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Reviews
General Orders No. 9 (2009)
Boredom has never been so antagonistic
I'm good with long movies, with slow-moving pictures, with films that don't offer obvious filmmaker/viewer interfaces. Give me Tarkovsky, bring on Antonioni, please release the Cremaster Cycle! General Orders No. 9 has to be the most painfully slow, ultimately meaningless film I am aware of. It took six or seven tries to watch end to end.
How the filmmaker imagined he might engage an audience with glacially slow, albeit lovely, images set to distant distorted Larghissimo echoey harpsichord music... What tranquilizer produces such a langorous, pretentious, catatonic film? Visually, from time to time, it is very appealing, but so is a drive across Death Valley. In a drive across an empty vista, the passenger is expected to fall asleep.
Sorry, but not being from Georgia, US, or Georgia, Eurasia, I can't be tickled into enthusiasm by antique maps.
The turning hare with a pipe in his mouth on the cover promises a kind of surreal adventure. This movie was all sleep and no dreams. If a team of filmmakers set out to produce a more tedious film experience, they could never achieve the triumph of.... What was it called? It doesn't matter.