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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 28, 2017 19:15:09 GMT
ditto
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Post by Deleted on Mar 28, 2017 20:40:44 GMT
And I am never going to veterinary school, even if there is no hazing.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 10, 2017 21:26:10 GMT
I thought the Italian superhero movie Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot was really amazing. And I'm not the only person who thinks so because it won 7 Donatello awards (Italian Academy Awards) including best actor, best actress, best supporting actor and best supporting actress.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 12, 2017 16:36:45 GMT
Today I saw the very interesting Israeli film Bar Bahar (In Between) by Palestinian director Maysaloun Hamoud. Her film focuses on 3 Israeli Palestinian women sharing an apartment in Tel Aviv. One is a communist atheist who knows that she cannot ever marry her nice Jewish boyfriend because of his family. One comes from a Christian family which keeps presenting possible suitors to her because they do not know that she is homosexual. As the movie begins, the third woman leaves because she is getting married, but she is replaced by her cousin, who wears a veil and lives the lifestyle that goes with it.
It is very funny and also quite tragic, and I learned quite a bit about the lives of Israeli Palestianian women.
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 12, 2017 20:01:26 GMT
I'll take your word about Jeeg Robot, as the trailer isn't terribly illumating, possibly on purpose.
I'd love to see Bar Bahar
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Post by Deleted on Apr 14, 2017 20:12:35 GMT
I saw the evil British film Lady Macbeth based on the toxic Russian novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov. It has been transposed to England in 1865 where the young bride of a brutal impotent man rebels, and the events become Hitchcockian. And sex sex sex.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 14, 2017 20:39:52 GMT
Yesterday I saw the bizarre Ivorian movie Bienvenue au Gondwana made by a director from Niger with French funds. It is most definitely an African movie because the tempo and the acting is not at all like a 'Western' movie. The dialogue and expressions are exaggerated, everything is a caricature, and there are even two venerable Africans dressed in white who act as a Greek chorus on the side to comment various events, including the scenes that take place in France. West African cinema has always intrigued me precisely because it has its own set of codes and doesn't give a damn about how the rest of the world makes its movies. Strangely enough, this already struck me back when I was just 11 years old spending a year with my grandparents in France and there was a movie shown on television called "Le Gentleman de Cocody" about bourgeois life in a rich suburb of Abidjan. It is also very odd to imagine that French television would show such a movie back then when it would absolutely never happen now.
However, the country in question is called Gondwana, because the movie is in fact very serious about the rampant corruption in various African countries and therefore could never take the risk of naming a real country. And the conclusion of the movie is quite realistic, because the problem is absolutely not solved.
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Post by breeze on Apr 16, 2017 20:28:33 GMT
kerouac, I'm hoping you'll be available to review this one when it comes out: "Normandie nue." This is currently being filmed in Le Mele sur Sarthe by director Philippe Le Guay. Francois Cluzet stars as the mayor of a village whose farmers are suffering an economic crisis. The premise is that an American (we're always available to be a bad influence) photographer whose specialty is getting groups to pose nude is on his way to the airport when a traffic tie-up on the N12 brings him to Le Mele or whatever it will be called, meets the mayor, and proposes a nude photoshoot which will somehow bring money to the region. The film supposedly features 300 nude farmers of the Orne. Somehow I doubt that. Currently the filming is boosting the economy of Le Mele's hotel, restaurants, boucherie, and boulangerie. www.le-perche.fr/54448/normandie-nue-le-realisateur-philippe-le-guay-pose-sa-camera-dans-l-orne-pour-deux-mois-de-tournage/www.le-perche.fr/54691/cluzet-tourne-normandie-nue/
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Post by Deleted on Apr 26, 2017 17:19:09 GMT
