While doing a random Netflix search was something called "The Pervert's Guide to Ideology"... It sounded like something that would appeal to my odd sense of humor.The film opens with one guy telling another guy (who somehow turned from a big black guy to an old German guy) to either put on glasses or eat from a trash can. I was already in stitches. But a few lines later I realized that I wasn't actually watching a comedy, but a preach-umentary in the vein of "WHAT THE #$*! DO WE KNOW?!"... at least that's how it seemed.It continued on with Slavoj Zizek narrating as the main character uses his sunglasses to determine whether or not the people he was looking at were aliens. I began to hurt my knee with my fits of unintentional laughter. I think at about this point I realized that the whole sunglasses dude was a different film... one called "They Live", which I'd never seen before but I might at some point because it looks like it would be a lot of cheesy fun.The annoying thing was that from this point I realized I was just watching some old guy tell us about his views of ideology (which Wikipedia tells me is "a set of conscience and/or unconscious ideas which constitute one's goals"). Therein lies the problem of this film... I know what my goals are, so if my conscience and subconscious are working towards achieving that, why the hell do I need some old fellow with an accent to tell me the problems with it?I was waiting for some kind of "pervert" to make an appearance in the film, and bizarrely it showed up when he was analyzing "the Sound of Music" and claimed that it was actually teaching us that Christianity is about sexuality. I guess no one told him that Catholics are not allowed to use birth control so that sex is not about pleasure but reproduction, which sort of flies in the face of his argument. In fact this whole argument sounds like someone who knows very little about Christianity and even less about The Sound of Music.Anyway, after watching as much of this as I could handle, I think I determined the point behind this movie to be: don't take things at face value. There, I just saved you two painful hours, and waiting in vain for something funny or perverse.

Viewed at Seattle IFF, 2007. The day's opener, an 11 AM screening at the Egyptian was "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema", one I was dying to see but had missed previously because of a scheduling conflict (with another flick I was even more dying to see)."Pervert's Guide" is a Dutch-Austrian production directed by British documentarian Sophie Fiennes'(39)i in which Slovenian Psycho-(ahem -"analytic") film philosopher and culture- theoretical guru, Slavoj Zizek disquisses in grammatically correct but perfectly outrageous English, on a hilarious range of sexual perversions and their possible interpretations in a broad variety of flicks from Hitchcock to David Lynch, via Kubrick and other collective libido obsessives — with cleverly selected excerpts from the "perverted" sequences of the films in question — goes on and on for two and a half excessive hours! (150 minutes). The first hour and a half was interesting, informative, revealing, psychologically insightful, and often highly amusing– in a scatological vein — but eventually I began to fidget when I realized this psychoanalytic orgy was going to last far longer than bargained for, and was beginning to cut into my Ali Baba time.By the third take on Dennis Hopper (one of the most disgusting psychos ever to disfigure a silver screen) in "Blue Velvet", I was beginning to get sick to my stomach — even more so when my illuminated Casio wristwatch revealed that I was missing the beginning of Ali Baba. Somehow I couldn't quite bring myself to stalk out before the end, but I did then scurry immediately over to the SIFF theater under the Opera House in time to catch the second half of Ali Baba — which turned out to be the perfect antidote to the mental illness that had gone before at the Egyptian. Mind-bending at times, sickening at others, but definitely worth The effort it tales to sit through.

"Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire; it tells you how to desire."So begins "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema," in which Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek applies his Freudian/Lacanian brain-scalpel to world cinema. This film in three parts is the second feature documentary directed by Sophie Fiennes (yes, sister of Ralph and Joseph), and it is a notable accomplishment, clocking in at 2 1/2 hours of talk from one man and yet remaining humorous and engaging throughout. In essence, it is an extended film lecture, and one of the best you may ever get. Over the course of the film, Zizek guides us through a catalog of obsession and desire in film history. He touches on more than 40 films and, in particular, spends a great deal of time with Hitchcock, Lynch, Chaplin, Tarkovsky, the Marx Brothers, and Eisenstein. But he also takes a close look at "Persona," "The Conversation," "Three Colors: Blue," "Dogville," "Fight Club," and "The Exorcist." Thematically, Zizek's inquiry into cinema ranges from thoughts on the death drive to the "coordinates of desire," and from Gnosticism to "partial objects.""The Pervert's Guide" will be a slightly better experience if you've taken a few minutes to bone up on your basic Freudian terminology. However, even if you're not steeped in psychoanalytic theory, Zizek's dynamic and hilarious personality carries the film forward with such gusto that you aren't likely to balk at the specialized lingo. The film frequently cuts from movie clips to images of Zizek *inside* the movie he is talking about--that is, in the original locations and sets. The transitions in these sequences sustain such tension and humor that the trick never gets old. And Zizek himself is constantly making us laugh, either from bizarre little jokes or from his enthusiastic insistence on, for example, a bold Oedipal interpretation of "The Birds." And this go-ahead-and-laugh attitude, on the parts of both Fiennes and Zizek, is essential to the gonzo character of the film. It is the spoonful of sugar that helps us digest Zizek's weird medicine. After all, don't we all have a sense that, past a certain point, psychology theorists are just pulling our legs?

