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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 13, 2018 18:07:04 GMT
Yes, I saw the stars, but what is the maximum # of stars you award?
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 13, 2018 18:38:52 GMT
It is not impossible that I will put 4 stars from time to time, but then again, normally I would write a longer review for a movie that deserves 4 stars rather than just adding it to a list.
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Post by lagatta on Oct 13, 2018 18:50:11 GMT
I'd love to see Dilili; wonder when it will come here?
Quite a cast of characters; while artistic licence is fine, I do hope that Orel is shown carrying loads far heavier than a little girl. Triporteurs did have the perk of discovering all their city, but they carried heavy loads - and in Paris, sometimes uphill - and it could be gruelling work. And many were just teenage boys, like Orel.
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Post by rikita on Oct 14, 2018 9:12:43 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. looks interesting. at what age would you think children could watch it? (the word "kanak" always makes me cringe a bit, as in germany it is a slur, mostly used against turks. i always thought it is based on a turkish word, only now found out it isn't ...)
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 14, 2018 11:45:32 GMT
Actually, the movie is a little bit too politically correct, because nobody used the word Kanak 100 years ago. It is only in the last 40 years or so with the independence movement in New Caledonia that the indigenous peoples (Kanaks) have been trying to get an independent Kanaky. You will actually probably see a short item about this on the news in most places before long, because a new referendum for independence is being held in New Caledonia on November 4th.
I think that even small children could appreciate this movie because it is very "pretty" and promotes politeness and the acceptance of all sorts of people. Naturally, children who have started "real" school will be more interested if they recognise names like Pasteur, Monet, Curie, Rodin, Eiffel, etc. There is even a phone call to Ferdinand von Zeppelin in Berlin in the movie, because urgent advice and fabric are required by Santos-Dumont and friends to quickly build a dirigible to save the missing girls. Clearly the movie will have a major career in schools because there is already a website (in French) for teachers to get material and ideas for presenting the movie to school groups.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 14, 2018 12:03:29 GMT
Ramen Shop is quite a wonderful Singaporean movie if you don't mind drooling at the cinema. It is about a young Japanese man, whose Singaporean mother died when he was just a child and whose father who had a ramen shop has just died. He decides to go to Singapore to find his uncle so that he can finally learn to make one of this mother's special dishes and also to visit a food blogger with whom he has been corresponding. She has also been sending him special spices for the dishes. The movie moves constantly between now and olden times (the 1980's) when his parents were still in Singapore, giving clues to a painful family secret. It's not too hard to figure out the root of the problem because anybody who has ever spoken with older Singaporeans knows that the one thing they despise more than anything else on the planet are the Japanese. The Japanese were responsible for such horrible atrocities during the occupation that even some of the younger generations are still seething with rage. I'm sure they'll get over it one day, just like we did in Europe, but it seems to be taking longer. Just as an example, the protagonist, Masato, visits the Surviving Syonan museum (Syonan was the name that the Japanese gave to Singapore). The movie doesn't dwell on his visit but is long enough for Masato to listen to recorded testimony by a woman who saw a crying baby being wrenched from its mother's grasp, thrown high in the air by a Japanese soldier who drew his saber to impale it on the way down. Ouch. I know that my Singaporean friends are absolutely not fans of the Japanese, and they are at least 10 years younger than I am. The movie is in Japanese, Mandarin and English.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 17, 2018 16:04:28 GMT
The Predator was more fun than I expected. The last one was not fun at all. Actually, it was about #6 or 7 in priority of my movies to see this week, but I had an unforeseen delay this morning and couldn't leave home until about 10:30. The schedules for new movies are all skewed this week, because all of the major ones are more than 2 hours long, so there was not much available for my arrival time. However, The Predator was starting just 2 minutes after I got to the cinema, so there you go. I'm not sure if Whoopi Goldberg will be happy about being compared to the creature by one of the future dead people.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 20, 2018 19:29:52 GMT
I thought that First Man was excellent, since I am one of the people who appreciate Ryan Gosling's minimalist acting style. I know that lots of people can't stand his inexpressiveness.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 21, 2018 16:13:00 GMT