Today I saw the absolutely amazing Algerian movie I Still Hide to Smoke about women in a hammam in Algiers in 1995, during the peak of the Islamist troubles. I have seen a number of hammam movies over the years, since it is the perfect location to let people loose and allow them to talk about things that they would never talk about outside in the open, but this went far beyond all of the other movies that I have seen. I feel as though I learned more about the problems, hopes and desires of Algerian women than in all of the other movies combined. There is an unwanted pregnancy that they try to pass off as a "hammam pregnancy" using the myth that on the men's days, they leave sperm lying around that can get you pregnant if the place is not properly cleaned before the women's day. The women talk about their sex lives or whether they are still "intact" or not. A woman who lives in France and who arrogantly only speaks French comes to buy a wife for her son on the condition that she can cook, sew, clean and do all of the other womanly duties. The only woman in stock is 29 years old, so this is cause for suspicion that something is wrong with her. The absolutely magnificent and ubiquitous Palestinian Israeli actress Hiam Abbass runs the hammam. I will never figure out how she manages to be in so many Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian, French, Canadian and American movies (next upcoming one is Blade Runner 2049), but I am thrilled to see her every time. And there is also the amazing Biyouna, looking more and more like an aging tranvestite, but that it part of her charm. The women talk about annoying conjugal duties, whether or not masturbation is a horrible sin as per the Koran (it is pointed out by an expert that it is not the Koran but the Bible that condemns masturbation), one woman starts bleeding and the little girl screams when she sees it, so they have to explain that it is normal. A baby is born. Bombs are going off outside due to the civil unrest, and bearded fanatics come to break down the door so that they can kill the bad pregnant woman and her baby ("I will drink the baby's blood!"). I was as limp as a dishrag by the end of the movie.
They have apparently whipped together a pre-trailer for people who do not speak Arabic or French, but the French subtitled trailer gives a better vision of the film.
There is quite a bit of graphic nudity, so I sincerely doubt that the film will ever be shown overtly in Muslim countries, but there are so many other ways of seeing movies these days that I'm sure it will get around. The nudity is not at all prurient since most of the women have tired and flabby bodies, and some of the scenes shock in a different way, such as when a woman unwraps herself to show the horrible scars on her breasts and belly inflicted as an honour punishment. Except for the exteriors in Algiers, the movie was filmed in a hammam in Thessaloniki, Greece.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 29, 2017 22:27:42 GMT
Guardians of the Galaxy, vol. 2 is watchable, but god, what a waste of money and talent! These movies should be obliged to pay a huge tax from their porfits to support art cinema.
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Post by Deleted on May 1, 2017 5:33:10 GMT
I went to see Django about the Belgian gypsy jazz musician Django Reinhardt. It is not really a biopic since it only covers one year of his life -- 1943 -- when the Nazi occupants both loved and hated him and were busy exterminating and deporting gypsies...
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Post by bixaorellana on May 3, 2017 3:19:07 GMT
Well? What did you think?
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Post by Deleted on May 4, 2017 16:42:07 GMT
Well? What did you think? As a biopic it was pretty much trash if one believes that a biopic should try to stay close to the truth. The music was there and the acting was excellent since both Reda Kateb and Cécile de France are nearly always wonderful, but -- for example -- the Cécile de France character was totally invented. While secondary, she still plays a key role in the movie but it is complete fiction. Since the movie concerns a period when Django Reinhardt was still performing in Paris in spite of the Nazi occupation, that is obviously interesting since most people who performed at that time were denounced as total collaborators -- in the performance scenes, there are a multitude of uniformed German soldiers and officers in attendance, which probably really happened and which shows a total contradiction (one of many) in the Nazi desire to exterminate certain categories of the population while admiring some of their skills. One of the main points of the movie is the fact that the Germans liked Django so much that they wanted him to go on tour in Germany to stimulate to morale of the population and the troops. But they wanted to impose certain rules such as "no nigger music, no blues, no fast tempo," etc. to drain out everything that made Django's music great. Fast tempos make people lose control of themselves and become savages, and those other things, well, they are just horribly decadent and must be abolished... So the second half of the movie concerns fleeing Paris and holing up in Thonon on Lake Geneva while waiting for the moment to escape with his wife and mother into Switzerland. Plenty of great music in the movie (or else why bother?) and an extremely moving final scene in Paris 2 years later when Django performed "Requiem for the Gypsy Brothers" one time only. The sheet music was lost in a fire shortly afterwards and only a tiny scrap remains, which was recreated for the needs of the movie. It is played over a photo montage of hundreds of gypsy men, women and children who were killed by the Nazis.
