YMMV / Lars von Trier

• Award Snub: Why hasn't Lars been nominated for an Academy Award for his directing yet?
• Broken Base:
  • Lars von Trier is a major candidate for the most divisive filmmaker in the history of cinema. Either you think he's a brilliant underrated genius who singlehandedly reinvented the very art of filmmaking or you think he's a pretentious, misogynistic edgelord who lives to make audiences as bitter and miserable as his films. Those two descriptions are, of course, not mutually exclusive.
  • To drive this point home, The Movie Show's Margaret Pomeranz gave Dancer in the Dark 5 stars out of 5, while her partner, David Stratton, gave it zero stars. That was the only time that'd happened in the history of the show. To say that Lars is a polarizing figure is an understatement.
  • Melancholia is either a real heart-wrenching film enforcing the idea of Hobbes Was Right, or it makes the characters so unlikable you just want the damn planet to kill everyone. This is of course assuming you can get behind that premise.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: A major criticism about his films among his detractors.

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