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Post by bjd on Sept 12, 2017 18:53:12 GMT
I went to see Crash Test Aglaé. Since Kerouac didn't put up the trailer, here it is.
Not quite what I expected but I enjoyed it.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 12, 2017 19:25:02 GMT
Today I saw the Singaporean movie Pop Aye. It takes place entirely in Thailand where an architect learns that the shopping mall in Bangkok that he designed 30 years ago (probably the highlight of his career) has been closed and will be torn down to give way to a new project. After visiting the dismal sight/site, he suddenly spies a circus elephant nearby and recognises it. It is Pop Aye, the elephant with whom he grew up! He wasn't certain at first, but when he whistles the "Popeye the sailor man" theme music, the elephant recognises the music and comes to him immediately. He buys it (the elephant is nearing the end of its career anyway), and the movie is a road trip across Thailand to return the elephant to his native village where they both grew up. It was really a lovely movie, all the more so because it is the first movie by a young female director, a rarity in southeast Asia.
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Post by whatagain on Sept 13, 2017 14:55:44 GMT
Since I am an intellectual I went to see ´ hitman and bodyguard ´. The pitch : a guy specialised in protecting people has to keep an assassin alive. They keep arguing even when bullets fly and the assassin gives the bodyguard tips to reconcile I'm with his ex girlfriend. I laughed a lot. Some scenes could have been shot for mission : impossible. More humor less attempt to any credibility and high tech (if one can talk about credibility in these movies).
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 13, 2017 16:22:31 GMT
Oh, don't worry about that. Since I have both of the "unlimited" movie cards of France which cover about 95% of the cinemas, I enjoyed that movie, too. (Original title "The Hitman's Bodyguard" transformed to "Hitman and Bodyguard" for some strange reason in France, as though that made a real difference).
Additional proof that I see any crap -- today I went to see the latest Tom Cruise movie "American Made" (titled "Barry Seal: American Traffic" in France). Actually, I thought that it was quite good, and I completely understand that the original title would have made no sense to international audiences. I am not at all a Tom Cruise fan, but I do not deny that some of his movies are interesting. For some reason, this movie has been released all over the world, but will not come out in the United States until the end of the month. Go figure.
Before that, I went to see a much more recommendable movie, Good Time starring Robert Pattinson. It's about two brothers trying to get ahead in life (not honestly). Robert Pattinson's brother is mentally retarded, but he tries to use him as a partner in spite of the handicap, and he does absolutely everything possible to get him out of trouble when he is captured by the authorities after a pathetic bank robbery. Things go downhill from there. Robert Pattinson is a really excellent actor.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 16, 2017 21:11:25 GMT
I saw a strange little British film today, The Party (not to be confused with the Peter Sellers movie), a comedy if you consider things by people like Harold Pinter to be comedies. It is a very short 71 minutes long, but it packs quite a punch. In any case, it has an amazing cast (you'll see the list in the trailer). It's about a get together to celebrate the nomination of the hostess as a government minister. But are the people who have been invited really friends? One wonders...
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 4, 2017 12:08:06 GMT
Well, I saw Blade Runner 2049 today and have mixed feelings about it. Visually, it is even more stunning than the first one was, but its slow place started to grate on me, particularly during the first hour (it is almost 3 hours long). Ryan Gosling being a new generation android, he was clearly chosen for his lack of facial expressions, but naturally this suited the plot. I mostly liked the movie by the time I made it to the end, but the ending was a bit too enigmatic for me, especially for a movie that has already spent too much time explaining everything. Why stop now?
It was interesting that part of the movie takes place in abandoned Las Vegas. I wondered if the decline of the city began on October 1st, 2017.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 4, 2017 21:00:51 GMT
That's a great review! I have intense interest in Blade Runner 2049 since Blade Runner is one of my all-time favorite movies. It is admirable that you managed to tell me what I want to know about the new one without giving anything crucial away. I like Ryan Gosling, but all too true about his facial near-paralysis.
Indeed interesting about situating part of it in abandoned Las Vegas. The depiction of a futuristic Los Angeles is a huge part of what makes the original film so compelling, so I'm looking forward to what sorts of similar metropolitan-based treats are in store in the new movie.
I just read that the original movie is supposedly set in November of 2019 -- hadn't realized that. 2019!
