This review incorporates responses given by the director Arturo Ripstein and screenwriter Paz Garaciadiego during a Q&A screening at the American Cinematheque, and will hopefully correct to some extent the lack of information that seems to be currently available about this film online.
Like Deep Crimson, Divine is loosely based on a true story -- in this case that of a religious sect that actually existed in Mexico. In fact the idea for it originated when Ripstein used a question…
“No one wants to make a pro-war film, everyone wants to make an anti-war film… It shouldn’t have sequences of violence that inspire a lust for violence.” - Francis Ford Coppola, in reference to Apocalypse Now's questionable status as an anti-war film.
It’s true that Coppola’s classic isn’t strictly anti-war by his definition, but at least he knows the difference. All Quiet on the Western Front is based on a classic anti-war book, and it functions as an anti-war story…
Watching Gummo for the first time is something of a traumatic experience; it's most comparable to those rare instants in every day life when you grasp the mortality of things and realize that the world is simultaneously remarkable and imperfect. There aren’t many films that have the ability to capture such an ineffable feeling. It’s why Harmony Korine is the one filmmaker who's come the closest to capturing what Werner Herzog describes as ecstatic truth. In Herzog's work, this idea…
Bribing its way to a Sundance prize is this film's only notable achievement. The script is awful, filled with awkward, obvious lines lacking authenticity, while the acting backs it up with cloyingly self-aware deliveries that are anything but hilarious, unless the hilarity lies in the actors' failure to be convincing. The humor is therefore extremely belabored; in fact the entire film feels as if it were written by a first year film student who was somehow lucky enough to get…
