Three

Not funny enough for a comedy, not serious enough for a drama, and as a romance… way off. And on top of that, all the three protagonists are incredibly unlikeable (Adam almost made me physically sick). The provocative and controversial ending was cleverly spoiled on the posters. I don’t give a toss about whether Tyker is demolishing gender stereotypes, criticising current morality, or on the contrary, he’s saying that there’s nothing really bad about it, etc., I just didn't have fun. (10/08/2011)

Tykwer kicked me in the balls. At first glance, a layered film about a love triangle may seem like a cheap perversion and an attraction about a trio of bored "retirees" who are haunted and can't handle their sexuality, but in reality it's an unprecedentedly precise and subversive account of the subject's crisis and his traditional social role. Not coincidentally, Tykwer works very strongly with the motif of "biological determinism" - two characters research in the fields of genetics, stem cells and artificial insemination. The contemporary obsession with human control and measurability, the perverse decomposition of the subject to what Julia Kristeva calls the patrimonial individual (a man reduced to a set of organs with varying prices on the market), receives unprecedentedly sharp metaphors here - for example, when the mother of one of the heroes is posthumously exhibited in a museum as part of the Bodies exhibition. Tykwer also copes with the second, let's say predominantly gendered chimera - a person who is defined only by how adequately he plays his social role. In such a defined society, which is also filled with violence and disasters (these are recalled in the second plan from TV screens and newspapers), the pathological love triangle is actually the only option for revolt. By ignoring man as a passive executor of a social role and, on the contrary, by experiencing what is most personal despite the taboo, Tykwer's Three creates an extremely plastic and impressive image of humanity "against conventions". What is worthy of admiration about the film is the way it dissolves the sophisticated thought subtext in playful processing, in which irony, brisk genre collage and a huge degree of immediacy are constantly evident. What might otherwise act as a self-help mix of sexual perversions feels quite natural, soft and detached from all possible stereotypes in Three. I was fascinated by how consistently Tykwer combated the key phenomenon of the father in psychoanalysis - despite his age, the two main male characters seemed to me as children returning to a blissful world in which pleasure is still possible (because it is unencumbered by original sin). The ending is actually a romantic return to the roots of non plus ultra. The moral message of Tykwer's film may thus be to stop seeing life as quantifiable and manipulative contents of a petri dish and to accept it in its fullness, which defies any categorization. At times, it seems as if Three has successfully bypassed the limits of any symbolism and touched the very thing... this is, of course, an illusion, an illusion that I will be happy to indulge in one more time. For me, the film of the year so far (I am so full of positive impressions that I certainly missed a lot of things that might have bothered me during the screening...). (04/06/2011)

The Human Centipede 3. Haha you get it – three. Lol. Best joke of the week. Good thing it's Saturday. (I plan to maybe add to this, but if that doesn't happen, I'll at least leave it that if this movie hadn't been made by the jumpy Tykwer and the fantastically neurotic Sophie Rois weren’t getting ticked off in the main role, I'd knock the mirrors off). (11/21/2020)