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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 13, 2017 1:51:20 GMT
Fascinating! I liked both trailers, but the second one really gives an idea of what a remarkable feat of cinematography the movie must be.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 19, 2017 16:14:39 GMT
Dunkirk is really an exceptional movie, all the more so because very little CGI was used.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 21, 2017 7:40:32 GMT
I saw two rather extreme movies, both of which are forbidden to those under age 16 in France. Very few movies get this rating these days; there is usually just a "warning."
The Mexican movie La región salvaje (The Untamed) is a quite strange sex sci-fi horror drama. A creature from a meteorite lives in a seculuded cabin with two old people who apparently care for it and organise its social schedule. It is actually mostly a mass penis-headed tentacles which insert themselves into every orifice. Isabelle Adjani already had an affair with a cousin of this creature in Andrzej Żuławski's Possession way back in 1981. Anyway, if it likes you, you are given extreme pleasure and become addicted to the experience. Otherwise, it basically kills you although we never see the process. The old couple has a big pit in which to dump the bodies. The protagonist is a young woman with an unsatisfying life, expecially when she discovers that her husband is screwing her brother on the side. In any case, the movie is quite good but it has no moral compass.
The French trailer is a tiny bit more graphic.
I also saw the Australian film Hounds of Love (called Love Hunters in France) about a disturbing couple in Perth that kidnaps teenage girls for sex and then kills them about a week later. The husband buries the bodies out in the forest. Anyway, a new girl is abducted and chained in the usual bedroom. She realises that the wife is under the complete domination of her husband and there might be hope if she can drive a wedge between them... There really isn't anything nasty to see in this movie, so I suppose the French rating is based on how psychologically stressful it is.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 4, 2017 21:13:27 GMT
The other day I saw a movie that gave me everything that I crave from the cinema -- interesting people confronted with unusual situations. Crash Test Aglaé is about a young woman, perhaps suffering from Asperger's syndrome or maybe just very stubborn, who works as a specialist in a company that does crash tests. The company has decided to outsource the crash tests to a company in India, and as per French law, it is obliged to offer jobs to any employees who accept to move to the other location. Of course, nobody is ever expected to do this for one tenth of the salary, no medical coverage, a 48 hour work week instead of 35 hours... but Aglaé accepts the transfer. To make sure that she won't actually do this, the company refuses to pay for air fare to India. But she is determined to go and she has two quirky colleagues who support her -- the magnificent Yolande Moreau and the always interesting Julie Depardieu. They decide that they will drive to India. It is obvious that Yolande's pathetic little car will never make such a trip, but who cares? Let's go. They make a first diversion to Switzerland to harrass the owner of the company and then they are on to Germany for the night. Aglaé's father lives there, but actually he has run off elsewhere and they wind up in a very un-German dump of a house where her stepmother is living. But Yolande Moreau flashes on the woman and decides to stay with her to clean up the house and fix the garden. But she tells the others that they can take her car and continue... Onward to Poland and Russia, where Aglaé and Julie stop in a branch of the company. But Julie's sleazy former boyfriend and union rep are there to convince them not to continue. After a hot night of sex, Julie decides that her trip has ended and Aglaé is on her own... The car breaks down in Kazakhstan, and Aglaé begins to hitchhike. She is picked up by a gypsy family that performs at weddings but then she leaves them and steals a bicycle to continue on her way. There is an absolutely beautiful scene where she is riding along and at least 100 parachutists land all around her... They are Kazakh soldiers, and she is taken to their military camp. While she is being held there, she befriends one of the soldiers and he escapes with her on his motorcycle. But his colleagues catch him while she continues on her way. At the Indian border she nearly dies after all sorts of problems and wakes up in a hospital. The transgender nurse who is caring for her takes her in. Meanwhile, a movement has started in France to "Save Aglaé" and the human resources bitch shows up to try to convince her to return, because there has been such a media outcry that the company in France has been saved and she can get her job back, or an even better one if she wants. But she likes India and it is unlikely that she will ever return, and anyway she is pregnant from the Kazakh soldier and she loves playing cricket... I adored this movie! Today I saw another wonderful movie -- Avant la fin de l'été -- about 3 Iranian friends living in France. They are all students in their 30's but one of them has decided that he should go home. The others convince him that they should take a final holiday together. When they ask him what he will miss about France, he says "I'll miss the liquor aisle at Carrefour." They drive to the south of France (another road trip movie!) and have all sorts of minor adventures. They meet two young French women and do all sorts of things with them but do not have sex. Mostly they have philosophical discussions about how they see their lives. One of them has an additional dilemma about maybe having to return to Iran for his two-year military service or else his parents' house might be seized... In any case it was a really interesting glimpse at the lives of Iranians in France; filmed by an Iranian woman director...
