This is essentially Lars Von Trier stroking his cock and tickling his balls for two and a half hours, for a phase it feels good but you can't jerk off for long without it feeling boring and repetitive.
"The House That Jack Built" takes a sartorius angle on art films and specifically Lars Von Trier films. It does this by showing what it thinks are uncompromising disgusting acts, over explaining everything and showing pointless montages of high art and architecture and whatever else Jack and the disembodied or corporeal voice of Verge are talking about. I think the satire would have worked a treat for me if Lars hadn't removed two ribs in order in suck his own dick while presenting this element. There's a montage of what Lars considers high art with clips from both "Melancholia" and "Antichrist" which is enough to get a good idea about how pretentious everything about this is. Despite having criticisms about the kind of parody angle I actually really liked it for the most part, yes it's extremely self-indulgent and ends up repeating the same point over and over but it's also genuinely hilarious and actually pretty smart a lot of the time.
I liked a few of the performances, especially Matt Dillon', the cinematography is cinematography in a Von Trier film, same goes for the editing, the dialogue is unbearable at times and not great during the moments where I don't recoil at it either, the soundtrack was good and surprisingly not annoying cause, like the film, it's very repetitive and the score was awesome, the many montages + narration take away any room for interpretation which really hurt the film, but is also kind of the point of the film which is a problem I encountered criticising many elements of this movie. I likely would have immensely enjoyed this film if everything before the last 20 minutes weren't explained to me.
Jack is meant to be a genius, he's referred to as a genius many times over the course of his film but he does so many dumb things unrelated to his OCD (which as someone with OCD I can confirm is delt with well) only because satire? Or is it bad writing that can be written off as satire, this is why I had trouble critiquing this, almost everything "bad" about it can be played off as satire, but many of these things that can simply be shrugged off severely damage my enjoyment. Except for one thing, the uncompromising violence is nowhere near as brutal as it thinks it is, none of the imagery or implied violence had any effect on me which at times ruined the sartorius angle, the family sequence is the worst culprit of this, it comes off very silly, I laughed during this elongated stint of the movie because it was all so predictable, terribly executed, terribly acted, Lars still can't direct children, unnecessary and (again) disgustingly pretentious, so I didn't laugh for the reasons intended.
Despite having criticisms and despite really hating my viewing experience for about an hour I still really enjoyed seeing that state of the worth from Von Trier's perspective. You might know that I'm borderline obsessed with what people think so to see so many of his thoughts laid out in front of me was something quite special. He does like to shove his ideas down audiences throats but it's alright with me.