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Post by whatagain on Oct 7, 2017 20:19:13 GMT
I saw half of kingsman nr 2. Strangely in this brand n w compl x most manager vues have an ´ entracte ´. So you can go to the loo (50 cents) or to the bar. Or have popcorn. I just exited it altogether. My daughter went the day after and liked it. Guess I am too old for this shot ;-)
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 8, 2017 17:03:31 GMT
I totally loved Tehran Taboo, a German movie that uses rotoscoping animation to tell the story. It tells several stories that all fit together -- the prostitute who has to take her young deaf son with her to work, the ayatollah addicted to porn, the young DJ trying to help a friend get her hymen repaired just before the marriage... It is full of alcohol and drugs and most definitely shows a Tehran quite different from what the media often depict.
Okay, and I confess to also liking the new Stephen Frears movie Victoria and Abdul, a highly unlikely so-called true story of Queen Victoria's friendship with an Indian servant. I'm pretty sure that at least 70% of it is bullshit, but Judi Dench was magnificent.
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Post by patricklondon on Oct 8, 2017 17:33:28 GMT
Victoria and Abdul, a highly unlikely so-called true story of Queen Victoria's friendship with an Indian servant. I'm pretty sure that at least 70% of it is bullshit, but Judi Dench was magnificent. The core of the story is quite genuine. There was a TV documentary about it here recently. He was brought in to cook curry for her because she was fascinated by the exoticism of India, where she never actually travelled to, then somehow caught her attention while serving at table, was asked to teach her Urdu, and she started to become personally close to him and his family, and eventually trusted him with her correspondence from India. Needless to say, both class and race considerations really got up the noses of the rest of the family and the court, which only made her dig her heels in even more, just as had happened with John Brown all those years before. It eventually turned out he had somewhat embroidered his family history and exaggerated his previous social status in India, and moreover had managed to offend the Viceroy and the establishment in India, so was eased out and went back. I haven't seen the film, so I don't know whether they lay all too modern an interpretation on the whole story, but it is true that, at least where he was concerned, she stood up for him against the stuffier courtiers - but whether that was more a matter of her own amour propre and wanting to get her own way rather than a principled stand against prejudice - well, that's another matter.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 11, 2017 10:42:34 GMT
I found the film Loving Vincent completely haunting. It is a Polish production and will probably be in English in most countries, but I saw the excellent French version as probably most people in France would be outraged to see Van Gogh and all of the people of Auvers-sur-Oise speaking English. I certainly would have been. Anyway, all animated films are dubbed no matter what language they are in. What makes this movie special, besides the fact that it took 8 years to make and the work of 150 artists in Poland and Greece, is that it is totally done in oil paintings. It uses 120 of Van Gogh's paintings, and the animation starts from there. Nedd I say more?
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Post by lugg on Oct 22, 2017 10:08:55 GMT
I saw the second screening of Mountain Between Us at Toronto Film Festival a few weeks ago. The editor gave a talk before it started and explained that there were no green screen effects ( except the plane crash) which is pretty impressive to know as you watch the film. Anyway I really enjoyed it, no wandering of my attention and yes it was a bit ( well a lot) cheesy but the Canadian Rocky landscapes are stunning.
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Post by whatagain on Oct 22, 2017 17:51:51 GMT
M'y daughter liked le petit Spirou whilst both I and my wife nearly fell asleep. Francois D'Amiens and pierre Richard are great as are sold other characters. But globally you don't laugh enough.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 22, 2017 18:29:26 GMT
I saw the Swedish movie The Square today, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes festival this year. 2h20 of very grim comedy showing all of the Swedish elite in their full horror while the streets of Stockholm are filled with the invisible homeless. And the total nightmare of being the director of a modern art museum and having to defend modern art even when you don't understand it yourself.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 22, 2017 18:59:38 GMT
M'y daughter liked le petit Spirou whilst both I and my wife nearly fell asleep. Francois D'Amiens and pierre Richard are great as are sold other characters. But globally you don't laugh enough. It's nice when both parents go to the movies with their child(ren). Too often they seem to hold a lottery to see which parent is condemned to see a kid's movie in which they have no interest.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 25, 2017 12:31:18 GMT
Today I saw Au revoir là haut (See You Up There) which impressed my considerably. It is based on a novel that won the top literary prize in France (Prix Goncourt) a few years back. In any case the Argentinian actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart is having an amazing year in France after also starring in BPM, which just opened in the United States (I talked about it in reply #1605) and which is representing France for the best foreign film Oscar at the next ceremony (without Harvey Weinstein).