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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2017 19:47:53 GMT
Get Out is as simply effective as everybody says it is. It definitely puts a new spin on American horror movies where "the black guy is the first person to die." However, for me A Quiet Passion was even more gruelling since I am allergic to poetry and the concept of a movie about Emily Dickenson is definitely testing my limits. I nevertheless found it entertaining for the horrifying portrayal of life in the 19th century, with dialogue every bit as unnerving as the movies of Whit Stillman ( Metropolitan, Damsels in Distress). Cynthia Nixon is pretty incredible in the role.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 6, 2017 21:29:12 GMT
Thanks for the feedback on Django!
That was the first trailer I watched for Get Out, since the word "horror" in the description had always stopped me before. Coincidentally, a friend of mine just saw the movie and, although she didn't really enjoy it because of the genre, she greatly approved of it and thought it quite well made.
I keep hearing how great Cynthia Nixon is in A Quiet Passion. Does Keith Carradine actually act, or just stand around all jut-jawed being Keith Carradine like he usually does? Also, the trailer says "wildly funny" -- true?
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Post by Deleted on May 7, 2017 4:56:49 GMT
Well, the reason I mentioned Wilt Stillman is because he uses extremely stilted dialogue to comedic effect, which is what this movie does, too.
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Post by Deleted on May 10, 2017 13:12:05 GMT
It took two years for the Palestinian film The Idol to reach French screens, but it finally made it. It's the story of Palestinian pop singer Mohammed Assaf who overcame great odds to become the winner of the Arab Idol show in 2012, so it is not exactly suspenseful, especially since the event received quite a bit of international media coverage at the time. But it is just as heartwarming as Slumdog Millionaire in a grimmer setting. The first half of the movie is about his childhood, his love of music, his sister's battle with kidney disease, and Gaza is mostly intact at that time (since that part was filmed in Jordan). As a young adult, he lives in Gaza half in ruins from all of the bombings, driving a taxi. But he decides that he absolutely has to go to the final auditions of Arab Idol in Cairo even though the border is closed. Obviously, he manages to get there but he arrives too late to get a ticket for the auditions. He just started singing in the crowd and another Palestinian contestant gave him his ticket... And then it was off to glitzy Beirut where the show is recorded. Anyway, I thought it was a nice movie.
Here is the real Mohammed Assaf, now a good will ambassador for the United Nations Relief Agency for Palestinian refugees.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 27, 2017 3:07:35 GMT
I went to see Rodin, yet another movie about the sculptor, done this time because it is the 100th anniversary of his death. He was an unlovable man, and this is an unlovable movie. I found it difficult to feel involved at the beginning, but as it progressed, the power of the creative process won me over.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 28, 2017 19:27:31 GMT
Today I saw the evil and somewhat perverted new François Ozon film, L'Amant Double (The Double Lover). Many of his films fall into this category while last year's lovely Frantz was the exception that proves the rule.
No award although it was in competition at the Cannes festival, but the acting was superb and I was not able to guess the weird ending before it happened.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 31, 2017 11:37:55 GMT
I found the Greek movie Suntan quite interesting. It's about a mild-mannnered lonely doctor who takes a job as the village physician on a little island with a population of 800. However, in the summer it is a party island for the youth of Europe, and he rather loses control. Never having taken a summer holiday on a Greek island, I found it very informative and also in completely agreement with all of those lurid articles that are written about such places.
