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From: blp Category: Life Date: 07 August 2006 Time: 05:52 PM Review: A gothy industrial music fan teen stews in his room while his lame dad, a former heavy metal musician, makes a messy porno film in the sitting room of their one bed flat. There's a girl who says she's wanted to be a porno actress since she was 12. She's like a really really stupid Big Brother contestant and at one point has a little cry because she's been rejected by Big Brother. The male porno lead is a handsomely goofy looking guy called Geko with a mild sadistic side. It's shot on video, mostly in a flat modern verité style, but then cuts frequently to more artful constructions: gruesome shots of cosmetic surgery on a vagina, bodily organs pumping, GI Joe and Barbie dolls chatting in the actors voices and having sex, a rubber vagina and arsehole. There are also a lot of sequences where the cuts go haywire and the actors seem to be involved in some sort of far worse ordeal than anything the intelligible bits convey. At one point the goth kid seems to shoot his dad in the head with an airgun. Then they sit on the bed chatting, the dad's head covered in drying blood. I'm not making it sound good am I? I hope not. It's not. It's very very bad indeed. Moodysson can't seem to face the implications of his own subject matter. He picks the ostensibly most unbearable, hellish situation he can think of, then doesn't let himself imagine it at all. The quick cuts aren't challenging, they're a wretched inability to watch the situation for long enough to let it go anywhere interesting - and as anyone who's spent an afternoon mucking about with editing software knows, ten-a-penny artistically. Instead, he moves his characters around like dolls themselves, making them say whatever's convenient to his arty notions, succeeding finally, only in sentimentalising all of them, showing them all to be implausibly articulate vocalisers of their inner pain - my mum this, my dad that. People think this guy is good. Why? Haven't they ever seen anything that actually is?