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Waste of Money.

Thanks for the memories!

Disapointment

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Dialogues are amazingly constructed. A critic to a self-destructive society. A call for action towards preservation and against politics.

My first ever written imdb review, just because I cannot believe how highly people are rating this:This movie is a mess. There are moments when you think, "ah, this is interesting", but it slowly melts until you find, disappointingly, only garbage left in the end. The plot is filled with preposterous events that jar with the serious tone. One scene is reminiscent of The Big Lebowski. Not in a good way. There is obviously a connection trying to be made with Bergman's movies (like Winterlight). But the cause of anguish is silly, the decisions made stupid in the extreme and so the characters unbelievable.

There are some film that comes to my mind when i watch this film: Winter Light, The Devil Probably, The Diary of a Country Priest, Sacrifice, and Nostalghia. Paul Schrader has said that this film have the same root and feel with the directors whose films i just mentioned. but then, i also find a connection to his previous film Taxi Driver, both Toller and Travis Bickle had a different perception towards the world they were living.Toller was a troubled man to say the least, he was haunted by his past, present, and also his future. his son was killed and then his marriage crumbled, he has a cancer now, and he is worried about the future of the planet. he was also experiencing doubt about everything that he was preaching, and he wrote his doubt on a diary as a form of prayer hoping to find answer someday. it's hard not to hear the voice of god, the voice of certainty when you need it the most, to float on a space and time not knowing what to do, Toller was also highly depressed, he was either had a little common sense or too much sense to live in the world or the REAL world as Reverend Joel Jeffers called it. Toller has no place in the world where he could find peace, it's his curse, he sees no way out.Paul Schrader's strength has always been in his character, it's always complex and merciless, but as much as he cared about the foreground, he is also cared about the background, the setting, First Reformed is the name of a "tourist" church owned by a company or an organization named Abundant Life, it's more like a company rather than a belief society, one of the referend was laughing at a funny stuff that Martin Luther was doing, etc. this setting helped to create a character so dark and secluded that it could only existed in Paul's universe.

It started with an atmospheric mood that was somehow reminiscent of Fargo (the movie, not the series) - there was that bleak sense of small town simplicity that was almost funny without really being funny. It seemed almost pathetic but the sense of 'plain-ness' was somehow gripping, somehow drew me in and made it watchable. As another reviewer put it, there was a shift to the surreal later on that just seemed out of place. It was like we went from a more tragic Fargo feel to a Life Of Pi feel rather unexpectedly. This broke the mood that had been building irreparably (for me). The ending scene reminded me of an indie film called "Last Night" which was a movie about how ppl chose to spend their last day at the end of the world. I was somewhat dissatisfied with the ending in this case though. Overall, I would still recommend this movie for the better parts, the thought provoking subject matter, though a true Christian wouldn't find anything useful here.