This movie takes place just as the Great War is ending, and on just about the last day before the armistice, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart gets his face blown off. He spends the entire movie without a single line of dialogue and has to act with just his eyes and forehead, because there is a mask covering the horror below. He shares a flat with a comrade from the trenches and the two of them set up a scam to sell war monuments to all of the villages of France without ever delivering the monument. The disfigured person keeps creating the most incredible masks to wear in public, and some of them are breathtaking although he also has a very plain mask that he can change from smile to frown as needed. The set decoration and costumes are simply amazing, as are the digital effects. There are a number of famous Paris locations used (Rond Point des Champs Elysées, Place Blanche, the Bon Marché) and they all appear as they did in 1920. There are giant pits in Paris where metro extension works are in progress -- all those things that make you wonder "how on earth did they do that?" And yet the budget of the movie was "only" 20 million euros. It should get major international release, but I don't know when.
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Post by breeze on Oct 25, 2017 14:14:47 GMT
kerouac, when you describe a movie that appeals to me, right away I click over to Netflix to order the movie but of course it's never there yet, and it may never be released in the US. About 1/3 of the movies on my queue haven't come to Netflix yet, at least not the old-fashioned DVD-by-mail part that we subscribe to. And then there are movies I wasn't even able to add to the queue since Netflix doesn't recognize the name.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 2, 2017 14:31:45 GMT
I saw the excellent new film by Michaël Roskom Le Fidèle today. Just when you thought he had already done everything horrible that it was possible to do to Matthias Schoenaerts in Bullhead, he took it all up a notch, although Adèle Exarchapoulos did not get off easy either. The most upsetting thing to me is that the English language title is currently programmed to be Racer and the Jailbird which makes it sound like it is something with Vin Diesel and Reese Witherspoon.
Well, Adèle is a race car pilot and Matthias is a bank robber. Bad things happen in French and Flemish. And then even badder things happen. To make things a bit more appealing, as usual, neither is shy about taking off their clothes.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 4, 2017 19:57:42 GMT
Today I saw the totally charming but somewhat weird Hungarian movie Teströl és lélekröl (On Body and Soul). It takes place in a slaughterhouse (with some rather brutal scenes of that profession) but is about the handicapped manager with only one usable arm and a young Asperger employee. After an incident at the slaughterhouse, a psychological investigator is called in to try to unmask the perpetrator by asking many highly personal questions. It turns out that the manager and the Asperger emplyee have been having the same dreams. He is a stag in a snowy forest and she is a doe. They sniff each other, rub their noses, wander away. The investigator thinks it is a fraud or a prank. But the two people get together, start having lunch at the canteen and discuss their dreams, which match every single time.
Naturally things go on from there, both poetical forest scenes, absurd scenes of daily life, and a certain progression towards tragedy. Hungary has made some incredibly interesting movies in recent years.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 6, 2017 12:32:08 GMT
For people who found The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos a bit upsetting, his new movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer is even more upsetting, weirder, perverse... Colin Farrell is excellent again but Nicole Kidman's role was not as challenging. Nevertheless she is going to greater extremes than she used to. The real revelation for me was Barry Keoghan as the psycho kid. Ewwww!
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 7, 2017 12:17:05 GMT
I saw the new Polanski movie Based on a True Story, not great. I had not read the book, so there were a few interesting twists, but I could see that this was headed in the direction of Misery, and Eva Green is no Kathy Bates. Emmanuelle Seigner was okay, but I generally find her better in movies not directed by her husband. Polanski's movies are rarely meant to be super realistic, but Eva Green was far too wicked right from the start and she really hammed it up. Oh well...