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 5, 2017 2:35:19 GMT
That summation of Crash Test Aglaé, plus your stated enjoyment of it, are far more likely to make me see it than any number of plodding "official" reviews.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 5, 2017 10:49:51 GMT
Today I saw the disturbing Mexican movie Las Hijas de Abril. It's about a 17 year old girl with a boyfriend the same age. She lives with her half-sister who is in her mid-thirties. They have little of no contact with their Spanish mother who lives in Mexico (they live in Puerto Vallarta, which looks really lovely, by the way). But the girl is pregnant and when the baby is born, they are not able to cope, so the mother arrives to help. And she takes over, boy does she ever! It's little by little at first, but before long she is the only person making decisions about everything and nobody is able to stop her. I sat there thinking "how bad is it going to get?" Really good movie, though.
One of the biggest shocks, though, was at one point the house in Puerto Vallarta is put on sale at a Century 21 agency. The house seemed like a nice but ordinary house, no fancy decoration or anything and it looked very lived in. But it was just off the beach, so I guess that's why the price was 26,200,000 pesos! Ouch!
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Post by lagatta on Aug 6, 2017 14:34:01 GMT
I suppose I should go to see Django, though I hated the utterly invented character and story - it is showing at a cinema near my place.
I haven't seen any sign of Nos Patriotes...
I'd love to see those Italian historical films, but I don't think there is anything so interesting at our upcoming Settimana italiana. I'll check the film roster again.
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Post by whatagain on Aug 8, 2017 7:55:55 GMT
I may go to see luc Besson Valerian. I don't like besson in general and I don't like the valerian comics. I saw Dunkirk. Liked it a lot but found it totally misleading. Small accounted for a small portion of the evacuation albeit is a great feat and the mission of the spitfire which shoots down 5-6 planes in one mission is ridiculous. Also I have to check how many U-boats were active. But I liked the way it was filmed and the down to minimum soundtrack and dialogues.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 8, 2017 8:58:28 GMT
But it was Tom Hardy piloting the Spitfire. He can do anything!
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 10, 2017 16:46:30 GMT
Well, since I read the Stephen King volumes and thought they were pretty interesting (except for the one that was almost completely a wild west novel), I went to see The Dark Tower in spite of the terrible reviews. The acting was fine, but the dialogue was often pretty pathetic, and most of all, I completely hated the fact that there was practically nothing from the seven novels in the movie. The novels have all sorts of incredible settings, ghost cities, abandoned motorways on which to hike and a sentient self driving train that just goes on and on while talking to and threatening the passengers... (I suppose that I was also relieved in a way because it would have been horrible to compress the whole story into one movie that last just 95 minutes -- just the same as if The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter had been made into just one short movie.) It had its own agenda, which was basically just a shoot-em-up, a genre that I increasingly despise and avoid. It looks like it is set up to become a series, and that is a shame. I also saw a second disappointing movie but far more interesting it its own way. It's about a young Parisian man who tries to find his estranged father after the death of his mother, a pretty classic tale. But all he finds is an extravagant belly dancer teacher in the south of France at the last known address of his father. It soon turns out that the dancer is in fact his transgender father, who was a ballet dancer at the national theatre of Algiers. For a young man of Arab origin, even in modern times, this is not the easiest thing to accept. And so Lola Pater is still an interesting movie to see, all the more so because Lola is played by the sensational Fanny Ardant. Unfortunately, she is perhaps not the most appropriate actress to play a former Algerian man, but she does her best. The (French) director Nadir Moknèche had previously made two movies in Algeria -- Viva Laldjérie and Délice Paloma -- starring the magnificent Biyouna, an Algerian actress who could easily be mistaken for a transsexual, so I am pretty sure that he must have had her in mind for this, but she would have been much too old for the role. Fanny Ardant was an acceptable replacement. Just for the record, here is the trailer for Viva Laldjérie with a few glimpses of Biyouna (she is of course the one who looks like an old transvestite). It is an extremely edifying film as well, especially for those who picture Algeria as an Islamic hellhole.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 13, 2017 22:19:12 GMT
Anybody following this thread should know by now that I willingly go to see the strangest movies. I will mention once again that I am not wasting any money by doing so, because I have an unlimited movie pass, so I can go and see things that I would not have spent one penny to see if I actually had to pay.