In a totally different genre, I liked the Georgian movie My Happy Family about a middle aged woman who gets fed up with her life. She lives in a rather shabby but bourgeois apartment in Tbilisi with her husband, her parents, her adult children and the spouse of one of them. So on her birthday she just packs up her stuff and moves out to a little place of her own. Nothing at all earth shattering happens in the movie. She enjoys spending some time alone after so many years, she sees old friends, she goes to parties. Her family thinks she had made an awful mistake and wants her to come back as quickly as possible. She even has a brother who has paid some of the neighbourhood men at her new place to make sure she doesn't bring a man home. But she is a strong and serene woman, and it is nice just to watch her live and see everyday life in Tbilisi. As you may suspect, the title of the movie is ironic.
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Post by whatagain on May 31, 2017 13:44:21 GMT
I went to see pirates of the caribbeans opus 5 Salazar revenge. I loved it. Crazy fun spectacular etc. I am a fan of the series.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 31, 2017 14:43:37 GMT
Oh, I saw that, too. Didn't bother mentioning it. I think I missed the previous one, but this one wasn't bad. For some reason the title of Salazar's Revenge in the U.S. appears to be Dead Men Tell No Tales. I have no idea why.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 31, 2017 20:26:48 GMT
Isn't "dead men tell no tales" some kind of iconic pirate saying?
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 1, 2017 12:48:36 GMT
Jeez, I didn't have enough warning before seeing The Autopsy of Jane Doe.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 5, 2017 11:32:34 GMT
I saw the London terrorist plot thriller Unlocked (retitled Conspiracy in France), which British reviewers considered "outlandish" when it came out there in May. I thought it wasn't all that bad, and I really liked Noomi Rapace taking on the Jason Bourne type role for a change. On the down side, I knew who the evil traitor was the moment the person appeared on screen so I was not gobsmacked when it was revealed at the end. The very first scene of the movie shows London Bridge, so that was quite eerie in view of extremely recent events. According to IMDb it isn't even due for release in North America until November, but I suppose that could change...
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 21, 2017 17:21:57 GMT
Obviously, I've seen plenty of movies this month. Here are some of them.
Ce qui nous lie by Cédric Klapisch. (The English language title will be "Back to Burgundy.") He notably made The Spanish Apartment and its two sequels. This time he chose a rural subject -- siblings trying to save their father's wine production after their father's death. It took me a while to warm up to the subject, but I was fully satisfied by the end. The fact that it was filmed over all four seasons was a definite plus.
Nos Patriotes is the true story of an African soldier who escaped captivity while the Nazis were trying to kill all non-white prisoners. He had the opportunity to be transferred to a safe zone, but he preferred to stay and fight in the French resistance. And he was killed for it (spoiler).
The Mummy. Nuff sed. Trash.
Free Fire. Shoot 'em up mayhem. Funny and bloody.
Return to Montauk. I am an unconditional fan of movies by Volker Schlöndorff. Until this one. Boring middle aged stuff
Ali, the Goat and Ibrahim. Delightful Egyptian movie about a man in love with his goat (whom he believes is the reincarnation of his dead financée) who goes on a trip with a sound engineer being driven mad by hereditary tinnitis. The guy's grandfather made himself deaf to survive, and his mother committed suicide. The trip is to solve problems/get a cure by throwing stones into the "three waters of Egypt" -- the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Nile. So it is a road movie, and they meet numerous interesting people along the way.
Creepy - this is the latest movie by Kiyoshi Kurosawa who actually made two movies this year -- one of them in French with Tahar Rahim. A former police detective moves to a new home with his wife and the neighbours are definitely creepy. Oh, are they ever! This movie is very good but it creeped me out.
