Boss of it All

If you're expecting a review of Boss of it All - well, okay. Though my main reason for posting is to complain. And complain about utterly local things... Specifically about the Coolidge Corner movie theater, who are showing this film - in their digital screening room. Which means - it's shown on a DVD. A nice DVD projector, sure - but still... This is the second time in a month that I have been annoyed to find a film I wanted to see was being shown there on video - the last time was Zoo. I was annoyed because I had been reading about the film somewhere and the director specifically mentioned that he'd shot it on film. So - I was displeased to find it on video. (And before that - Bamako.)

I feel guilty about complaining - the Coolidge has doubled its number of screens in the last couple years, and uses them to bring in marginal films. This means - that digital screening room is bringing in more films that might otherwise not be shown. But I am going to complain anyway. First - because it is a bloody shame to show Lars Von Trier films (or films as visually rich as Zoo or Bamako) on video, not film... And second, because the result seems a bit less that there are more films getting a theatrical run than that the Coolidge can keep films like The Lives of Others around for half a year. I don't mean that's a bad film - or the other films at the Coolidge are bad (right now, that would be Once, Away From Her and Day Night Day Night) - but those other four films have all played elsewhere - and three of them are still playing elsewhere. And now, between them, they are keeping a Lars Von Trier film off the real screens - and it is not playing anywhere else. And it worries me that this allows the Coolidge to bring in films instead of someone else - to get them instead of the Brattle or something like that - where, even if they only played for a day or so, at least they would get shown on a real movie screen.

Nothing to be done I guess. The irritating part is that these films aren't going to play anywhere else - it is precisely the films that won't show up somewhere else that get shown in the digital screening room - so I can't just choose to go where they'll look right. Very annoying. Anyway - as for the film itself - it's pretty good. A comedy - an IT company is run by one Ravn, who pretends there is a "boss of it all" in America. He wants to sell the company to Icelanders - he needs the boss on hand to seal the deal. He hires an actor - who has too many theories, including an infatuation with a crank ploaywright named Gambini - there are complications and the actor has to convince the employees as well... Things proceed. It's quite funny, a worthy Danish successor to Office Space or The Office - though it's Lars Von Trier and he's up to a good deal more. Brechtian jokes, jokes about Dogme (the crazy playwright sounds a bit like that), about filming in Danish instead of English - and a new trick called Automavision - a way of programming the camera, to randomly change position, angle and so on... Another way of giving up control, you could say - which of course is part of what Dogme was about as well... It's disorienting, but also rather funny, in itself. Von Trier's theories tend to be almost as funny as the films - serious or not, it's a bit of a put on.... And usually entertaining, in its utterly bizarre way.