I am not a fan of the Chinese director Johnnie To. In fact, one of his movies if one of the only 3 movies that I have walked out of in the last 30 years. He makes Tarentino style gangster movies with nonstop bloodshed and convoluted plots with about 5 different warring Chinese mafia gangs. But this movie was different. It is a musical. In Mandarin and Cantonese. About the stock market crash of 2008. In 3D.
It is already 2 years old and was only released in Asia until now (wonder why?), but in August in Paris all sorts of movies come out because it is the cinema desert season (not as bad as it used to be but still not great). And so I went to see Office, all two hours of if. An appealing young woman and an appealing young man start their jobs at the Huge Company on the same day, as assitants to top management. The woman is secretly the daughter of the owner, which leads to some mysteries that intrigue the young man. Obviously, it is love at first sight. Meanwhile, Top Management is up to all sorts of shenanigans due to falling sales, embezzlement, power struggles and ending love trysts. Every now and then there is a weird song and sometimes a dance for some reason. Oh, I guess that's because it's a musical. The lyrics were often astonishing and really opened my eyes about Chinese philosophy. For example, "the pig becomes more intelligent as soon as he hears the roar of the tiger." You would not believe how many references there are to pigs in a movie like this -- the favourite food of the Chinese and a constant source of inspiration.
Naturally, considering the subject of the movie, there was also constant obsession with enrichment as the principal goal in life. It was a lot like that Michael Douglas movie in this respect. ("Greed is good.") But since it all collapses at the end, we can suppose that it was meant to be ironic.
Clearly nobody in the movie was a real singer (sort of reminded me of Mamma Mia! in that respect), nor dancer of course, although there was a wonderful ballroom waltz near the end that could have easily been in a Fred Astaire movie. The set decoration was fantastic, quite reminiscent of Jacques Tati's Playtime but with a lot more money, even though the movie apparently only cost US$6,500,000 to make, which is nothing these days except perhaps in Asia.
This trailer should leave you just as confused as I was.
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Post by rikita on Aug 14, 2017 8:10:32 GMT
watched two movies recently - lion and le fils d'autre. i suppose they are both already mentioned in this thread. i liked both of them ... watching lion i wondered a bit how my own child would cope with such a situation - i don't think she'd even know how to survive ...
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 16, 2017 16:26:08 GMT
Today I went to see the Italian movie L'estate addosso (international title, even in France: Summertime). It is 90% in English, including the protagonist's narration (in the international but not in the Italian release version). The protagonist has just finished high school and doesn't know what to do. His best friend has just started at Stanford in Palo Alto and says he should come and visit. He doesn't have the money to do this, but suddenly he does, as an insurance settlement for an accident. So he's off to San Francisco. Unfortunately, he discovers more or less at the airport that his friend has also invited a girl that he despises to come and visit at the same time. Okay, you can see where this is going, right?
Wrong -- they are supposed to be lodged by friends of the Stanford guy in San Francisco for the first 3 days. The friends turn out to be a gay couple, and the girl is homophobic. She also says prayers before going to bed. This complicates matters -- which get more and more complicated at the film progresses.
Critics were rather lukewarm about this movie because they were disappointed after the director's previous two movies, but I liked it anyway. I thought it was a good portrayal of the positive side of the lifestyle of San Francisco, and there was also a very interesting and unexpected interlude in Havana.