Lars von Trier aims to shock, and he has succeeded again with The House that Jack Built. It is about a serial killer who piles up his victims in a cold storage chamber. There is no convincing explanation about why he does this -- he doesn't even seem to really be sure himself. The movie only shows a few deaths although he claims to have killed more than 60 people, but they make movies like American Psycho, Seven or The Silence of the Lambs look like a walk in the park. Killing children is always an awful thing to see, but watching the little boys being blown to pieces with a shotgun was pretty grim. Another thing that is unpleasant to see is a woman having her breasts cut off with a kitchen knife. While one is merely placed as a trophy on the windshield of a car, the other one is converted into a leather change purse. Matt Dillon, what has happened to your career? Actually, the movie is worth being seen.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 26, 2018 11:14:43 GMT
I saw the Kazakh movie The Gentle Indifference of the World about two penniless villagers who move to the city to find a better life. Saltanat, the girl is quite beautiful, and her indebted mother has decided to send her off to her uncle, who knows a man who needs a wife. Otherwise, they will lose the farm. With a heavy heart, Saltanat obeys. Her friend Kuandyk, who is secretly in love with her, says he is going to the city, too, because he is setting up a business with friends, an obvious lie. Saltanat goes to her uncle's place and meets the person who wants to marry her, but she just can't go through with it. She shares a pretty awful room with Kuandyk, who has a shitty job carrying huge sacks of potatoes. She gets a job as a cleaning lady. Will romance bloom? Maybe, but since they are both killed at the end of this tender and whimsical movie, it is clear that love does not conquer all.
My neighbourhood is full of Kazakh refugees and it gave me a new understanding in why they always look so serious.
In a slightly different vein, I went to see Disney's Christopher Robin. I have to admire how Ewan McGregor can act convincingly with stuffed animals. This movie made me happy.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 26, 2018 12:52:25 GMT
Well, that was creepy. A snippet of the Christopher Robin trailer mirrored what I was dreaming a little over an hour ago, just before I woke up.
Re: acting convincingly with stuffed animals -- I wonder could he even see the animals most of the time. I watched a short video about actors having to act to green screens & it would be quite a feat to do it well. A green-screen dragon puppet head was made for Emilia Clarke so she'd be able to stroke it more believably in Game of Thrones.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 27, 2018 20:21:07 GMT
I saw the Polish movie Cold War by Pawel Pawlikowski who had previously made the amazing Ida.
Once again, this movie is in black and white. It follows the lives of Wictor, a composer and pianist, and Zula, a singer. It starts in 1951. They are both involved in a very successful folklore group. The government likes it but says that it needs some songs and dances to the glory of Stalin and the lives of workers. After a year or two Wictor flees the Soviet bloc through Berlin (no wall yet). Zula is supposed to join him, but she chickens out.
He settles in Paris and works in a jazz club. Zula finally shows up and things seem to be going not so badly, or maybe not... She finally returns to Poland. He wants to go back to be with her, but he has been stripped of his citizenship. And then he is in a Polish prison...
This is not a happy movie.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 28, 2018 20:05:33 GMT
I wasn't planning on seeing Halloween, but accidents happen. Two things intrigued me -- the idea of Jamie Lee Curtis playing the same character she played in the first movie 40 years ago and also the fact that the movie received pretty good reviews.
It wasn't too bad. The killings were quick and efficient rather than being dragged out, with plenty of gruesome variations, but I did hear necks snapping a bit too often. Jamie did the job and can come back in 40 years when she is 100 for the sequel. Frankly, the screenplay was pretty sloppy, and it is so annoying when people pause to look at what is going on when they should be running away from the serial killer. The ending was kind of botched, but they had probably run out of Technicolor blood.
High marks for the concept of being trapped in the most horrible service station restroom in the world and being pulled out under the stall door to be slaughtered. It was almost a relief to get away from the awful toilet even if the woman had to die. I also enjoyed the way the killer threw down a handful of bloody teeth like jacks while the victim was still taking a crap. That will cure anybody's constipation.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 29, 2018 16:26:14 GMT
I confess that I missed Invasion by Kiyoshi Kurosawa last month. The trailer looked a bit too much like his previous science fiction movie Before We Vanish, which I did see. Alien invaders to Japan seem to be rather gentle and just want to replace some of the population rather than blowing up all of the cities like alien invaders to the United States. Well, maybe I'll catch it on video some day.
