|
Post by kerouac2 on Aug 19, 2018 10:09:55 GMT
I found the Icelandic film Under the Tree too mean-spirited to be funny. I think they are inbreeding too much on that little island.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Aug 22, 2018 20:44:37 GMT
Sometimes movies are surprising in unexpected ways. Yesterday I saw the German movie In den Gängen (In the Aisles) which is about a new employee in a wholesale warehouse store. He stocks shelves, he learns how to use the forklift, he is very interested in the woman who works in the candy section even though she is married. Sometimes he works at night, sometimes during the day. He encounters other employees at the coffee machine... That is all. There is no conflict, no big plot, nothing sensational and yet it is a fascinating movie which even dares to last more than two hours. As it ended, I thought to myself that I could have easily sat through a second screening. Bizarre.
Today, I want to see the Chinese movie The Meg. Yes, of course it is a piece of crap, but it is mildly amusing. Spoiler: even though the shark is as big as a blue whale, Jason Statham manages to kill it with his little knife and his bare hands after it has eaten entire boats and plenty of people. Totally illogical "plot" as usual, especially at the beach resort. Even the tiny children are floating around in their little colourful rings in water deep enough for the meg to come swimming up under them. I guess Chinese parents don't worry about little kids drowning or anything.
The stupid little dog survives, in case anybody is worried.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Aug 22, 2018 22:08:56 GMT
In the Aisles does look good. It's refreshing to see "just plain people" in a movie.
Did not/will not watch shark trailer.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Aug 22, 2018 22:23:18 GMT
The French trailer is absolutely and totally different and uses the real music from the movie -- Strauss waltzes instead of pop music. In fact, the French title is "A Waltz in the Aisles."
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Aug 23, 2018 0:42:53 GMT
Wow -- really different! That is so strange about changing the music.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Aug 23, 2018 10:42:07 GMT
BlacKkKlansman is an amazing movie and richly deserved the Grand Prix that it won at Cannes. The last three minutes are a bit difficult to watch, because it is documentary footage from Charlottesville, 2017, including Donald Trump's remarks on the event.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Aug 23, 2018 18:02:28 GMT
Oh -- great to get a real person review of this so quickly! I'm very curious about the movie, especially since it's based on a true story with all the principals still living. Glad to hear that recent high-profile examples of racism were cited in the movie, so no fake happy ending.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Aug 23, 2018 18:17:37 GMT
So much of the movie has lines like "Make America great again" and other such stuff, which makes it totally chilling.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Aug 23, 2018 18:19:06 GMT
Good! Let's remind people that they really do know about racism and where & how it exists and grows.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Aug 28, 2018 22:11:26 GMT
Well, this has been sex week for me so far. Yesterday I went to a premiere of the movie Sauvage, which created quite a buzz at the Cannes film festival. It is about male bargain basement prostitutes in Strasbourg, the dirty ragged kind that hang out on the woods. It leaves very little to the imagination (forbidden under age 16 in France), but the performance of the main actor was absolutely astounding. He will do anything, even things that his colleagues refuse to do, such as kissing his customers. They are repulsed by such sentimentality. But he is looking for love, since he can't get it from the hustler on whom he has a crush -- the other guy isn't gay and just does stuff for money. It is really a heartbreaking movie because the guy is only 22 years old and it is pretty sure that he'll be dead before he is 25.
One of the advantages of seeing this at a premiere was having the cast there. It was extremely reassuring to see them in (apparent) good health after the horrors depected in the movie.
And today I went to another premiere. Bonhomme ("My Guy" - English title) is about a young man who suffers brain damage in an accident. When he comes out of the coma, he is about 5 years old in his brain but 15 years old in his genitals. Any of you who have at one time been a 15 year old boy will understand what a serious problem this is. His girlfriend tries to take care of him, but she has to go to her job too, so there are all sorts of problems. He has an almost constant erection that needs to be dealt with, either by brutal immediate sex or masturbation. (There is one delightful scene where he has been sent to spend the day with a nanny. She looks after small children, and he is just as happy to play with building blocks and use colouring books as the kids, but later in the day the nanny and he are watching television while she diligently jerks him off and cleans up the mess with tissues.) Since his urges cannot be controlled without using drugs that turn him into a zombie, the girlfriend finally starts whoring him out to lonely women even though she basically hates the idea -- it is just the least bad way to deal with it. A very interesting movie, but definitely not as good as the other one. It is interesting to note that this one is only forbidden to viewer under the age of 12 in spite of erect prosthetic penises and flaccid real ones. The other movie probably got its 16 rating for drugs, which is a more serious subject for the French.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Sept 3, 2018 21:20:15 GMT
Lee Chang-Dong's previous movie Poetry was so magnificent that I had high hopes for his new film Burning. I am always a bit wary of movies that last two and a half hours, but I took the plunge anyway. The plot is a sort of love triangle. Jong-su is a sort of drifter who wants to be a writer. He runs into Hae-mi, a girl he spurned in high school because he thought she was ugly, but she has improved considerably. They hook up and sleep together, but then she goes on a trip to Africa. She asks him to pick her up when she returns but she is with another Korean that she met in Kenya, Ben. He is an affluent guy from Gangnam with a Porsche and a glitzy apartment in total Gangnam style.
