1/5 Bizarre!!
  by Sharad Yadav
There are some movies that warrant reviews because they deserve one and there are some movies that warrant reviews as warnings to the unsuspecting viewer from watching celluloid junk made by someone who probably wasn't in the right frame of mind while making the movie.
I endured almost 2 hours of junk only because I wanted to push my limits of mental endurance and after watching this fare, I was very nearly at the end of my sanity and in serious danger of losing it.
The characters being shown in the movie (a crazy French couple from LA) are nasty at best, constantly fighting with each other, showing fits of sudden anger & love and then repeating the cycle all over again. The long periods of silence are flawed and in all probability the director (and crew) was lost whilst the camera rolled. The brutality and the sheer (bloody) violence shown in the movie (in my opinion) is a reflection of the director's personality. I cannot, but feel very sorry for the actors. I am sure, they only did this for money.
I was shocked at the end of the movie and disturbed. It is undoubtedly one of the worst movies ever made. Please, stay away!!!


1/5 Pretty damn awful...see Dumont's L'humanite instead....
  by Grigory's Girl (NYC)
This is a particularly bad film. It's extremely boring and tedious for the first hour or so. The last half hour has a good night scene, and a shocking act of violence, but overall it's a pretentious, stupid film. It consists of a very ugly couple (ugly on the inside mostly) screwing, yelling, screwing, and getting brutalised. I am a fan of existential cinema, but this isn't a good example of it. In fact, it's an embarrassment. It's a shame, as the director, Bruno Dumont, previous film, L'humanite, is flatout amazing. L'humanite had gotten some reviews from people thinking it's pretentious, slow (aka boring), and stupid, but it's a very powerful film with an incredible visual style to it. This film isn't like that at all. I think Dumont is a great filmmaker, but this is a bad misstep. There seems to be a lot of posers out today making "slow, ambiguous" films in an attempt to be arty (there have always been posers of this kind throughout history, I suppose, so for us to think that they don't exist now is arrogance on our part). I don't believe that Dumont is one of these posers, but many might think that he is if this is the only film of his they've seen. Check out Dumont's L'humanite for proof of his talents, and ignore this film. Thank you and good night.

1/5 Palmy
  by Bradley F. Smith (Miami Beach, FL)
Possible THE worst move I've seen in a long time. A couple fight and have sex in the desert around Joshua Tree where I once lived. He speaks English and she speaks French, which is weird in itself. Then the "plot" is non-existent. The ending is extremely violent, so beware if you get that far. This seems like a glorified porno film, only worse than an actual one because of the pretensions herein. Don't waste your time.

4/5 controversial brilliance audacity
  by hillary (oxford)
1. katia golubeva is one of the most beautiful women in the world
2. david out gallo's vincent gallo as most insensitive, most brutally, hollowly macho lead actor EVER--a guy you love to hate (but of course it's in the script as well)
3. the desert is shot so beautifully you will wanna plan a trip pronto
4. this is a film about the violence endemic in america--yeah, typical frenchy frenchy jeremiad, but the pacing, though molasses-slow, is deft and the ending's a shock that, actually, the director has earned. sorry, haters--it's just too subtle for you. here's how: the Hummer, the most reviled yank car (by any sensible person's standards), is symbolic: it's a goddam tank, yah, but no matter how much we think we can protect ourselves from evil, from violence, from ANYTHING...with our "art" or educations or cars, we're kidding ourselves...also: 29 palms is a BARREN place (like the states--ok, at times, not always) and a milieu that's kept alive by a marine base...basically a training center for people who are programed to shut off all emotion and kill...
5. a second viewing brings out all this stuff--if you just think about it.
6. katia golubeva is the most beautiful woman in...oh i said that already

3/5 Surreal movie with a wacked ending
  by LGwriter (Astoria, N.Y. United States)
Lots of reviews of this film have noted its pointlessness and in all fairness, there's a lot of truth to these reviews. One of the most grating things is the director's incredibly high-falutin' ostensibly philosophical explanation/description of what he was trying to do when he made the movie, which he "reveals" (for lack of a better term) in an interview. Unfortunately, it's very pretentious sounding.

That being said, there's an interesting parallel here to another "two souls lost in a huge barren place" movie, "Gerry" by Gus Van Sant. "Gerry" is a really interesting film, I think, and there are some intriguing similarities. But the Van Sant film really probes its two same-named characters, while the Domont film, "Twentynine Palms" spends a lot of time with its two characters engaged in back and forth stuff.

So why the three stars? Good question. The back and forth stuff consists of alternating bickering and sex and, at least for me, it felt like there was some weird kind of atmosphere building up as a result of this. As in the Van Sant film, there are fairly long stretches of the two characters traveling (in "Gerry", by foot; in "Twentynine Palms", by car) with little else happening. It's during the traveling that we feel the complete emptiness of the relationship. The reason, though, that I gave "Gerry" four stars is that the relationship has some depth, is palpable, emotionally reverberates, while in the Dumont film, that's not the case.

In spite of this pronounced shallowness, though, there's something going on and it ain't good. There IS a slowly creeping malaise that you do begin to feel, minute by minute, and in fact, I think Dumont does a reasonably good job at this.

The problem is that this creeping malaise is shattered with a double blast (not literally a blast, as in shotgun, but referring to an outburst) of violence at the end of the film, making it, I would say, not so much pointless, but more like a huge doofy cartoon. The cartoonishness in particular is emphasized in the totally bizarre getup one of the characters sports in the penultimate scene.

It kind of feels like the reason Dumont chose this really wacked out ending was to emphasize how America is the land of random personal violence. But the problem with that is, that point's already been made in a bunch of films. I think what he should have done is to build on the creepiness he started and instead of hitting us over the head with an outrageously cartoonish ending, move the characters to some kind of bizarre climax that much more naturally develops as a result of the buildup. I guess he just couldn't control himself.

Too bad. This really should have, I would say, two and a half stars, but maybe I was feeling generous. The creepiness is done relatively well. But the ending totally destroys it.