Lukas Moodyson's far-out new feature film is not for everyone. In fact, it's not for anyone. Or perhaps, somewhere in some abandoned mental home there is someone, wallowing in their own waste products, sucking a warm thumb, breaking wind and giggling, who might regard Container as a masterpiece. The rest of us, stuck with boring old sanity and intelligence can dismiss this drivel as the pointless waste of space it so assuredly is. Container is just the kind of "arty" irrelevance that makes a certain kind of film-fan go all weak at the knees. Shot on grainy black-and-white and blessed with a voice-over so inane and expressionless it makes David Beckham sound like Orson Welles, this movie has to be seen to be believed. Seeing it, however, is not advisable. At the screening I attended, Moodyson himself was there to take questions. He's got guts, I'll give him that. Had I been responsible for this witless debacle I'd have kept well away from any audience stupid enough to have paid to see it. But there he was, advising us that perhaps the best way to appreciate his film was by falling asleep during it. Later, the ghost of Andy "f*cking" Warhol was invoked. Ah yes, Andy Warhol, touch-stone for any and all second-rate artists who find that their work is boring the chattering classes to death. It's "Warholesque". So deal with it. Moodyson made the charming and wonderful Together. I still hold that film close to my heart, so was prepared to go along with Container, to see where Moodyson might lead me. He led me nowhere. His film is a blank, a nothing, an empty space. What a brilliant comment on the vacuousness of contemporary culture, right? Wrong. A film with nothing to say about everything and anything is not commenting on vacuousness, it is contributing to it.
