Here's to hoping it's everything Josh says it is!

Slant Magazine just published a really good review of it. Here's hoping you like it as much as I do

I hope so, too. Unfortunately, I have to push the film back to Thursday due to the timing of my classes and meal period. But I'll watch it.

Gotten around to it yet?

Unfortunately, no. Life got in the way, as it does. This is probably the last time I make a topic I can't commit to. Much apologies, Josh, I'll see this one eventually.

All good, lord knows I've done the same thing (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia tonight? I finished Season 4 of Mad Men last night so I think so).

Blind-bought this today, $15 for 237 minutes. I'll start it in 30 minutes. Sono!

Interesting film. Somebody somewhere (I think it was Ignaty Vistavishky (?) over at MUBI, but don't quote me on that) said it was more like an art installation piece, and while I think it's a little too indebted to the forms of genre to be anything other than a film there's something to the idea that Love Exposure more resembles Sono free associating with the medium than actually making a cohesive piece of film. It's interesting, sure, but goddamn if 4 hours wasn't a little too long for me to watch Sono fuck around with editing, then fuck around with the romantic comedy, then fuck around with family tragedy, etc etc etc. Props on keeping the whole "Love" thing pertinent throughout all that, but a film needs more than a consistent theme to work. I'd still give it a 7/10, just because the first hourish, when Sono is setting up the dominoes, is one of the most effectively propulsive pieces of moviemaking I can recall, and even when it's hard to sit through it's still sort of fascinating.

It took two false starts to make it through the film -- even then I divided the viewing into two-hour blocks -- and the best I can come up with is the not-quite-praise of oppressive. And I love stuff that's insanely metaphorical so it isn't that the movie is exactly beyond my reach. Or maybe it is. I ended up being happy with Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle (the last two films I never reviewed on the forum but ended up giving shape to the first three installments -- very good INSTALLATION PIECE that worked somewhat as traditional narrative filmmaking) and see how the Sono epic fits in with the Barney mode.

There wasn't anything in Love Exposure that really demanded to be in Love Exposure. A pop collection of inventive images without the mood required to make them stick. Mishima was more creative and more metaphorical and it doesn't require random guesses to admire.