I Stand Alone

This is Gaspar Noe's deliberately disturbing film of one man's resentment of his own life. It's a highly cinematic monologue of malevolence by a volatile, middle-aged protagonist. The film's brilliance comes from the daring moralism it projects right up to it's startling conclusion. Without giving anything away, this is a mean-spirited, convincingly fiendish love story that sadistically gives it's audience a 30 second chance to leave the theater before things get resolved. A absolutely terrific monster movie for mature audiences only!

A brilliantly disturbing film, unlike anything I have ever seen. This is an incredibly detailed account of how a disturbed human mind rationalizes everyday reality. It's like looking right into the mind of a man pushed to the brink, a man capable of anything. The film darkly builds as we watch the main character fall lower and lower, becoming more and more desperate. I love a movie that can capture an emotion so strongly, and this film defiantly grabs you and does not let go. The tension literally drips off the screen making it difficult at times to take, but like a car crash, you can't take your eyes off of it.

Noe's direction is excellent. The pace is slow and methodical and cut up with a surprising sound affect that makes you jump almost every time you hear it. This just adds to the disturbing, uneasy atmosphere that the film creates.

Its a trip that not all people should take, but those of you how are not easily offended, and have a strong stomach and a good eye for art, you should go far out of you way to see this film.

Following the life of the most disaffected, disillusioned, alienated, resentful, hostile and unbalanced middle aged man that has ever carried an image on a screen - but is he alone, and can all the factors he believes brought him to this nadir of all nadirs actually be correct, that there was little or nothing to be done, with the cards he was dealt as a child, the hands he had to play during his formative years, set in stone, to fatefully be performed in only one way, as unsatisfying an existence that could ever have walked this earth, beaten by the state, society, its structures and its rules.

You won't come away with a smile on your face, or at least not until you realise that there's always someone worse off than yourself. A painful watch at times, but it comes with the director's territory.

Stunning. The writer-director Gaspar Noe's first-person account of a jobless butcher's trip on the down escalator has a lot of superficial resemblances to TAXI DRIVER, but the real unseen hand behind this shattering picture belongs to Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose scabrous stream-of-consciousness monologues Noe has translated into scorching, nineties angry-white-man-ese. As the butcher's three hundred francs dwindle, and his handgun starts looking more and more appealing, Noe surgically implants us inside the antihero's head using a cascade of hilarious and horrifying nihilistic rants that don't quite resemble anything you've ever heard in a movie.

Noe's ingenuity in reinventing the subjective style of TAXI DRIVER is near-limitless; his array of techniques dazzles, from the Godardian intertitles that break the action like a butcher's cleaver hammering a wooden cutting board, to the deafening gunshots accompanied by digital pans and zooms that throw a Brechtian bucket of icewater on the proceedings whenever they calm down. At times the picture suggests one of Fassbinder's fatalistic fables staged as a William Castle horror movie; in a stroke of genius, Noe conceives of the inevitable crack-up finale not in terms of some novel spin on the image, but as a blizzard of scurrilous language--a head self-narrating to the implode point.

At times, the butcher's and Noe's nihilism seem to be one--and a posturing, collegiate nihilism it can be. And the penultimate section of the movie thunks along as Noe recreates painfully familiar scenes from TAXI DRIVER almost in toto. But the cumulative effect of the movie is lacerating, the way early Scorsese and Toback must have felt the first time out. French-language cinema hasn't gotten this kind of wake-up call since the (lesser) MAN BITES DOG.

The movie shocked me, it made me feel sad, sorry and ashamed.

It shows how a potentially good human being can become bad due to the lack of love in our society. Society and it's egoism, loneliness, selfishness, and individualism affect all humans. Some more than others. This movie is a rather extreme example, but it is definitely what is needed to shake you and make this world a better place.

Some might interpret it as a useless display of bitterness and turn their head to keep on living their "comfortable" lives. Probably most will do that by fear of confronting such a terrible reality. With that attitude nothing will change.

I see the main's characters attitude as the natural consequence of a society without love, a society where everything is given in exchange of something (natural consequence of capitalism). Unfortunately people living afraid and with no love are everywhere. Their acts are a consequence of the extreme individualism and lack of interest of human beings towards others, hence the lack of care for themselves, hence the lack of love.

"Life is a selfish act". Unfortunately our society, or in other words ourselves, act selfishly. As long as that keeps on going the world will be a sad, boring and lonely place.

I have faith in humanity and in living in a world of care, respect, tolerance and responsibility towards the rest. Unfortunately we still have a looooong way to go.

I recommend it to everyone, specially the ones who do not like facing reality and prefer living in "comfort". They need it more than anyone. I give it a well merited 10.