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 9, 2017 11:14:43 GMT
I saw Lynne Ramsay's new movie, titled A Beautiful Day in France but supposedly called You Were Never Really Here when it is released in the United States next year. Joaquin Phoenix won the best actor award at Cannes for it, but I think I would have just given him the award for best psycho killer with a hammer. If anything, it is even more upsetting than Ramsay's previous movie We Need to Talk about Kevin. She is one sick lady.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 11, 2017 11:32:33 GMT
I was very impressed by the Swedish film Borg McEnroe, which builds up to the 1980 Wimbledon final. Shia LaBeouf was a completely inspired choice to play John McEnroe, but Sverrir Gudnason as Björn Borg was excellent as well. They clearly both worked their arses off to portray credible tennis players, but the real drama is in the anxiety of the locker room and all of the frustration of training. Two adolescents play young Björn, one of them being his real life son. If one is to believe the scenario (and Björn Borg has said that is is accurate), he was just as big of a hothead as McEnroe until he learned to control himself.
I rarely like sports movies, but this was an exception.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 28, 2017 20:13:51 GMT
Today I saw Marvin ("Reinventing Marvin") which all of the critics despised, but I liked it very much. It's about a boy from a terrible family who breaks free and succeeds in Paris. It's the sort of thing which has been done dozens of time, but it strikes a chord with some of us.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 30, 2017 14:24:19 GMT
I saw the abysmal Madame with Harvey Keitel and Toni Collette giving some of the worst performances of their respective careers. Clearly they and the rest of the cast just signed on to get a free vacation in Paris, since I am sorry to say that it is a French movie made for international audiences who want to fantasize about living among the rich in Paris. Not a single thing in the movie rings true, although Rossy de Palma tries her best to rescue a few scraps of quality. I was also embarrassed for French actor Stanislas Merhar who normally only appears in cutting edge art films -- he must have been starving from lack of work to sign up for this disaster. My brain tried its best to save me by putting me to sleep for about 20 minutes, but I saw more of the movie than anyone should be forced to bear.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 6, 2017 19:44:23 GMT
I have seen a number of movies recently, but I will just mention three of them at the moment. Two of them were total disappointments.
The Snowman -- I really like Michael Fassbender as an actor, but sorry, I cannot abide with the idea of a Norwegian movie taking place in Norway being filmed in English. On top of that, the movie was totally sluggish, and worst of all -- perhaps because I have seen too many crime thrillers -- I knew who the killer was the moment the person appeared on screen for the first time.
Wonderstruck was supposed to be a very moving and tender story. Bullshit. It was a boring goody-goody waste of time.
God's Own Country, on the other hand, was totally astounding. The protagonist is a brutish lout. In the opening scene he is puking his guts out because he spends his evenings binge drinking and having rough gay sex in pub toilets. His invalid father finds fault with everything he does on the family farm and his grandmother isn't much better ("Don't expect me to clean up your sick again!"). The father takes on a Romanian farmhand to help for a week. He's an excellent worker, never complains and has much greater affinity with the animals than the protagonist, who hates him. And who loves him. There is an obvious Brokeback Mountain element to the story, but it is much more realistic than that other movie. What is touching is to see the brutish lout slowly change into a human being, but being a human being he does something inadmissible that ruins everything. It was all quite heartbreaking, and my god, who would ever want to live in the mud of Yorkshire?
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Post by Deleted on Dec 6, 2017 21:35:53 GMT
I really wish we could find some form of continuity in this section of the board between What Is The Last Movie You Saw? and The Current Cinema. It gets to be very confusing and they seem to blur into one another in such a way that browsing through each one and/or choosing as to which one to post in is flummoxing.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 6, 2017 21:49:40 GMT
I always think of The Current Cinema as a place to discuss movies in general and perhaps more specifically upcoming features that have not been seen yet but which are greatly anticipated. But everybody is free to make a personal interpretation of it.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 6, 2017 22:24:02 GMT
I always think of The Current Cinema as a place to discuss movies in general and perhaps more specifically upcoming features that have not been seen yet but which are greatly anticipated. But everybody is free to make a personal interpretation of it. And, there lies the confusion and lack of continuity. Even seasoned posters such as myself are not quite sure which thread I should post in. To say "everybody is free to make a personal interpretation of it" is the equivalent of how to make a gumbo. Throw everything into the pot (i.e. "kitchen sink gumbo") seafood, poultry, sausage etc. and/or leave it up to "everybody is free to make a personal interpretation of it".
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 6, 2017 22:40:39 GMT
Absolutely. That is why there is great tolerance here for going "off topic."
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