Then there was K.O. by the scriptwriter of The Returned. It's about the head of a television channel who gets shot by an angry man who was fired. But when he wakes up in the hospital, he is told that he had bypass surgery. And the world is different -- his wife isn't his wife anymore, he doesn't live in the same place, and he is the weatherman at the station instead of being in charge. Is he going crazy or is it a conspiracy? Almost as creepy as Creepy.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 24, 2017 18:57:36 GMT
I saw the somewhat distressing film Ava about a 13 year old girl on holiday with her rather too young 'loose' mother at a seaside location. The principal problem of the film is that the girl (Ava) has a genetic disease that is going to make her blind, much more rapidly than expected. So she wants to get as much out of life as possible while she can still see. She meets a gypsy boy, a bit of a criminal, but they get along well very quickly while the mother has fun with her African lover. And then things go downhill. One thing that I found particularly upsetting was that the scenes got darker and darker (in lighting) as the movie progressed, just as the girl was losing her sight.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 2, 2017 19:38:10 GMT
This weekend I saw two movies belonging to two different genres that have become important in France. I've already seen about half a dozen movies of the first category -- teens or young adults who are tricked by their parents into going to the "home" country on vacation and who suddenly have their passport confiscated by the patriarch at the other end to make sure they agree to the arranged marriage or some other traditional scam. In Wallay, a young teen boy goes to see his family in Burkina Faso. His father sent him there because he was going bad in the 'burbs and needed to be corrected. A lot of what happens is quite sweet, compared to the movies I have seen about North African girls ending up in Morocco or Algeria. Well, I guess that the main reason is that it is boy and therefore a superior being (?). He is very well received by his family in Shithole, Burkina. His aunt is ready to cater to his every whim, his cousins adore him, and all of the local kids want to hang out because he is an exotic Parisian. Nevertheless, he is a prisoner and on top of that it is discovered that he is (eek!) not circumcised and this is absolutely necessary if he is ever to become a man. Worst of all, his uncle knows that he has been stealing some of the money that his father has been sending from France, because the amount received does not correspond to amount announced. The kid had been in charge of sending the money orders to Burkina, but he has some really nice sneakers, an iPhone and a few other things...
There are some amazingly lovely incidents in the movie, though. His cousin takes him on a trek to see his grandmother for the first time. She absolutely adores him even though they don't speak a word of a common language. She calls him "my little husband" and also "the little white boy" because he is not at all as dark as the others there (In the movie, we learn that his mother is dead but we have no idea if she was white or just not very dark.). The bond between them is so amazingly obvious, even when the cousin is not around to serve as interpreter.
This was really quite a wonderful movie.
The other genre movie I saw was about Islamic extremism. Yes, it has become a genre in France. I have seen quite a few of them in recent years about young adults, both male and female, leaving their families to go to Syria or similar places. A recent good one was Les Cowboys about a father and brother who go to extremes to find out why the daughter/sister suddenly disappeared. This movie was the first completely different one -- it was a comedy, Cherchez la Femme. The elder brother of a "deceased parents" family returns from Yemen totally and radically Islamic. He takes complete control of his totally secular sister and brother and makes life hell. The girl is prevented from leaving the apartment at any time (mobile phone confiscated, etc.). But her boyfriend concocts a plan to see her disguised as a woman wearing a niqab. I agree, it's not all that believable, but sometimes you have to invoke "suspension of disbelief." On top of that, the niqab lady is so devout that the brother falls in love with her... Meanwhile, the boyfriend is from a Communist Iranian refugee family, and his parents are a totally different problem. Yes, a comedy.
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Post by rikita on Jul 7, 2017 17:18:20 GMT
watched "okja" on netflix the other day ... was a bit strange and some parts were a bit too silly, but still thought it wasn't bad ...
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 12, 2017 19:13:23 GMT
Today I went to see Le Caire Confidentiel (in reference to the movie L.A. Confidential), which seems like a far more appropriate title than The Nile Hilton Incident, which is the English language title. It is a movie by Swedish director Tarik Saleh, who was obliged to film almost all of it in Casablanca because the Egyptian authorities greatly objected to the use of the word "freedom" in the scenario. The movie takes place just as Hosni Moubarak was on the verge of being overthrown.
A completely corrupt police officer (always on the take, collecting cash from the weak) finds himself involved in the murder of a singer in the Nile Hilton (perhaps the most famous hotel in Cairo, where I have found myself in the past enduring dinners with belly dancers). For some reason, he begins to investigate the case seriously even though all of his superiors tell him to drop it. The woman had her throat cut, but they are calling it a suicide.
It is a totally amazing movie and won the grand prize at Sundance.
As is often the case, the French trailer is quite different.
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