Brilliant and touching

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

I watched this movie last night, and I am still feeling spaced-out :D Actually, I really liked the first half, which is all serene and normal ( I had not read many reviews...was watching it without much expectations ). Nothing much happens, but its still good. I thought it was all building up to something very interesting/moving/disturbing . I found the couple kind of interesting and sweet at first. But 70 minutes into it, I began to wonder, where exactly the film was going. The one thing that disappointed and confused me was, how the bloody climax, makes all the interesting little details of the relationship ( the ice-cream conversation, the late-night fight, oral sex in pool, David stalking his girlfriend etc ) seem irrelevant. The couple itself doesn't seem normal, but I think the climax would have been the same, irrespective of how normal/dysfunctional the couple was. An incident as horrific as that, can make anyone go mad. 90% of the 114 minutes, are focused on their relationship, but the "horror element" which arrived in the last 5-10 minutes of the film, just comes out of elsewhere. Sure the rape is horrible and humiliating, but it seemed to be there just for shock value. Maybe, the director wanted to show how one random horrific incident, can absolutely ruin everything...but if thats the case then the duration of the film doesn't really make sense. I think the makers have done a great job in building up the suspense....but the wait is too long and when the bad stuff happens it is just weird. For me, the climax was neither shocking nor thought-provoking (Everyone knows, man is capable of both savagery as well as saintliness) , but just very very saddening. So this movie has left me in a sad and confused state of mind. Also, I don't know, why are movies like these, are marketed as something they are not. If you promise the viewers "a deliverance meets psycho", and give them this movie, there are bound to be negative reviews. Even, the original trailer tries to make the film look so eventful and thrilling......I can understand why horror fans are badly disappointed.Its NOT a bad movie, but I would not call it a horror film either... I agree that the desert looks quite menacing, so OK that qualifies as a "thriller" element. But there is a disjointedness to this movie, which is why I would not recommend it.But if you like to watch slow, ambiguous movies and then dissect them for symbols, hidden meanings etc..then go ahead. You just might like it.

This is one of those films where "nothing happens", where the frame stands as a window into the world of tedium. It's contrasted against this humming nothingness, mirrored in the film in the empty stretches of desert, that the small gestures can reverberate outwards to the eternal, to give us a portrait of life as we might know it by our own existence, elsewhere, in some other time.These fleeting human moments, painful or exhilarating in their small profundity, largely make the film for me. A man stealing a glance at a passing girl in a diner, glance which may or may not be casual or mean something else, and which makes the woman sulk in jealous consternation. The woman trying to penetrate the hard, unyielding, demeanor of the man, asking him as he drives what is he thinking, the man saying nothing. The irritable tantrum of the man when their car won't go any further in a dirt road, that reveals the male child inside, petulant and impotent at the sight of failure.Elsewhere Dumont fails to cut as incisively. The contrast he gives us in the first pool scene, "do you love me?", "do you like my penis?", is simpleminded at best.The film works despite all that, first as a tangible reminder of the meaninglessnes of craving, here in the form of carnal animal sex that needs to be consumated, almost exorcised, the moment it builds. The nothingness of Dumont's desert world is not the shunyata of the Buddhists though, a realization of the world in true form. Rather it's a limbo where souls in disconnect aimlessly drag their feet yearning for a sense of direction or purpose when the only sense possible is a sense of still time. This shines for me in the latenight scene where David finds Katia sitting by herself at the side of the macadam, they seem like they're washed ashore in some other plain of existence. A pall of simmering, unspeakable, violence hangs over this like the shifting rents of dust in a dirt road, so that at least a breaking point can be surmised to be waiting at the other end.Then it works for me as a painful vehicle that brings us at the brink of the existential void. I'm not very enamored of the act of random cruelty that makes this possible, the randomness makes sense yet at the same time it's so easy as to be schematic, but the monster that emerges on the other end is a shocking sight to me because I have the memory of the flawed human being that used to be.The dysfunction of the protagonists then, foremostly human, also foreshadows doom. That malaise we see but small traces of in their behavior must exist out there too, in the rest of the world that is largely kept from our eyes.Dumont doesn't dare go any further than this, that is if we accept there is somewhere to go, but as an agnostic lament it goes far enough.

Just finished this.....movie? I'm not sure what else to call it. It's 2 hours of watching 2 people, fight, drive, eat, f**k, swim, fight, f**k, drive, eat, pee, f**k, and ON and ON and ON!!!!!!! Eventually, they are raped and killed. All this happens in the mystical beauty of the American Southwestern Desert. So, was it good? I have no idea. Was it art? Sure, why not. One thing I will say is that every time I wanted to shut this film off, I didn't, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because the lead actress was smoking hot and couldn't seem to keep her clothes on for more than 15 minutes. Maybe it was because I really wanted to see the main guy if this film get hit by a bus. Why does every guy in this movie scream when they have an orgasm like somebody just dumped boiling water on their genitals? Ugh?!?! Would I watch it again? Probably not. 29 Palms will undoubtedly haunt my mind for a few days. If this is what the director was going for, then bravo. I've also received the same effect after seeing a 300 pound women in a bikini. That incident didn't take 2 hours of my life away. For what its worth, the two lead actors did a damn good job acting like a dysfunctional couple on a road trip. I've been there, only nobody raped or killed me because of it.

This is truly a great film. With long shots that will bore those with short attention spans, and mesmerize those with the patience to watch and stay with the film. Too often in Hollywood, directors use flash and trendy music to divert the watcher from the sometimes horrid scripts and acting going on in movies nowadays.Not in this film. You get the sense that you are really watching something that is happening, rather than feeling like you are at the MTV movie awards. The ending is excellent, made more-so by the extravagant-less build up that more reflects something the viewer can relate to; which makes the ending, like I said, excellent and truly horrific.This is a true horror film, that gets you without cheap thrills and predictably timed jolts and spooky faces.