The three of them hang out quite a lot, but Jong-su is afraid that he is losing Hae-Mi to the other guy. He spent 3 weeks looking after her cat and masturbating in her apartment while she was away. And then Hae-Mi disappears...
Not a clue as to where she is, but Jong-su begins stalking Ben as he looks for clues.
Actually, not much happens in this movie, but I was spellbound just by the observation of modern Korean life from a millennial viewpoint -- the places they live, the places they hang out and how they spend their days. The length of the movie did not bother me at all.
Interestingly enough, it is loosely based on a Korean short story which itself was based on a story by William Faulkner.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Sept 5, 2018 20:01:53 GMT
I saw the amazing Zambian film I Am Not a Witch. A little orphan girl is sitting by the road when a woman carrying a load of water from the well stumbles and falls. She brands the girl a witch, and she is taken off to the police station. The little girl is taken to a witch camp (these apparently really exist in Zambia) and is attached to a ribbon like everybody else in the camp. The ribbons are on huge wooden spools and determine how far one is allowed to walk. Such a young witch is a real novelty, though, so the girl is taken to pick criminals from a line-up of suspects. She doesn't know what to do but gets a lot of advice over a mobile phone from the other witches. "Pick the blackest one." "If somebody is looking at the ground, he is the guilty one." "If someone is staring at the sky, he is guilty." So she just picks someone at random, and the man is arrested. She even appears on television with the Minister of Tourism & Traditional Beliefs, who is actually more interested in selling eggs laid by a hen that he says she has bewitched. However, most of the time the witches work in the fields or break rocks. The spools travel with them to the worksites. Sometimes they are displayed to tourist groups. "The ribbons are to keep them from flying away." This movie had me dumbfounded. I see that I Am Not a Witch has finally been released in the United States. That is good.
|
|
|
Post by rikita on Sept 6, 2018 7:09:53 GMT
about the meg, i must admit i have a certain fascination with trailers and clips of that type of movie, though i don't usually watch the movies themselves (for one thing, i tend to get scared easily, and i'd like to still be able to swim in the ocean) ... one thing i wonder is, with a predator that size, would it even go after individual humans with the determination that comes across in the trailer? wouldn't they be too small to be in its normal range of interesting prey?
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Sept 14, 2018 14:19:33 GMT
I find movies about borderline personalities so scary because you see the person trying function normally and failing, and you know that at any moment, something really horrible is going to happen. Taxi Driver, Silver Linings Playbook, Basic Instinct... Well, now there's another one with the amazing Thunder Road. A fragile policeman is breaking down -- his mother just died, he is getting a divorce, clearly he was never the most popular kid in school. The movies opens with an incredible 10 minute sequence done in just one take. It is his mother's funeral and he is doing the eulogy. He wants to play a cassette of Springsteen's Thunder Road on his Hello Kitty tape player, but it won't work. He keeps talking, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing. You can feel all of the churchgoers squirming in discomfort while trying to be supportive. What makes this scene even more impressive is that the director is also the star of the movie. Anyway, it won the Grand Prize at the Deauville American film festival. France is the only country in which it has been released for real screens. Anybody else will apparently have to watch it on their little devices. As to how anybody can call this movie a comedy, I am mystified. The two different trailers are interesting. The first one is for the French theatrical release. It's the distributor who always puts these things together to try to get people to actually spend their money. The second trailer is by the director himself, trying to sell it on iTunes -- much less flashy and with nothing really shocking in it...
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Sept 14, 2018 14:54:40 GMT
From your review and especially from the second trailer, I agree that this couldn't possibly be a comedy, except in the sense that it might provoke nervous laughter as you watch the poor guy lose control.