However, today I went to see the Iranian science fiction movie Invasion (such a popular title!) to make up for it. How many chances does one get to see an Iranian science fiction movie? Half of the world has been plunged into darkness, not really sure how or why, but the people living in the light definitely want to keep out the people living in the dark. But the main point of the movie is that the protagonist has killed someone, and he is brought back to the crime scene for the reinactment. This is in the dark zone, which I would prefer to rename the foggy zone, because every scene of the movie seems to have been filmed in a giant warehouse filled with chemical movie smoke. I frankly did not understand the motivations of most of the characters, but I have no keys to the Iranian psyche. Most of the movie was all talk and no action, but hey, Iranians don't have much money to make movies. The costumes were kind of cool.
I am always intrigued by such movies which are always prolific in times when cultures are worried about being invaded by other cultures or political ideas. The first major documented movie that started the trend was the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956. It apparently depicted the communist menace, but there are so many other things that threaten us these days.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 1, 2018 17:25:12 GMT
Okay I saw Bohemian Rhapsody today. It was all right, but I probably would have liked it more if I were a fan of Freddie Mercury and/or Queen, which is not really the case although they did have a number of immortal hits over the years. Rami Malek was exceptional, all the more so because it must have been so annoying to do the movie with a mouthful of false teeth. Also, I thought the movie was very fair with screen time for the other members of the group and other characters. I never knew any of these people, so it was all a discovery to me. Like the critics have mostly said, I think that the sexuality issue was mostly and disgracefully erased, probably to make sure that it will not be censored in most of the countries of the world. I did not want any hot sex scenes, but this was more like American network television from long ago. It was still nice to see that a boy from Zanzibar could hit the big time.
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Post by bixaorellana on Nov 2, 2018 1:13:23 GMT
I don't quite get the prosthesis, since Rami Malek has a pretty pronounced overbite anyway. I'm quite interested to read your very balanced review, as any others I've read have been negative & downright bitchy.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 2, 2018 12:23:03 GMT
I saw the Romanian film Touch Me Not by director Adina Pintilie. It is one of the most glacial and disturbing films that I have seen in a long time. It's about a woman who cannot bear to be touched by anyone, an Icelandic hairless giant and a little deformed man with withered and useless arms and legs but with a working brain and penis. There is also a transgender psychiatrist with unusual techniques. The movie follows them through sensitivity sessions, sex clubs, interviews, physical therapy. As total fiction, it would already be disturbing, but these are real people using their real names, showing their imperfect nudity to all, like it or not. It really makes you wonder about all of the demons and tragedies hiding inside people, even when they have a normal body.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 8, 2018 19:05:17 GMT
I must admit that I was disappointed by Bad Times at the El Royale. It has plenty of action, but all of the times when there is no action are totally boring. It wasn't the fault of the actors, who were fine. It was the fault of the screenwriter and director who were the same person. It just made me think of all of the directors who manage to make every moment interesting even when there is no action. Tarentino is one who comes to mind (and I don't even like him as a director).
Oh well, I still think it was worth making the movie. It has some good moments. And damn, this trailer makes it look really good.
Far more interesting was High Life by Claire Denis, her first film in English. I had mixed feelings about but I already feel a need to see it again. It is about some sort of penal colony spaceship going who knows where? Robert Pattinson is one of the passengers and Juliette Binoche is some sort of medical officer making sexual experiments. She is one of the main users of the "fuck machine" since direct sexual contact is forbidden. Sometimes she goes to collect sperm from the convicts and then she injects it in other people.
