Nonureva Really Surprised!

Ameriatch One of the best films i have seen

FrogGlace In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

adonis98-743-186503 Inspired by a true crime, a man begins to experience mystifying events that lead him to slay his mother with a sword. I gave this flick a chance cause of Michael Shannon but damn it was just disappointing, weird and just bad from start to finish. I mean it hardly made any sense at all and even the perfomances couldn't exactly hold it off from being a huge waste of my time. The film is really weird and unfortunately not in a good way and it's probably on Herzog's part that whole flaw i guess. Now i wouldn't recommend this to be honest guys. (0/10)

Cosmoeticadotcom Shannon is pitch perfect with his madness, starting from a Peruvian kayaking trip he demurs from (the scene of the start of another of Herzog's great films on insanity, Aguirre: The Wrath Of God), which kills his friends, to his assumption of the name Farouk, to his belief that the face of God resides on an oatmeal container, to his calm bizarreness in general. Sevigny is excellent as the clueless and desperately lonely fiancée, while Kier delights as the agog friend- and Herzog makes ironic use of Kier's iconic stature as a horror film actor to rein him in to comment on assorted bizarre things he witnesses, such as the over the top scenes between Brad and his loony and racist ostrich farming uncle Ted (Brad Dourif), which ends in a classic 'Herzog Moment' involving a dwarf. While Dourif chews scenery, it's perfectly apropos to the moment the film unhinges itself, and also given that we see this partly from Brad's POV. Other odd moments occur when we see Brad at Machu Picchu, in a Tibetan marketplace, and seeking to buy pillows for 'the sick, in general, ' at a San Diego military hospital, and often these scenes, retrospectively, are seen as telegraphed earlier, but not in the ham-handed way a Steven Spielberg would do so. The film ends with Brad's surrender, and asking Havenhurst two questions: 1) could he put in his report that it was ostriches running, not flamingos, that were the birds involved, and 2) what happened to his basketball, which, in the film's final shot, we see a small boy pluck out of the branches of a tree.Herzog's direction is flawless, and cameraman Peter Zeitlinger does his usual sparkling cinematography by making blasé San Diego seem feral. Ernst Reijseger's score is apropos to the scenes, but the weak link is the film's screenplay, written by Herzog and Herbert Golder. It is good, for all it does; the problem is with just a few more moments and scenes, here and there, this 91 minute film, at 100 or so minutes, could have hit greatness. Some critics missed the boat and panned this excellent work, usually bemoaning it as a bastard love child between director Herzog and producer David Lynch, but there is little Lynchian material here. It is all Herzog. And it is definitely NOT a black comedy. Moments of humor do not make a film a comedy. It is straight on drama, and very realistic to the point that its utter lack of real poesy hurts it, artistically. Still, this is a relative claim since Herzog oozes cinematic poesy in almost all his films.

MBunge Less a film and more a test of your patience, this is one of those willfully, calculatingly offbeat productions that baffle you with their existence. None of the folks involved could possibly have thought this would ever make any money or appeal to any significant amount of viewers. The cast doesn't get the chance to do any interesting, let alone exceptional, acting. Most of the dialog sounds like it was excerpted from random fortune cookies. The direction appears to have been inspired by the "awkward pause" segment on The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is made with a high level of craft but to no good purpose.Let me be clear, this isn't one of those genuinely weird movies. Those are attempts at conventional motion pictures that just come out weird because they're made by genuinely weird filmmakers or ones inspired by the muses of oddity. This is a case of people who know convention and decide to demonstrate their cleverness by defying it. These films are like pretentious challenges to the audience, daring them to construct some justification or rationalization for what happens on screen. The meta-concept being that you don't enjoy the film, you enjoy explaining the film to yourself and others.I will freely admit that this production may work on some arty level I don't understand. Here's the thing, though. Great art works on more than one level. It engages the audience on more than one level. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done doesn't work on any level of which I can conceive. Not logically, not narratively, not thematically, not metaphorically, not stylistically, not as entertainment nor instruction nor inspiration. Stuff like this is what creates the impression there's something fraudulent about art house cinema, that it's kind of a scam that serves only as a delineation between the bourgeoisie and a self-selected elite of the supposedly enlightened. You like this rubbish not because it's good but to signify to yourself and others that you're a certain sort of person.Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) is a glaringly disturbed man who kills his mother with a sword one morning. The police arrive and surround Brad in his mother's home, where he lives, and the rest of the movie is a series of flashbacks that take us through Brad's "alone in a crowd" existence right up until the killing. It's all contrived strangeness and slow camera movement. The only honest element is the unacknowledged denial every other character is in about Brad's mental problems.Let me stress that no actor gets a chance to shine, no line of dialog rings true or will stay with you, nothing looks all that great and the grinding string music of the score sounds like something you'd play outside a convenience store to drive away loitering teenagers and small animals. It took sheer force of will to sit through the last hour and if I wasn't specifically watching it in order to write this review, I would never have made it. If some crazy person offered me $1,000 to watch this again, I wouldn't.My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done should only be viewed by those who think that doing so will impress their friends. If that's the case, however, you really need new friends.

kershmey_baker I wasn't entirely surprised to see the lacklustre rating IMDb had given this film, given its not the sort of movie that lets you 'enjoy' it in the conventional sense. None of the characters are particularly likable, the near entirety of the plot is revealed in the first few minutes, and the rest of the film is but giving you often surreal glimpses of how the characters came to this point. These, however, are not negative characteristics, or at least not where I'm concerned. The movie isn't 'pleasant', but its viscerally emotional; dark theatre that truly challenges the audience usually in subtle ways, but then at times quite directly, tearing down the fourth wall to do so.Willem Dafoe's role in the movie is understated, as are his scenes... he's something like the narrator as Detective Hank, and in the absence of the lead, his interactions seem strangely scripted, almost as if he's forgotten what an excellent actor he is. I get the impression this air of 'woodenness' around his scenes, especially his early scenes, is intentional... his scenes take place in the 'now' of the story, which seems a bland and almost plastic atmosphere... its when they track back to the 'past' that the Movie really begins to take shape as an almost anxious nightmare. Michael Shannon as Brad is spectacular. He's a grown man who seems trapped in the persona of a desperately sullen child, unstable and overwhelmed by the world around him. As we begin to empathize with Brad, he seems to make the very normal, modern, clean suburban world around him seem almost like a dystopia simply by his presence.The real star of this film in my mind was Grace Zabriskie, who played Brad's mother. She's always been an absolutely superb character actress, has given me the willies in more than one Lynch film, but never have I seen her shine so much than in this film as the submissively overbearing Ms. McCullum. She is a woman who seems to validate her own existence through the life of her disturbed son, and is incredibly desperate for appreciation. The most powerful bit of acting in the movie, in any movie I've seen in a long while in fact, involved her lingering in a doorway awaiting a thank-you from her son and his girlfriend. Her dwindling hope and mounting terror and despair with gradually dampening eyes as the moment stretched and stretched gripped like a fist behind my navel... such concentrated emotion is a testament to what a spectacular performer she is. The movie is excellent, but not for the impatient or those who can't appreciate artistic abstraction in film, nor for those who want a 'feel good' flick. This movie won't make you feel 'good', but it will make you feel, and think, a great deal.