Did this bring to mind...
Brazil? I haven't seen anyone else mention this, but I kept thinking, if Terry Gilliam had been Norwegian, THIS is the movie he would have made. It's like the flipside of the same coin. Such a great show!
sharecontextually i totally agree, this was really along similar lines to Brazil, but visually Gilliam camera is all over the place and isn't as considered as this film was.
if i was forced to choose my favourie of the two, i'd pick this one, but Brazil was made like '85 so it gets major brownie points.
now i come to think of it, this was very much like Orwell's 1984 as well, the Godfather of totalatarian fiction?
Yeah, I think that's also a good analogy.
As for the two movies, I'm not sure I could pick a favorite, as I didn't feel that this one was set up to be a comedy in the same sense (although I did laugh a lot). They both made me feel the same way after watching them, however.
Actually the film The Bothersome Man reminded me of was John Frankenhiemer's Seconds with Rock Hudson.
Oooh, that's one I haven't seen...I will have to check it out!
sharei've been meaning to watch seconds like, forever, :)it's now on my nextup list.
anyway dsrtrosy, i like what you said about these movies pitching different types of comedy and both concluding with the same feelings at the end. i'm thinking here of Gilliam using comedy as a device to keep younger audiences entertained as well as pacing the narrative with quicker cuts and other aesthetic devices, whereas Lien's film is completely focused on itself and its themes and feels more mature with it's humble static camera and finely composed shots.
i'd love to see the story of brazil made in the same way that bothersome man was made, very clinically, reducing the comedic elements, basically taking the brazil story and placing it into the aesthetic mould of a bothersome man, because i actually prefer the story of brazil, like it's easy to understand sam lowrys motivations and his reasons for what he does, whereas the bothersome man is more complex and more difficult to define as either good, or bad. even his motivations aren't clear in a bothersome man, actually the more i'm thinking about and comparing these two films, the more different they become.