Movies: Enter the Void

Gaspar (Irreversible) Noé’s death-trip film is a visually stupendous execution of, well, not much at all. American-born Tokyo slacker Oscar smokes DMT and hallucinates while his sister bumps and grinds for salarymen in a stripclub. When Oscar’s drug-dealing buddy sells him out to the cops, he's gunned down in a filthy toilet stall, and spends the rest of the movie floating between his past, present and possible future. It sounds great on paper — a CGI VR treatment of the Tibetan Book of the Dead! — and many of the individual effects sequences are indeed astonishing on both technical and aesthetic levels. But it’s all in the service of a deeply prosaic story (Oscar has sister and mommy issues), and the people in it are so fundamentally dull and unpleasant that following them for even twenty minutes is a chore. Two and a half hours? No thanks. At least Noé's Irreversible cast had charisma and sophistication. Also, watching a rendition of a drug trip eventually becomes as listless as just watching other people tripping. If death and rebirth is this boring, I’d hate to see Noé’s idea of nirvana.