Robert Pattinson ends up with a daughter whom he clearly loves and over the years she grows up. Is there a hint of incest? I'm not sure, hence my need to see it again.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 12, 2018 16:13:42 GMT
I've seen two rather distressing movies in the last couple of days. The first one was Amanda, about a young man called David (Vincent Lacoste) who is slightly struggling with life as one often does at age 24. He is a municipal tree trimmer in Paris, but he also works for a man who has a building in which he rents apartments, both long term and also Airbnb style. He lives in a small studio apartment in the same building in exchange for handling the small rental problems and also picking up tourists at the train station. He also helps his big sister, who is a single mother. Their father is dead now, and their mother ran off to London to live a new life when they were just children, so they have no contact with her and don't want any. David picks up his niece Amanda from school sometimes, gets yelled at by his sister if he is late, even if it was the fault of the late train he had to meet for Airbnb. But life is quite sweet all in all. He even starts going out with a cute new tenant whose window faces his. One day, there is a picnic planned with friends, his sister, his new girlfriend, etc. As usual, he is a bit late because he gets around town on his bicycle. But when he arrives in the park (near the Château de Vincennes), there has just been a terrorist massacre. His sister has been killed, his girlfriend seriously injured and another friend crippled. And so the real subject of the movie is how life goes on after a terrorist attack. There are plenty of tears. There is Amanda who misses her mother but who also needs her pastry routines and bedtime stories and all sorts of other things that her young uncle knows nothing about. There is a general sadness about Paris, as there most definitely was after the various attacks that occurred in the city. But life is shown in total authenticity, showing the way people really live. For example almost the entire movie takes place in the 12th arrondissement because David has almost no reason to go anywhere else in Paris except for some branch-cutting work. There is not a monument in sight, unlike most movies about Paris. I was very impressed, but I was also quite sad. Then I saw Un Amour Impossible, which I already knew would be hard to take due to the source material, an autobiographical novel by Christine Angot. She appears on television often and is a relatively hard-faced albeit pretty woman who doesn't smile much. She does nothing to make people like her, but she has a very strong message. This movie is about a young woman who meets a handsome young man in the late 1950's... and things happen. Christine Angot is the sort of author who gives you details that you normally didn't want to know ("He had always ejaculated on my breasts, but this time he asked if he could do so inside, and I accepted."). So, there is a pregnancy. The guy always said that he had no intention of marrying her and he doesn't change his mind. When the baby is born, he refuses to accept paternity. He is from an upper class family and it is not in his plans to marry a typist in a social security office, even though they love each other. The story goes on for many many years (good makeup work at the end!). The baby, a little girl, grows up. Pictures are shared every now and then but visits are rare. The mother lives in Châteauroux in central France, and the guy lives in Strasbourg. He marries someone. But he still can't let go of this old relationship, so he visits and even begins to appreciate the fact that he has a daughter. After quite a bit of harassment, the mother finally gets him to accept paternity officially, although he has clearly always been worried that it might be a trick to get money out of his rich family. But once things are official, he takes more and more interest in his daughter, who is about 12 years old now. She thinks that he is fantastic, so much intelligence and culture, unlike her mother. She starts going away on weekends with him. The mother thinks this is great, even though she feels very lonely when she is abandoned... When the daughter is about 18, someone else supplies the horrible secret. The girl has been sodomised by her father all these yesrs. Finding out does not solve any of the problems unfortunately. Mother and daughter become estranged for reasons such as "How could you possibly not see how I was each time I came home?" It is a tough movie, with 5 or 7 year gaps in the relationship. The unseen father dies of Alzheimer's after many years. For me the most awful thing was that the daughter, age 35-40 was played by an actress who was the spitting image of Christine Angot, and that made it completely impossible to try to toss this off as fiction. It really happened, and she wrote about it and it destroyed most of her life. I was quite sad seeing this movie, too.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 13, 2018 16:58:54 GMT
Crazy Rich Asians was all right, but it had quite a few dull moments for those of us who are not fascinated by the lifestyles of the rich and famous. There was no reason for it to last more than two hours since it is just fluff. The acting was fine for the most part. I was disappointed not to see more of Singapore -- just a few panoramic shots of the city. That is obviously because it was actually filmed in Malaysia, mostly in the mansions of the ultra rich. I'm sure it is a great movie for people who watch that Kardashian stuff.
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Post by bixaorellana on Nov 13, 2018 18:05:33 GMT
Strangely, a friend of mine who describes herself as a minimalist and indeed is not into luxury at all, told me yesterday that she'd watched Crazy Rich Asians and really enjoyed it. Even so, I'm not even tempted to see it as my guess has been that it's exactly as Kerouac describes it.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 14, 2018 14:24:54 GMT
I found The Crimes of Grindenwald to be extremely complicated, but I'm sure it all makes perfect sense to people who pay careful attention to everything. After all, J.K. Rowling wrote the screenplay herself, and we all know how meticulous she is. But I lost track of what the hell was going on from time to time. The acting was fine. Johnny Depp rehabilitated himself even though we are beginning to forget what he really looks like without dye jobs and weird contact lenses. Obviously, the special effects just keep getting better and better. One moment in the movie where fantasy comes a little too close to reality is when Grindenwald is having a pep rally for his supporters in Père Lachaise cemetery. He explains that contrary to rumours about him, he does not want to kill or enslave most of the muggles, but it is necessary for magic people to take over the world or the muggles are going to fuck up everything. He presents a visualisation of how the future might be if the muggles stay in power, and it shows bombs and destroyed cities and casualties everywhere, ending with a mushroom cloud that totally horrifies everybody. Long live Grindenwald. It has already been confirmed that there will be at least three more movies in this series.