Really, though I haven't seen the movie, based on your description I can't see that either trailer really serves the subject properly. I don't understand why trailers need to show the culmination of an emotional arc or storyline, rather than some intriguing bits of the lead-up to those culminations. Your review makes me want to see the movie, the trailers do not.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Sept 14, 2018 15:38:35 GMT
Apparently, the movie is an expansion of a short film that the director had made. The short film was just about the funeral service. Nevertheless, I can totally understand how one would want to expand on such a character... and cringe.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Sept 17, 2018 4:54:56 GMT
Searching is a low budget thriller of the new "internet" genre, but I thought it had one of the tighest, best written scenarios that I have seen in a long time. The father searches for his missing daughter using exclusively her social media, e-mail, telephone, etc. He naturally discovers numerous disturbing and mysterious things. There are several red herrings of course, but this time I absolutely could not guess the outcome of it all. I was also very happy to see that it did not star the usual two ethnic groups while at the sime time not making any mention of it at any time -- they were just Americans.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Sept 19, 2018 14:15:25 GMT
The Sisters Brothers is an absolutely fascinating western and trust me, I do not put those two words together very often -- in fact this might be the first time. Obviously the fact that it was directed by Jacques Audiard makes all the difference. The Sisters brothers are two killers (John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix) trying to track down two very erudite gold hunters (Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed). But the killers don't like this job, even though they kill plenty of people. The scenery is stunning, even though it isn't really Oregon -- the movie was filmed in Spain and Romania.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Sept 19, 2018 15:25:19 GMT
Searching looks as though it was amped-up tension from beginning to end. If, with as many movies as you see, you couldn't guess how it would turn out, it must be very well done indeed. The Sisters Brothers comes from a well-regarded book (Booker finalist) which I have not read. Judging by at least one review of the book in comparison with the trailer & your review of the movie, it looks as though the book has been well brought to life. I believe we are seeing the steady resurgence of the western as both a literary and a cinematic genre.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Sept 21, 2018 11:08:35 GMT
As everybody knows, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone was sensational and launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence. Her new movie Leave No Trace is almost as good. I don't know if Thomasin McKenzie's career will take off the same way, but Ben Foster is definitely overdue for major recognition. He has been amazing in at least half a dozen recent movies and yet nobody seems to pay attention. The movie is about a PTSD father living in the woods with his daughter. They both very much love the life, even if it isn't always easy, but they are finally apprehended because they do not have the right to live in a public forest. The daughter begins to get a glimpse of "civilised" life when social workers take care of them and she is rather attracted to it, but each day is an increasingly unbearable ordeal for her father. Just the fact that he is working at a Christmas tree farm, slaughtering thousands of trees every week, was enough to start giving me PTSD as well.
Once again in this movie we get a glimpse of those fascinating fringe people (like in Into the Wild and other movies) who create their little communities which have contact with the outside world, but as little as possible.
It is a really interesting movie.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 4, 2018 4:52:45 GMT
Against my better judgement, I went to see A Star is Born. Bradley Cooper is excellent. Lady Gaga is passable. The movie is mediocre.
|
|
|
Post by rikita on Oct 4, 2018 9:52:53 GMT
took agnes and my niece to see captain sharky yesterday ... agnes knows some of the books, so it was a bit confusing that the story was slightly different, but the kids still enjoyed it.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 12, 2018 5:11:57 GMT
Girl is an absolutely amazing Belgian movie about the trials and tribulations of trying to become a ballerina... when you were born the wrong gender. The strength of the movie is that it concentrates on general teenage angst and not really the complications of sexual reassignment. The father is 100% supportive (there is no mother), the ballet school too. None of the other girls object to sharing a dressing room or the showers with this new girl Lara. She is discreet and shy and spends a lot of time in isolation strapping down her inconvenient genitals. While the other girls drink plenty of water during their breaks, Lara never does, for obvious reasons -- it is just too difficult to pull off the tape and put it on again. The actor is beyond amazing. Victor Polster was selected for the role at age 15. He and 500 other girls and boys auditioned for the role, mostly for the chance to work with the famous Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Filming at age 16, it is pretty hard to imagine the difficulty of baring oneself completely at that age, and the hair extensions were so complicated that he preferred to live as a girl all the time during the shooting. Now he is back in ballet school... It is impossible not to wonder what he looks like normally, so here is a photo. fr.web.img4.acsta.net/r_1280_720/newsv7/18/10/09/17/48/59299540.jpg
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Oct 12, 2018 5:50:15 GMT
That is astounding!
