Vince Vaughn went there and apologized in October 2010, or about three years ago. Brett Ratner went there and apologized the following year (i.e., November 2011). And now Nymphomaniac director Lars von Trier has gone there and he, too, will presumably have to apologize. In a just-published article in the Norwegian film magazine Montages.no, Von Trier is quoted offering a kind of rationale as to why his film has no slow-motion footage, to wit: “What is [slow-motion] about? It is so gay!”
Here we go again, Von Trier in the doghouse, etc. Calling Anderson Cooper and the p.c. police. Riot squad, paddy wagon, round up the usual suspects.
The Montages.no article claims to convey information about Nymphomaniac that has not been previously published. It also reveals the following:
(a) The film is presently “five hours long, and according to plan it will consist of two volumes, each two and a half hours long. The intention is to release them simultaneously — they are not meant to be experienced as two films. The material is massive, however, and it is still in the cards to add a TV series to the theatrically released films”;
(b) One of Nymphomaniac‘s eight chapters “is shot in black-and-white…the film is shot in Cinemascope, except for one chapter in 1.85:1″ (Wells interjection: no chapters in 1.66?);
(c) “Von Trier has said that he is launching a new genre called ‘digressionism‘, and consequently we are now one step closer to understanding what this means”;
(d) “The film is said to be very funny — at times closer to pure comedy than anything von Trier has made since The Idiots and The Boss of It All. Its black humor is mostly present in the film’s first half, however, since the story gradually grows darker and more tragic.”
On 10.15.10 I rewrote Vaughn’s apology for having misguidedly used the word “gay” to describe electric cars. Here’s how I put it, in Vaughn;s words:
“The line I spoke simply meant that electric cars aren’t studly or swaggery enough in a Clint Eastwood sort of way — that’s all. The line wasn’t putting down gay people or implying anything negative. It simply meant that the thinking and the symbolism behind electric cars them is a little bit guilty and constricted and regimented in a p.c. kind of way, however necessary and eco-friendly those cars happen to be, and that Steve McQueen would never drive one.
“That’s all it was. Just a joke that average people who are totally down with Anderson Cooper and are not homophobes happened to get. The Thought Police don’t like to hear this, but funny is what people laugh at.
“The other day Jeffrey Wells took some heat for saying there are two definitions of gay. The first simply means being homosexual, and the second means a cross between p.c. overdosing and lacking a certain guy-ness — a kind of sloppy apartment, softball-adept, baseball-hat wearing, hot-dog-eating, Jack Lord in Hawaii Five-O quality. The second definition of ‘gay’, Wells said, is reflective of a certain gelatinous, salad-eating metrosexual thing — a ‘watch your language and be respectful of others and watch your attitude’ attitude. We all know what he was talking about even if if some of you say that you don’t. Leave that shit outside when you’re talking to me…okay? No offense.”