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Post by rikita on Nov 15, 2018 1:29:54 GMT
you mean Grindelwald, with an l, i suppose? i hope i can arrange for a movie night with mr. r. sometime soon, so i can see it while it is still in the theatres ... feel a bit bad for constantly asking my mom to babysit, though a. loves staying at grandma's and my mom also always says she enjoys having her there ...
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 15, 2018 5:09:34 GMT
Oops -- yes, of course -- Grindelwald.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 15, 2018 17:00:52 GMT
Suspiria is certainly a lush piece of ridiculousness. I have no idea how Luca Guadagnino got some many famous actresses to participate, except that maybe he hit the jackpot on his previous movie. Okay, I understand why Tilda Swinton would be in it -- she's was in all of his movies except the last one. The 152 minutes were gruelling.
Okay, the original movie by Dario Argento didn't make any sense either but it was more fun. How can you not love a movie that makes such generous use of maggots?
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 16, 2018 17:36:35 GMT
This was a mostly Italian week for me. Besides Suspiria (which was mostly in German, French and English), I saw Lazzaro felice (English title: Happy as Lazzaro), about a young peasant who is so pure that lots of people think he is a simpleton. He lives in a tiny village that has been cut off from the world and everything modern by a landslide. The villagers are living under medieval conditions. Lazzaro falls off a cliff and is dead... but he returns to life 20 years later. The landlords have been driven away, and he finds some of the other villagers living in a nearby city. He seems to have semi-magical powers and strange things happen. It was all very interesting. Italian cinema can be so poetic. Who gives a fuck about realism?
But of course then I saw La terra dell'abbastanza which could not be more realistic. (English title: Boys Cry) It is about two best friends who are in training in a restaurant school. One night they accidentally run over somebody in their car -- and they flee. Later they find out that the person they killed was a mob informer who was trying to escape. While not actually becoming mob heroes, they are invited into this new profession as hit men. They like it, sort of, one a bit more than the other. They get lots of money, which is never a bad thing, except when your mother is against it. Unfortunately, this sort of story rarely ends well. Very good movie, though.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 17, 2018 14:15:02 GMT
Thomas Vinterberg has never made a bad film, but I found Kursk particularly good, because everybody knows how that tragedy ended and yet he manages to maintain suspense until the very end. Matthias Schoenaerts is brave, Léa Seydoux is courageous, Colin Firth is noble, and Max Von Sydow is evil personified. It all plays out according to history and indicates how Russia made all of the wrong decisions, just as other countries could have done the same out of arrogance and a misplaced feeling of superiority. "We don't need anybody's help." How often have we heard that in various situations?
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 17, 2018 22:19:32 GMT
I saw a second movie this evening and I found it extraordinary. Les Chatouilles (Little Tickles in English) is about a young woman who was abused as a child by the best friend of her parents. The most amazing thing about the movie is that it is not sordid and is actually often quite funny. But you only have to think about all of the comedians who have committed suicide to understand how this is possible. The actress is the person who lived through this trauma and it is a completely true story, which she previously presented as a stage play. She became a dancer, sometimes in musical comedies, sometimes in shitty commercials, but the family friend was always present in her life, even though he had no sexual interest in her once she reached adulthood. Anyway, the woman got into drugs and alcohol abuse as she grew up (easy to understand), but she is a survivor, and the film is great. It moved me even more because she and her husband co-wrote and co-directed it, and I actually knew her husband personally about 30 years ago. He was the founder of a Minitel site (pre-internet) with a friend of mine.
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Post by bixaorellana on Nov 17, 2018 22:36:20 GMT
It looks exceedingly well done and compelling, but I imagine is full of bits which are very hard to watch.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 17, 2018 22:46:32 GMT
Absolutely none of the abuse is shown, but there is a scene where the mother finds her daughter, age 11, washing blood out of her underwear that I found unbearable. The mother just thinks that her daughter has had early puberty.
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