|
|
|
Post by whatagain on Oct 12, 2018 16:51:18 GMT
Jeez. Last time I went to see a man vie was on June.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 12, 2018 17:25:49 GMT
I think it is being released in Belgium in two weeks. And if I am not mistaken, it is the movie that will be representing Belgium for best foreign language film at the Oscars next time.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 12, 2018 18:10:07 GMT
I don't often see two totally outstanding films back to back, but today I saw the animated film Dilili in Paris. It opens on a village scene where little Dilili is chopping vegetables to be added to the primitive stew pot, surrounded by other villagers. But it is shown very quickly that she is just part of the display at the Paris Colonial Exhibition demonstrating life in New Caledonia. A young tricycle messenger (triporteur) is attracted to her, and the exhibition has just ended, so they team up. She is half Kanak and half French and learned to speak French from the militant feminist and anarchist Louise Michel who was deported to New Caledonia. She is disturbed that the people in New Caledonia thought she was too pale and people in France consider her to be too dark.
Paris is in the throes of a mysterious criminal group kidnapping young girls, so Dilili and Orel (the triporteur) begin to investigate while he shows her around Paris. They meet absolutely everybody -- Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, Marie Curie, Degas, Monet, Eiffel, Santos-Dumont -- for various reasons. Orel is bitten by a rabid dog who dies and they also meet Pasteur who treats him. At each step you learn a little bit about the importance of these people, so it is extremely educational for children. Little girls continue to disappear. They meet Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Rodin, Camille Claudel... And then Dilili is kidnapped, too.
The evil group that is doing this is turning women into objects of utility and call them "all fours" because they are never allowed to stand and just serve as seats, tables and other objects for the men to use, draped in burkas. They already have a lot of women serving as submissive objects, but they know that if they can force the little girls into this use early enough, it will be even better.
Obviously, things turn out all right in the end and even more obviously, there is a very important message for little girls in this movie -- that they should never submit, never give in, always resist. I hope that the movie makes little girls (and boys) ask their parents millions of questions.
Besides having such a strong message, the movie is also incredibly beautiful, mixing animation with photographs of 19th century Paris with a spectacular musical score by Gabriel Yared.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 13, 2018 11:35:15 GMT
** The Little Stranger - Domhnall Gleeson and Charlotte Rampling are among the people dealing with a very creepy house, perhaps haunted. Nothing much horrible seems to happen, but the foreboding is just as effective as if there were gore or monsters.
*** Blindspotting - Life in the hood in Oakland. I was glad to have subtitles or I would have missed some of the dialogue.
*** Nos Batailles (Our Struggles) - Romain Duris is abandoned by his wife, who leaves him the kids to take care of. He was devoting too much time as union rep in an Amazon type warehouse, so things just keep getting more and more complicated.
*** Frères Ennemis (Close Enemises) - Matthias Schoenaerts and Reda Kateb are childhood friends, except that one has become a narcotics detective and the other has become a drug smuggler. Oops.
** Upgrade - Australian movie masquerading as American about a future society where computers do everything for us, perhaps too much. A paralyzed man regains to use of his limbs due to an implanted chip which turns out to be more than he bargained for.
** L'Amour Flou - A divorced couple decide to move into two separate apartments connected only by their children's bedroom so that they don't have to worry about custody. What makes this movie more interesting than it sounds is that it is played by the real couple who actually did this, with their real parents and their real children, all using their real names. Yet it is a zany slightly alternative universe because I just cannot imagine that some of the weird things that happen in the movie actually took place in their real lives.
* Domingo - Another movie about the unhappy Brazilian upper class, on the day of Lula's election, which does not fill them with joy.
** Venom - I found this much better than the reviews would have you believe. There is definitely some more mileage in this character now that he has finally made friends with his alien parasite.
** Donbass - Ukrainian movie about how horrible the separatists are. It is so unrelenting that it could easily start a war. Oh, that's right -- the war has already started.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Oct 13, 2018 14:35:29 GMT
That's nine movies! How long did it take you to see all of them & which ones would you recommend?
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Oct 13, 2018 15:20:41 GMT
Well, that's why I put stars in front of the titles. Those are the movies from the last two weeks, along with the other ones about which I made longer reports.
|
|