The Green Butchers
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Movie Reviews of The Green Butchers
Movie Review: The Green Butchers
Summary: 5 Stars
I love it when a skilled group of actors takes an absurdly funny situation and plays it absolutely straight and serious, without mugging for the camera, without pausing so you can laugh, and most certainly without a laugh track. Dark humor? I suppose, since it has murder and stuff. Svend and Bjarne open a butcher shop in this film, which the cover blurb calls "deceptively simple and wickedly funny." Yeah, that's what it is. It's Danish, the director has a strong Academy Award resume, and I don't care. I just know I enjoyed it immensely. It also features some very clever dialog, and you know I love word play.Movie Review: My Favorite Movie
Summary: 5 Stars
I randomly picked this movie from the meager foreign selection in the local movie store. I did not expect much from it, but it turned out to be the best movie I have seen. It comments on the logic of what makes a person sane or insane - and how one arrives at that point (through watching loved ones die, through being abused, etc.)
It is also beatifully filmed. I love one particular part where the main character walks through a room full of plants and the camera passes by a magnifying glass just right. The closing shot is beautiful, too.
Movie Review: An Absolute Gem!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I picked up this movie at a local pawn shop and had low expectations. Was I ever wrong! This is an absolute gem of a movie. Certainly my new favorite. Other reviewers have waxed eloquent on the virtues contained therein and additional commentary would be superfluous. Just let me say that this movie is a "must see". If you can watch this movie and not be entertained I feel for you. For those of you skittish about watching foreign films this movie will cure you of you phobia. Enjoy!Movie Review: So ca-razy, you can't help but love it
Summary: 5 Stars
I highly suggest this movie to people who find some sort of appreciation in macabre things/stories. I love this movie, I have yet to see a Danish film I didn't like.Movie Review: Excellent.
Summary: 4 Stars
The Green Butchers (Anders Jensen, 2004)
What a wonderful little film this is. If you haven't seen it yet, you should.
A dark comedy in the tradition of (but in no way resembling) Delicatessen, The Green Butchers gives us Svend (Mads Mikkelsen) and Bjarne (Nikolaj Lee Kaas), two assistants to Holger (Ole Thestrup), the town butcher. They can't stand him, and Svend is burning to go into business for himself. They find an old butcher shop that'll cost them two million kroner to buy. Svend can get his half by mortgaging his house; Bjarne, on the other hand, has all of his money tied up in a trust related to his comatose brother Eigil (also played by Kaas), whom he hasn't seen in ten years. He asks the sanatorium to turn off the life support devices, gets the money, and the two go into business. Their first day is an unmitigated disaster, with their only customers Svend's girlfriend Tina (Bodil Jorgensen) and the electrician fixing the lights in their meat locker. At the end of the day, Svend locks up and leaves, only to find the next morning that he locked the electrician in the meat locker, and the man froze to death. When Holger comes in to get some meat to feed the town council, Svend panics and sells him the electrician's leg-- and when the town hears about Svend's secret recipe, everyone in town wants meat from Svend and Bjarne's place. Meanwhile, the doctors turn off Eigil's life support, and he wakes up...
The film is carried in no small part by Kaas' double-role as Bjarne and Eigil, whose relationship is as deep and complex as any I've seen in modern film. Svend, though the movie's main character, ends up playing straight man to the relationship of the brothers and Bjarne's hard-headed pragmatism, not to mention reluctance to sell the unsuspecting townsfolk human flesh in marinade and pass it off as chicken. And the rest of the movie has a great deal of emotional depth (not to mention excellent comic timing); there's not much at all wrong with the rest of it. (One coincidence does seem forced, which is unfortunate, as much of the movie's plot turns on it.) But it is Bjarne and Eigil who turn this from an amusing way to kill a couple of hours into a real tour-de-force. Highly recommended. ****