And I also liked the fact that there was no "happily ever after" ending.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 20, 2017 23:53:47 GMT
Today I saw a movie that unleashed an incredible flood of memories in me. It was an advance screening of BPM (120 battements par minute) which won the Grand Prize at Cannes this year (that's 2nd prize after the Palme d'Or). It is about Act Up Paris in the early 1990's. I was never a member of Act Up and did not have any interest in it, but as I watched the movie I realised how closely connected to it that I had been. One of my travel friends, with whom I went to Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, etc., had gone to the fine arts school of Paris (Beaux Arts). She was friends with a fascinating quirky student whom I met, and we had something in common because he was from Metz, so we became friends, at first as a means to share car rental costs for going east from time to time. His father had recently died and he had come into a certain amount of inheritance money, which he squandered immediately. Why? Because he was HIV+ and decided that he had no future. He knew that he would be dead within 5 years maximum. After all, this was 1990 or thereabout, and he was taking about 30 pills a day. Frankly, I did not want to hear about his lifestyle, or about Buddhism, which was his other obsession, but after his money ran out, he was more or less homeless, and I housed him for the night more than is reasonable -- maybe 20 times? Luckily, he was very personable and had lots of friends, so he sponged off at least half a dozen of us. My travel friend took him in as much as I did, and then she would kick him out and he would go elsewhere. You wouldn't hear from him for a month and then one day, suddenly there he was again. Then there was the money. He would borrow small amounts usually, which were nearly never reimbursed, for ayurvedic therapy or for a Buddhist retreat -- he was a total snake charmer in terms of getting money out of us. Anyway, I spent quite a bit of time with him over a 3 year period and it was impossible not to know everything about his medical treatments, antiretroviral protocols, his protease inhibitors, his T4 cell count. Frankly, I was a total expert on AIDS therapy back then without even wanting to be. On top of that, he would have me translate the latest English language research for him, since he was very much involved in Act Up and other associations and even attended some of the world AIDS conferences in Brazil, South Africa, Canada... but not the United States since the U.S. refused entry to anyone with HIV+ status. (Do they still do that? I don't know.) I met some of his "colleagues" from Act Up and I even recall a breakfast that I hosted for at least 8 of them for some reason -- he had convinced me into it on I don't know what pretense. They were even on the verge of using my apartment as a backdrop for a commercial that they were going to film. My friend got sick... more than once. I would go and see him at the hospital and he would announce with a big smile "My T4 count is down to zero." He had become such a specialist on the subject of AIDS that he knew more about it than any of the doctors treating him, and he would inform them which medications they needed to prescribe and the dosage. Buddhism must have done him a lot of good, because I never saw him depressed a single time. In all this time -- I suppose because I was doing my best to avoid his group of friends -- I only knew one person who died of AIDS, even when they were dropping like flies. As for this friend, he is still alive after being HIV+ for more than 30 years. He decided that he had a future after all, returned to university and got a degree. He moved back east and is living in Mulhouse where he is a professor at the university. I don't even know what subject, since I haven't seen him in about 10 years. I just heard from him 2 years ago when he wanted me to know that he was about to have coronary bypass surgery "just in case." He also told me -- but this was 30 years ago -- that I am officially in his will. He is 15 years younger than I am, but he was so certain that he would die quickly that he thought I deserved something for the help that I gave him. What? I have no idea. So, to get back to the subject, this movie hit me like a tonne of bricks. Everything the people talk about, the HIV treatments, the indifference, the people dying all around, the cell counts -- I feel that I am hearing exactly the same things that he told me back then. I feel completely guilty for not having done more, but at least I helped one person.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 21, 2017 0:02:18 GMT
I also saw Atomic Blonde. Jeez. It takes place in 1989, and since that is the year of my last trip to Berlin, I can confirm that the period reconstitution is 100% authentic.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 21, 2017 21:16:49 GMT
Since I need to discuss BPM, I have scheduled a dinner with my travel friend tomorrow, at the same place where we had dinner with -- guess who? -- whatagain. She has not seen our mutual friend from olden times even longer than my last contact, although I informed her of his heart surgery when I found out about it. Today I saw the questionable Austrian movie Egon Schiele. He was an even more radical artist than his friend Gustav Klimt, went to prison briefly because of his attraction to teen girls and died at age 28. It should have been fascinating but somehow it was pretty dull. He died of the Spanish flu in 1918, just a few months after his pregnant wife. This story should have been fascinating. Can't find a trailer with English subtitles, dammit:
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Post by rikita on Aug 22, 2017 0:33:20 GMT
watched "inside out" today, so not a new movie, and an animation movie so not as serious as most of the ones discussed here, but i really liked it ... like, that being sad is an important part of life and that we shouldn't give our children the impression that they have to suppress their sadnes ...
