Der Stuhl

Seeing this movie is like watching someone take a crap for an hour and a half. It tries so painfully hard to be meaningful and fails miserably. The huge meaningless sequences of characters walking are interspersed with characters blurting out quite basic philosophical ideas with absolutely no context. The end of the movie is probably the worst, there are honestly fifteen minutes of straight up nothing happening. This movie maybe tries to be surrealist, but who can stand an hour and a half of it? A movie this plain just shows poor writing and directing style, the ideas could have been introduced within an interesting storyline or simply presented in a fifteen minute movie. When I saw this movie in a theater in Spain half the audience got up and left.

I have never seen two reviews of the same movie so wildly opposing as the ones that have preceded me on this web-page. I have a suspicion that the positive review might have been a smouldering leg-pull. Right then, as for me, I think this movie lies somewhere in the middle, but there is no way that any right-thinking human being can believe it to be consistently entertaining, much less exciting. Boring is certainly the operative word, and anyone who suggests that it is not specifically boring is doing a dangerous disservice to the poor soul who plunks down *any* amount of money for this movie. The thing that does recommend this movie is the architectural locale. I have noticed, in general, a trend towards something I call warehouse architecture, that is, the tendency to take former industrial areas and turn them into residential ones. This leads to the so-called "loft" or warehouse apartments. You can see this scenario in "The Punisher" or "Carnival Knowledge". Now then, these neighborhoods can lend a certain existential charm, buttressed by the dictum "there's beauty in desolation". It certainly makes you wonder what it would be like to live in such a neighborhood, and this, at least, is interesting. This mood is heightened by the deliberately plodding pace of the movie, sparse in dialogue, suggesting utter vapidity. It therefore manages to communicate the core of post-modernism which is that, if things don't have meaning, you might as well have fun with the lack of meaning. Now, you really have to be a selective thinker to appreciate this Warhol-like experiment, and most people, admittedly, will start thinking about how nice it would be to have an ice-cream sundae about half-way through it and simply head for the door.

I sat through the whole projection waiting for something interesting to happen, for the plot to take shape, for an interesting character to appear. It's the most boring, obnoxious and pretentious piece of film I have ever seen in my life. I don't know if the director tried to laugh in the audience face, if he did, he surely managed to. Don't waste your time, money or brain cells. The storyline is flat, completely devoid of interest. A never ending voice over tries to explain what action and dialog can't, without any respect to the viewer. As another critic said, it's like taking a crap. But not any crap...a long, painful and disgusting one. Even though the cast is great, the writer/director managed to turn them into unbelievable and uninteresting characters. Even the great Argentinian actor Ulisses Dumont plays a strange, uninviting cameo of himself. Please, don't bother watching this bore.