The Congress (2013)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

How sad is this?

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

This was awful. Truly awful.The first act is 45 minutes long and is paced slower than coal turning into diamonds. None of the characters are believable at all, though some of the actors do give typically decent performances, particularly Harvey Keitel. Every character, in addition to not being believable, is loathsome. I didn't care about anyone and actively hated a few that I was supposed to sympathetic to. The second act was painful to watch. The animated parts weren't even interesting. For one, the concept of an "animated zone" was unbelievably stupid. Why would anyone do that in the first place, set something up where you've essentially taken LSD but somehow have to function as if you have not? The first scene where she's driving her car and the desert turns into an ocean and she finally goes over a cliff, for instance, was ludicrous; people would be dead. Then, she's already seeing herself and everything around her as a cartoon, but for some reason the tap water contains ANOTHER hallucinogenic drug??? It was also inexplicable to me why they mostly stuck with a pastiche of classic 1930s-50s style cartoon art, and even that wasn't done well.The third act and the ending were beyond terrible. I spent 2 hours watching this and at the end had no resolution whatsoever beyond the real world being a terrible place, terrible people getting what they want at everyone else's expense, and our protagonist being significantly worse off than she was when the movie started.I couldn't even tell you what themes they were trying to explore. There was no examination of the nature of reality, no look at what it means to be human, no exploration of how we trust our senses... nothing at all.A better movie with a similar subject (the digitizing of actors) was made way back in 1981. Looker is a flawed and dated film, but it is at least engaging: there is conflict, the characters have real motivations. And not least, there is a resolution to the story beyond the story just ending.If you and your wife were 2 of 13,000 that saw this film, I'd guess that you were 2 of 13,000 that enjoyed the experience; The Congress was execrable IMO. In fact, it was so bad that I consider it a public service to warn people away from it.DO NOT WATCH!Zero stars; zero thumbs up.

The Congress is one of those art projects that are definitely out there, but contain just enough plot, character development and story so as not to devolve into a straight stream-of-consciousness acid tripping – though there's definitely a lot of that present as well.The movie stars the talented Robin Wright, playing a fictional version of herself as she finds her career slowly but surely dwindling as the years pass and take their toll. But then an offer comes to digitize her. Or, at least her likeness. To immortalize her in a manner of speaking. Plus a boatload of money, but that goes without saying.The movie follows Wright throughout the years as she deals with the consequences of her choice and with a world that's slowly adapting the technology to digitize and animate pretty much the entire human population. Everyone can become a cartoon character and follow rules of their own making. Think Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but as an art house film, with a more artistic vision and more abstract themes.It mostly works, would be my way of summing it all up. The animated segments are certainly pretty enough and the film takes good advantage of the fact that it can do pretty much anything it wants with them. Robin Wright is a very good actor, though her character is written to be a bit more passive than I would have preferred. She's the observer, the one things happen to, but this leads to her simply wandering around, staring at things with wide cartoon eyes.Still, it's worth a watch if you want something to really sink your teeth into. The world and story are both very interesting, it's well-made and has some really good moments. Not my personal cup of tea, if I'm being honest, but I enjoyed it just fine.

First thing of all: a drug that gives us all our wishes the way we want is not good for economy, for the entire world economy. The main pinnacle of our occidental economy is the fact that people BUY, constantly, with a great variety. People buy all kinds of products not because they need to buy it, but for two main reasons: for social status, or for tradition. It's not just a choice of an individual if she or he is going to buy a new food, drug, mobile-phone, book, etc. Doesn't matter how perfect an Apple phone (Iphone) can be, sometime you either buy a new one, or the one you have gets broken and you buy another. It's for some social reasons that people buy. First, it's because the occident have created a society in which such consumerism is possible with De La Division du Travail Social (The Division of Labour in Society), second, it's because we are born in a family in which it's OK to buy a mini skirt or something like that (for example, if you're born in a Quaker family, you going to have a bad time with freedom to choose what you buy), third, if we are lucky about the previous possibilities, we still buy according to what kind of social group we are integrated, for example, if I'm a skater, the things that I'll buy will be slightly different from what a "headbanger" buys, or a rapper from Brooklyn, etc. And here I get into the second point about what the movie gets wrong about society. What I want to say is that we do not only seek individual pleasure, we also seek social status, we are constantly trying to reaffirm our position on our social groups, and we act accordingly with it. Although the individual has much more liberty to choose and act than it had before the modernity (the consequences being not so good as it seems, as Durkheim shows on Le Suicide), we still are seeking new ways to be more easily socially integrated, that's why the people who use Facebook the most are people with more social life (as some studies have concluded), and even on Facebook we have dozens of crews, and that's why new kinds of social integration are constantly being born and reaffirmed (the boom of "what's up" for example). I don't know if this movie would be scientifically possible, I would not doubt, since technology is improving beyond our sights, but what I do know is that it's sociologically impossible, for two main reasons: it would break the world economy, and second, it's not sociologically viable. And a third point that I won't discuss much further, what about the State? Only in anarchy that would be possible, and it doesn't seems that all order was abandoned in that world, the Contemporary State is a bourgeois State, it needs, as a corporation, to maintain the profits of the dominating class. Beyond this sociological analysis, I must say that the story is a little bit confusing, that "revolt" or "revolution", I could not get it if that was meant to break the new system that was about to happen but failed, or if it just changed the way of how things were going to be, like a single company was selling these drugs but then it became free for everyone. Second, I did not get it that thing about Robin being frozen to wait for a world in which she could be cured (the disease appearing to be "seeing the world as cartoon" or just the "random dreams" she was having?), it seemed just a bad excuse to get her separated from her son for a long time. Although its sociological failure, the movie have a good picture, and it's an interesting sci- fi. And it shows a very important thing about post-modern society: that we are blindly trying to seek happiness and understand what we need by individual ways, we forget that what we need since we invented religion is being socially integrated, not just individual pleasure. As Durkheim shows on Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, we praise society, not a god, and being moderately socially integrated is necessary for our health, as he shows on Le Suicide.

The concept, the images, the themes, the lead actress... the movie was filled with so much potential. And with a visionary director like Ari Folman, I expected great things from it. The movie isn't bad, but it's much less than what it could have been/achieved. By the time the movie ends, one wonders where it drifted. The film does end on a thought-provoking and intriguing note; the film's second half is quite surrealistic.Robin Wright looks and acts terrific. Harvey Keitel is a good support, especially in the scene where he talks to Robin about his and her various experiences to bring out various emotions in her.It's a good movie, but with more depth or story, it could have been an epic sci-fi surrealist drama. I liked the ending (recapping all the significant moments of her life in animation).