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 23, 2017 18:45:05 GMT
Went to see The Hitman's Bodyguard this morning. Obviously a big piece of shit but with some enjoyable moments. One thing that I can't stand, though, are these gigantic shootout scenes in a city centre where at least 30 people are killed or else 30 vehicles destroyed... or both. There is no pleasure in that for me and obviously it detracts from any sort of credibility in the plot. Unfortunately, I think that a lot of the spectators want to see such things for just that reason -- it is a total fantasy, just like the election of a psychopath.
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Post by bjd on Aug 29, 2017 19:24:53 GMT
After literally months of not going to the movies, went to see Le Caire Confidentiel this evening, in Arabic. What a good movie! However, as advertising for Egypt -- it really made me think I don't want to go there (even though when I opened this page I read Kerouac's comments saying it had been filmed in Casablanca).
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 31, 2017 13:15:36 GMT
** Le Prix du Succès - an up-and-coming stand-up comedian (the always excellent Tahar Rahim) discovers that you have to leave certain people by the wayside if you want to succeed. Classic story, no surprises.
*** Ciel Rouge - a yong French soldier in Vietnam in 1946 falls in love with a prisoner and joins the Viet Minh to fight against the French. Very Terence Malicky cinematography which is almost more interested in the plants and insects than the human beings.
*** The Beguiled - obviously no suprises in this remake but a really excellent cast.
** Upstream Color - one of the most WTF movies that I have ever seen. It actually dates from 2012 but nobody dared to release it in most countries. There seems to be some sort of brain control going on through the use of maggot juice. There is also some nasty business with piglets.
** Inversion - the siblings of a young Iranian woman try to force her to move with their mother to a house one of them owns in the middle of nowhere in northern Iran. The reason for this is that the aging mother has a severe respiratory condition, and the pollution in Tehran is terrible. The old lady has an oxygen tank and even so, she is sent to hospital during a particularly bad episode. The younger daughter has been living with her mother and taking care of her all along, and the brother and sister have decided that it is her job and anyway she is not married and has no children, so she has no life worth anything. Well, the young woman rebels. You go, girl! (The French title of this movie is Un Vent de liberté - A Gust of Freedom.)
**** Gabriel e a montanha - I found this movie absolutely fantastic. It's directed by Fellipe Barbosa who had already made the excellent Casa Grande. This new movie Gabriel and the Mountain, is about a real life friend of his, Gabriel Buchmann, who took a year off from university to travel around the world. And that's what he did for 10 months. The movie tells the story of the last 70 days of his life. He goes from Kenya to Tanzania to Zambia to Malawi, where he dies on the slopes of Mount Mulanje in 2009. This is not a spoiler, because the first scene of the movie shows two local farmers discovering his body about 3 weeks after his death. And then we go back to follow his path and all of the people that he encountered. He is sort of a goofy guy at times (after all, somebody who takes a year off to travel around the globe is already considered goofy by most serious people); he tries so hard to fit in with the locals that they find him pretty weird, too. He spends a lot of time wrapped in Massai fabrics while all of the Massai villagers around him are wearing track suit bottoms with t-shirts. But he is a nice guy, likes to pick up local expressions and is genuinely interested in the lives of the people. What makes this movie somewhat incredible is that the director (with help from all of the emails to family and friends) actually tracked down most of the people he met, stayed with or hitchhiked with, and it is these people who play their own roles in the movie. On top of that, the actor wears Gabriel Buchmann's real clothing and uses the same camera that was found with his body. The camera's memory card was also a wealth of information and helped to recreate exactly many of the scenes. He girlfriend flies into Dar to meet him, and they travel together for a while, argue quite a bit but do not break up, and then he takes her to Lusaka for her flight home. He climbs Kilimanjaro, wants to give up near the top, but his guide forces him on and rightfully so. A sort of vagabond gives a tour of some of the things in the Old Town in Zanzibar. I read in an article that when the director found him by miracle and then told him what had happened to Gabriel, he cried. I learned that if you leave Zambia on a Brazilian passport and try to enter Malawi on a French passport (because no $75 visa fee), it won't work (he did not have a budget for bribes) because the exit stamp is in the wrong passport. Lots of nshima was eaten, and it still does not look very good. Anyway, I learned a zillion things about East Africa from this movie, but I will probably remain a hopeless mzungu.
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Post by bjd on Sept 1, 2017 13:57:57 GMT
Have you seen Crash Test Aglaé, Kerouac?
