). I dare you all: who will have enough guts to approach Žižek and defy him? My guess is that once you look into those eyes in real life, you become a believer.