The Boss of It All Reviews

(MU) Even Von trier knows -his voice in off says it and I take it for granted- this is a lousy comedy. poor in gags, hard on forced feelings...

To be honest, the only movies I really loved from Lars von Trier were ‘Dogville’ and ‘Manderlay’ and I was really disappointed that he didn’t finish his trilogy with the planned ‘Wasington’ which was unfortunately cancelled. Instead, von Trier decided to make this movie which was something completely different and, I must admit it, I thought it was in fact pretty good.  I actually saw it with my wife, she had no clue what the hell was going on and she thought it was really terrible but I really liked the damned thing. Basically, it was a really weird and absurd comedy, some kind of come-back to the Dogme 95 for this director. Even though half of it didn’t make much sense, since it was shot Dogme-style, it was still quite realistic and you could assume that such situation could actually occur for real. However, the mix between realism and surrealism, while enjoyable and fairly entertaining, made it rather difficult to take the whole thing really seriously. On top of that, the director made it quite clear that it didn’t take this tale seriously at all (especially with his own narration) and even though it was quite refreshing after all the dark drama he made, as a result, I didn't take the whole thing really seriously either. To conclude, even though it is probably one of the most obscure movies delivered by the Danish master and a minor feature for him, I really enjoyed it and I think it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Lars von Trier’s work. 

The owner of an IT company wants to sell up and does not want to admit he's the real owner. For the past 10 years, he's invented an owner who lived in the US. So, he hires an actor to become the company's 'owner', "the boss of it all"; that actor will have to meet with the would-be buyers in the flesh.

Hmmmm, well maybe it's because we're so used to Hollywood-type movies that, when a film such as this one comes out, we're disappointed. Honestly, this lacked everything, including a good script and good punch lines. I was told this was hilarious. Well it certainly has some funny lines, but nothing striked me as memorable.
I do admit to this: The editing job was so bad, I just had to stop watching after 40 minutes, and at that point, I just didn't care about how the story ended.