Žižek! (2005)

Wonderful Movie

the audience applauded

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

This Zizek guy actually has some perceptive ideas on modern culture when he's critiquing our pathological need to diminish our enjoyment of soda, coffee, beer and other consumer products by accepting diminished aspects of the real thing such as diet, lite, decaffeinated and so on. He's way off base by venerating a mass murderer such as Stalin though and it's awfully telling that the director doesn't even challenge him on this but does express astonishment at the fact that some people when they see his proudly displayed portrait of Stalin in his home walk right out the door - I mean what sad, narrow-minded idiots these people must be for not appreciating the finer ironies of the slaughterer of millions! Despite this fault of Zizeks I kinda liked him, he is whip-smart, not afraid to mix it up with his critics and despite his extreme intellectualism is a lovable schlub. The real problem is the aforementioned director, Astra Taylor, and her slavish adoration of Zizek and her jokey, yet unfunny, interspersing of the film with stock footage accompanied with old-timey piano music to present some of his ideas. Not cool.

Before you ask, Slavoj Zizek does pronounce his name for you in this movie, thankfully. And now that you have asked, I'll tell you that this film was good and thought-provoking, but it could have been much better. This is why: whatever Zizek wants to achieve with his philosophy is simply beyond explaining through the medium of film unless you are actually intimate with his work, which you probably aren't, as Zizek remarks. You have to read his books; I found myself pausing and rewinding whenever too much text or expository was on screen. I think the film's strength is in the scenes spent simply walking around with him or watching him do things: he just never shuts up, but he always has something funny or intriguing to say, as long as it doesn't have to do with Freud or Marx or Lacan (who in my mind are guaranteed insomnia cures, if nothing less, as I'm sure they are for most).We briefly meet his son, who smiles for the camera after an initial stage of shyness, prompting a punchline from Zizek (whose name is just as much fun to type and see as it is to say aloud once you know how to do so): "he is narcissistically amused." The same could be said of the film's director, a woman whose haircut says she is a great fan of the Teutonic invaders of Alexander Nevsky, and whose smilingly cautious but really nakedly narcissistic insertion of herself into the film distracts the camera completely from its far more ostensible subject. There would have been infinitely more mystery, and therefore infinitely more appeal, if she had remained a disembodied voice, a young feminine auditory hallucination, a modern daemon for a modern Socrates, because much as I hate to admit it she sometimes asks decent questions, and really has put together a decent film on an interesting man, though it is by no means the definitive one. Let me spend a day walking streets and drinking coffee and slicing steak with Slavoj Zizek, and let me prod him away from his -ians and -isms, and you will have me shouting his impossibly Slovenian name with far more than one exclamation point.

A good introduction into Zizek as a thinker and as a personality, but the film goes along with Zizek, posing no challenge to its subject. It seems pretty obvious that Zizek has been an object of fetish by the west, using cinema and pop culture as the sugar with which he gives people his medicine. From my expeirence on US capmuses, this makes a lot of American hipsters feel smart when they pick up one of his good books. Though not completely fluff piece - and who is Zizek to deny taking advantage of it - it would have been better if the filmmaker took the Zizek beast on with more than a humble adoration of his current cool factor.

Yeah, I know it seems like a pretty high rating, but I really enjoy movies that make you think, and if you're like me, you'll want to see this one 3 or more times to try to get the most of it. Slavoj is an interesting character on his own...he seems to not quite "appreciate" a fan base. But the theories and observations mentioned are definitely thought-provoking. They range from talk of advertising, to politics, to Love, to the super ego. His political peak (up to now) is also mentioned and talked about a little.Anyway, I saw about 20 movies at the 2005 Toronto Film festival, and in my opinion, this was the best of them.