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 1, 2017 15:27:22 GMT
Yes, I loved it. I thought I had posted about it, but apparently not. Who could resist a movie with both Yolande Moreau and Julie Dépardieu? And India Hair has also proven herself to be an extemely interesting actress recently. I recommended Crash Test Aglaé to several friends, and they all loved it.
Meanwhile, I found Patti Cake$ pretty astounding, but probably not recommended for everybody. The Australian actress who plays Patti is phenomenal.
Thank god for French subtitles, though, because I had enormous difficulty with Jerseyspeak.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 2, 2017 15:38:46 GMT
Today's movie was Petit Paysan which means Little Peasant (or farmer if you prefer), but I see that the international title is Bloody Milk. It is about a very minor young dairy farmer with only 25 cows who tries to save his herd when one of them gets sick. He knows that if he declares the disease, the entire herd will be slaughtered. He resorts to more and more desperate measures and even though his sister is the local veterinarian who tries to help him even though she is totally against what he is doing... well, you can see where this is going. I thought it was excellent because it is a subject never treated in movies but is very much worthy of attention. Although it is a drama, it has a number of funny moments including with his invasive parents even though he is 35, just like life, as well as the marvelous India Hair (star of Crash Test Aglaé) playing the bakery girl who is in love with him but in whom he has no interest. trailer with Dutch subtitles, just because
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 5, 2017 15:29:13 GMT
**** Gabriel e a montanha - I found this movie absolutely fantastic. Wow! Thanks so much for that great précis. It really made me want to see the movie, which the trailer alone probably would not have done.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 5, 2017 15:36:35 GMT
Depending on how many movies come out tomorrow, I am even considering seeing it again. If you start googling Gabriel Buchmann, it is easy to be addicted to his story.
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 5, 2017 15:46:43 GMT
Thanks. I'm definitely passing on your review & the tip about googling to a friend of mine who is planning a non-cushy journey down the whole western side of Africa to Cape Town.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 5, 2017 16:01:22 GMT
Well then, another Icarus to check out is Dan Eldon, who only lasted to age 22. But of course both Gabriel Buchmann and Dan Eldon were in East Africa rather than the more bucolic West. The book made from his journals "The Journey is the Destination" is an absolute treasure.
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 5, 2017 16:48:53 GMT
Hard to say anything that doesn't sound completely trite after seeing that video. Thank you SO much for that information!
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 5, 2017 19:51:12 GMT
So, over the last couple days I saw What Happened to Monday? (French title "Seven Sisters" which makes more sense) ImdB implies that it was only released in the US on the internet. It has extremely severe flaws for those of us who would like a plot to be coherent, but actually it has a number of very effective action scenes, this said by somebody who is not a big fan of most action scenes.
I also saw Wind River, which is basically a Canadian movie although it takes place in Wyoming. It is a quite interesting foray into a Native American reservation, and I confess that for a long time I was wondering why it had an "age 12" rating in France since you have to go pretty far to get such a rating (for example, full frontal nudity does not qualify). Oh, but by the end, I understood perfectly well. Anyway, it was pretty good.
I should also admit to seeing Bonne Pomme, a sort of comedy which represents the 10th film in which Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu have starred together. I was not at all attracted to this movie, but I found that I liked it much more than I expected, particularly because it had a multitude of secondary characters, most of whom were very interesting. Basically, Gérard Depardieu decides to leave his unhappy marriage and start a new life elsewhere. Since he owns a car repair shop, he finds a similar place in another village that he can buy. But first he has to stay in the derelict hotel run by Catherine Deneuve across the street. She is a real number. Anyway, it is so strange to see them acting together beyond age 70 after seeing them together more than 40 years ago. If you don't speak French fluently, don't even try to figure out the dialogue in the trailer.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 7, 2017 20:36:54 GMT
Today I saw the Belgian movie Insyriated starring the magnificent Hiam Abbass. It's about a Syrian family holed up in an apartment while the battle continues outside. They are the last residents of a nice bourgeois apartment building. In the apartment is Hiam Abbass, whose husband is blocked on the other side of barricades, her children, father-in-law, a boyfriend of one of her daughters and a young couple with a baby from the apartment upstairs which has been destroyed by shelling. Normally movies in a closed setting drive me crazy, but this was absolutely gripping. the tension continues build as unknown people pound on the reinforced door, missles and shooting happen from time to time outside. They spend a lot of time in the secure room, which is the kitchen. Nasty things happen, but there is a bit of hope at the end, which was a relief.
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