Already his first claim, that desires are always artificial, is totally fallacious.When a Jehovah Witness reject gets his own documentary on movies – or anything for that matter - it's time for anyone to get their own. Although far, far more intelligent than, say, Paris Hilton, Zizek's mouth spews just as much baloney as hers, just a different kind. He combines the worst from both his professional worlds: psychoanalysis and philosophy. Both fields are notorious for conveniently offering the expert b*lls***osopher plenty of leeway to create unprovable theories, to rant without a beginning or end, and to connect concepts almost randomly, in the process misusing the English language by creating a semantic jumble only a mother can love. Example: there are three main Marx brothers hence what a "great" idea to connect them with three levels of human consciousness, the id, the ego and the super-ego. I'm kind of surprised he didn't play a clip from "Snowhite" and make an analogy between the seven dwarfs and the seven levels of Gahannah (Moslem hell). It's like the premise of Schumacher's "The Number 23": play with numbers long enough, and you can come up with any kind of cockamamie theory you want, even linking Ancient Greeks with Princess Di's death.However, there is an entertainment element to TPGTC: watching a raving lunatic sweat like a hog while uttering delusional chants masked as intellectual analysis can be quite a lot of fun. Why watch "Cuckoo's Nest" or any other madhouse drama when you can have Zizek for more than 2 hours? It's like watching an amusing train wreck. Admittedly, he is almost funny on one or two occasions.I have always been mystified by people who desperately try to elevate movie-making into an exalted intellectual social science. Giving idiotic movies like "Birds" this much thought, hence this much credit, probably has its fat creator laughing in his grave. The raw truth is that the vast majority of movies have zero intellectual value, and the few ones that do have some intelligence don't require a shrink-turned-philosopher to draw one a map to understand them – unless one is a complete idiot. Zizek sees layers and layers of meaning in the most banal movies. Hallucinogenic drugs must be rather popular and cheap in Slovenia these days...When Zizek showed the bathtub hole in the "Psycho" shower scene, I thought he was going to say something about galactic black holes; how they drain the life out of stars just as the bathtub hole sucks in Janet Leigh's blood. Or perhaps he could have said how the hole represents Leigh's vagina, with the blood flowing into it instead of out, this representing some kind of "clever (Zizekian) irony". Speaking of which, the real irony is that if Hitchcock had really put that much thought into every scene his movies wouldn't have been the illogical, far-fetched crap that they often are. The point of these bathtub hole analogies was to illustrate just how easy it is to improvise about "hidden, deep meanings". And when you add Zizek's fanciful terminology from philosophy and psychology, layering these terms on top of these analogies like wedding cake decorations, you get a rambling jumble that can instantly impress the uneducated - i.e. the easily impressionable and the gullible.Zizek utters a number of unintentionally bits of poppycock, one of the most absurd ideas being when he associates Anthony Perkins's cleaning of the bloodied bathroom with "the satisfaction of work, of a job well done". Don't laugh... Neither Hitchcock nor the writer of "Psycho" could have ever even vaguely entertained this notion that Perkins might be enjoying a job well done - the cleaning of a blood-stained toilet - while they were conceiving/directing that scene. Talk about putting words into one's (dead) mouth, but in the context of misinterpreting what the director had to "say".I like Zizek's initial thoughts on Tarkovsky's terrific "Solaris", but then he has to ruin a rare good impression by dragging in "anti-feminism" and other nonsense into his theory.Zizek's attitude towards logic is that of a dog toward its plastic bone. "I just want to play with it all day!" Logic has its rules, and is not supposed to be raped - at least not publicly - by the likes of him. He seems to regard logic, proof, common-sense, and reason as enemies or mere throwaway toys; concepts to be either avoided, twisted to fit the end-goal, or simply annihilated. Zizek is the LSD-tripped hippie, and all his favorite movies are his own personal "2001"s.The fact that Zizek over-focuses on two of the most overrated directors - and ones whose films often LACK intelligence, if anything - such as Hitchcock and Lynch, only further diminishes his already low credibility. I was surprised De Palma didn't feature more prominently; that's another lame director who writes inept scripts. Zizek has a field day with Lynch's incomprehensible "Lost Highway". There are just as many interpretations of that movie as there are people who watched it.Zizek's comment that the viewer readily accepts von Trier's laughable, "ground-breaking" physical set-up in "Dogville" made me snicker. However, Zizek doesn't only make up stuff as he goes along, he also indulges heavily in the "bleedin' obvious". Like all "social scientists" (an oxymoron), he wraps his very trite "observations" into articulate (if full of spitting) and sometimes complex blankets of language. After all, sociology functions in precisely the same way: it makes us believe we are hearing something new when in fact it's what we already all know, but told in an eloquent way - which fools the more unobservant listener.I was half-expecting for men in white suits to suddenly appear out of nowhere and strap him up in a loonie-suit...Slavoj Zizek: soon as a stalker in a kid's park near you.For depressed, frustrated, confused film students only.